Singapore-based IT automation startup ShiftControl has launched a next-generation IT operations platform designed to run natively on Google Workspace, the company announced at Echelon Singapore, the region’s flagship technology conference.
The platform is aimed at small and mid-sized businesses that rely on Google Workspace as their core operating environment but lack the dedicated IT resources to manage employee access across an expanding portfolio of cloud applications.
ShiftControl serves as an orchestration layer on top of Google Workspace, providing administrators with a unified view of every employee, their team assignments, and the applications they can access and actively use. From that dashboard, admins can automatically push or revoke access rights across all connected SaaS tools.
The company says the problem is acute for growing businesses. A typical 60-person company may run more than 40 separate SaaS subscriptions, frequently tracked by hand in spreadsheets and managed by a founder or operations lead rather than a trained administrator. Onboarding, offboarding and periodic access reviews are often manual, creating security exposure when departing employees retain access and wasted spend on licences no one uses.
The platform applies AI to surface unused licences, flag accounts that retain access after an employee leaves, and recommend access changes as roles shift. ShiftControl says businesses most commonly run into these problems as headcount approaches 40 to 50 people or the point at which informal, manual processes tend to break down.
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Co-founder Dan Gericke said legacy IT tools were not designed for how modern small- and mid-sized businesses operate. “The typical IT stack was designed for a different kind of company. It’s expensive, requires a large IT team to run and maintain, and it’s operating on old technology,” Gericke said.
“For a growing number of small and mid-sized businesses, those tools don’t work for them. They run on Google Workspace, they don’t have a full-blown IT team, and they expect their tools to be AI-native by default. We rebuilt our product for them.”
ShiftControl was founded by two former ExpressVPN executives who said they experienced firsthand the difficulties of scaling a modern tech business with the IT tooling currently available. The company’s stated mission is to make IT operations simple enough for any business to run without specialist staff.
Customers already using the platform include cybersecurity firm Blackpanda, mobility company GetGo and philanthropic organisation The Majurity Trust.
The company, founded in Singapore, now serves customers across London, Hong Kong and North America.
The launch positions ShiftControl within a competitive but growing market for identity and access management tools tailored to smaller organisations. The platform integrates with modern HRIS platforms to align employee lifecycle events with access changes, reducing operational overhead and security risk, a capability increasingly sought by lean operations teams managing IT responsibilities without formal training.
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