How Entrio Created a New Category in Enterprise Tech: Lessons from Building a Tech Adoption Platform

Category creation in enterprise software isn’t for the faint of heart. When you’re asking customers to think about their problems in entirely new ways, you need more than just clever marketing – you need evidence that existing categories fundamentally misunderstand the problem.

In a recent Category Visionaries episode, Entrio founder Avi Cohen shared how they discovered their category by looking beneath the surface. “What we thought was the biggest problem above the water turned out to be a mistake,” he explains. “When we started to talk to a lot of financial institutions, we understood that the problem is not actually above the water, is underneath the water.”

The initial assumption was that banks needed better access to external innovation. But customer conversations revealed a more fundamental challenge: banks couldn’t effectively utilize the technology they already had.

This realization led to a critical decision point. The easy path would have been positioning Entrio within established categories like SaaS management. But as Avi notes, “SaaS represents a very small portion of their technology stack. So at least 75 or 80% of their technology stack is still either on prem or is being delivered in a different way.”

Instead, they created the “tech adoption” category, focusing on helping organizations become more efficient with existing technologies. “We decided to go and kind of help the organizations become more efficient and be more conscious about the technologies that they have,” Avi shares.

The proof this was needed came quickly. One bank they met had “20 different local no code solutions internally” – a sign of the growing complexity in enterprise tech stacks. This complexity wasn’t being addressed by existing categories focused solely on SaaS management or procurement.

Their category creation strategy had three key elements:

First, build evidence before launching. “We wanted to reach a phase where we had enough traction and feedback from customers that we can really go out to investors and say, we’re not making this thing up.”

Second, create a data foundation. “We created this data lake that encompasses every technology solution in the world,” Avi explains. This gave them unique insights into the technology landscape that supported their category narrative.

Third, expand the category vision over time. “What we’ve been investing a lot of time in the last couple of months is actually how can we take the brand that we build, the new language, the branding, the new category around tech adoption and try to bring it into downstream potential customers.”

The result? A category that resonates across market segments. As Avi notes, “Everyone is looking for the best way to govern their solutions, to get visibility, transparency. They want to make sure that they know what they own and what they’re using and what the relationship that they have with their vendors and their solutions.”

For founders considering category creation, Entrio’s journey offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the best category isn’t the one that’s easiest to explain, but the one that most accurately describes the problem you’re solving. The key is having enough evidence to prove that existing categories miss the mark.