Legato Raises $7M to Power AI App Creation

Legato secures $7M to embed AI‑powered vibe app creation inside SaaS platforms, enabling business users to build custom apps and driving the Platform Creator Economy.

Legato has secured a $7 million seed round to bring its AI‑powered “vibe app creation” engine directly inside B2B software platforms, giving non‑technical business users the power to design, customize, and deploy apps in their existing tools while vendors retain full control. This shift supports a new “Platform Creator Economy,” where SaaS customers, partners, and internal teams effectively become in‑product builders, compressing customization cycles from months to hours and opening fresh, extension‑led revenue streams for platforms.​

Legato’s $7 Million Seed and Vision for Embedded Creation

Legato, a Tel Aviv–based startup founded by Dana Rochman and Shlomit Tennenbaum, has raised $7 million in seed funding led by S Capital VC, with participation from Cerca Partners. The company positions itself as a pioneer of in‑platform vibe app creation, allowing SaaS vendors to embed an AI builder directly into their products so any business user can implement, customize, and automate workflows in simple language. According to the company, the seed capital will be directed toward accelerating research and development and expanding its AI team to support a growing pipeline of platform integrations.​

Traditional SaaS customization has long been constrained by complex implementation cycles that can take months, require specialist skills, and often depend on external consulting partners or internal professional services teams. In many enterprises, the cost of implementation and customization services can rival or even exceed the subscription spend on the platform itself, creating friction for adoption and limiting expansion opportunities. Despite the investment, organizations still frequently struggle to fully operationalize these platforms, leading to under‑utilization, stalled ROI, and higher risk of churn.​

For Global Martech Alliance readers, Legato’s funding underscores how martech and SaaS vendors are racing to remove the implementation bottleneck by embedding intelligence directly into product workflows. The focus is shifting from “ship features, then implement” to “let users co‑create” inside the platform, blurring the line between product, professional services, and marketplace ecosystems. This evolution is highly relevant for marketing, product, and CX leaders evaluating extensibility and AI capabilities in their own stack roadmaps.​

From No‑Code and Vibe Coding to Business‑User AI Builders

Over the past few years, many SaaS vendors have invested in no‑code and low‑code tooling, and more recently in vibe coding interfaces that enable technically minded users to define workflows and automations with natural language prompts. However, these approaches often still assume a developer, admin, or power‑user persona, leaving the broader base of business users dependent on technical teams to translate domain requirements into implementable solutions. In practical terms, this keeps feature delivery and customizations tethered to IT capacity and professional services bandwidth, which can become a strategic bottleneck.​

Legato proposes a different angle: an AI builder that sits natively inside the platform and is explicitly designed for business users rather than developers. The company’s engine operates as a multi‑agent AI system that behaves like a virtual professional services squad, collaborating behind the scenes to design apps, workflows, and AI agents based on plain‑language descriptions of what the user needs. Once a requirement is captured in natural language, the system interprets it in the context of platform APIs, data structures, and permission models to generate production‑ready components, while still respecting vendor guardrails and governance policies.​

For SaaS and martech providers, this pattern effectively turns the product into a self‑serve creation environment while the vendor keeps full visibility over what is being built, deployed, and scaled. Governance and security controls remain centralized at the platform level, even as business users, partners, and internal teams compose extensions and micro‑apps at the edge. From a GMA Council standpoint, this is a notable example of how AI‑assisted extensibility can be embedded into the product layer to support both adoption and compliance.​

The Platform Creator Economy: Users as In‑Product Builders

Central to Legato’s positioning is the idea of a “Platform Creator Economy,” a model in which users and partners build verticalized apps and features directly inside the platforms they rely on, instead of waiting for vendors to ship every new capability via core releases. In this framework, the traditional professional services motion is inverted: business users become the creators of bespoke product extensions, while the platform orchestrates the environment, governance, and commercialization rails.​

This shift has several implications for SaaS vendors:

• Platforms can expand functionality through user‑driven innovation without linearly scaling core engineering resources.​
• Extensions created by customers, partners, or internal teams can be packaged and shared as marketplace assets, turning domain‑specific solutions into reusable modules.​
• Vendors can monetize community‑built capabilities, generating incremental revenue from marketplace transactions, premium extensions, or vertical solution bundles.​

On the customer side, the Platform Creator Economy promises shorter time‑to‑value and more context‑aware capabilities. Teams closest to the business problem can design the workflows, data flows, and interfaces they need, then iterate quickly as requirements change. For marketing and growth teams, this could mean standing up campaign execution workspaces, account‑based journeys, or analytics dashboards tuned to specific verticals or go‑to‑market motions without heavy implementation projects.​

Global Martech Alliance’s community has been tracking how AI‑driven extensibility, marketplace ecosystems, and community‑built solutions are reshaping martech economics. Legato’s model sits squarely at the intersection of these trends: it provides an extensibility layer that encourages extension‑led growth while still giving vendors ownership of the underlying platform and data. For vendors exploring new routes to recurring revenue and stickier adoption, this creator‑driven approach offers a path to align innovation with actual user demand.​

Multi‑Agent AI as a Virtual Professional Services Layer

At the core of Legato’s product is a multi‑agent AI system designed to behave like a virtual professional services unit embedded in the platform. Each “agent” in the system can take on specialized roles—such as understanding requirements, mapping to platform APIs, validating logic, or enforcing security constraints—collaborating to produce robust, production‑grade applications and workflows. The user interacts through a conversational interface, describing goals, constraints, and edge cases in natural language, while the system handles translation into the underlying technical constructs.​

This architecture is intended to compress customization cycles dramatically. Tasks that previously required cross‑functional scoping sessions, solution design documents, ticket queues, and iterative dev cycles can be handled within hours, directly in the platform UI. At the same time, platform‑level governance ensures that role‑based permissions, audit trails, and compliance considerations remain intact, reducing risk relative to ad‑hoc external tooling.​

For enterprise martech and SaaS leads, this kind of AI‑powered builder raises new questions about where professional services live in the value chain. Instead of externalizing customization to agencies or SI partners, vendors can internalize large portions of that value into the product experience, offering “autonomous professional services” as a native feature. GMA Council members evaluating AI platforms may increasingly need to consider not only model capabilities, but also how multi‑agent orchestration can be aligned with platform extensibility and marketplace strategies.​

Market Impact for SaaS and Martech Platforms

Legato is already collaborating with a range of SaaS providers spanning CRM, HR technology, and adjacent categories, with plans to extend into sectors such as financial services, healthcare, telecom, and energy—essentially any platform with APIs that can support embedded customization. For these vendors, the immediate value proposition is reduced dependency on traditional professional services cycles and increased platform stickiness through in‑product creation. By lowering the barrier for building tailored experiences, platforms can improve adoption across departments and accelerate expansion into new use cases.​

From a competitive standpoint, SaaS vendors are entering what Legato’s backers describe as a new battleground in the AI race, where the differentiator is not only AI features, but the ability to empower business users to build what they need themselves. Instead of relying solely on developer‑focused no‑code or vibe‑coding tools, vendors that embed business‑user‑centric AI builders may be better positioned to retain customers who might otherwise turn to external AI apps to fill gaps. This containment of innovation inside the platform can also give vendors crucial visibility into usage patterns and emerging needs, informing product roadmaps and ecosystem strategy.​

For Global Martech Alliance’s audience of marketing, product, and CX leaders, this funding round is another signal that “embedded extensibility” will be a central theme in the next wave of martech evolution. Platforms that treat users as co‑creators—not just operators—can unlock organic growth, deeper integration into daily workflows, and a richer lattice of partner‑built solutions. Evaluating future‑ready platforms will increasingly mean asking how they handle AI‑assisted creation, governance, and monetization of user‑built assets.​

What Martech and SaaS Leaders Should Evaluate Next

For leaders assessing Legato‑like capabilities in their martech and SaaS ecosystems, several practical evaluation points emerge:

• User personas and access: Determine which business roles (marketing ops, sales ops, CX, product marketing) can safely be given creation powers, and what guardrails they need.​
• Integration depth: Understand how the AI builder interfaces with existing platform APIs, data models, and security layers to avoid fragmented or shadow configurations.​
• Governance and compliance: Verify that role‑based permissions, logging, and approvals are embedded in the creation process to meet internal and regulatory requirements.​
• Marketplace and monetization: Explore how user‑built extensions can be packaged, shared, or monetized, and what governance model governs community contributions.​
• Change management and enablement: Plan for education, templates, and best‑practice patterns so that business users can design effective apps without re‑creating fragile processes.​

For GMA members, this is also an opportunity to benchmark how current martech platforms approach extensibility and AI. Comparing native capabilities with emergent AI builders like Legato can help identify gaps, partnership opportunities, or areas where internal teams may want to pilot extension‑led growth models. As the Platform Creator Economy gains momentum, vendors that get the right balance of autonomy and governance could set new standards for what “enterprise‑ready” AI in martech really means.