The New Ecosystem Model Includes Your Users – Not Just Your Partners

01 /The Concept

Legato built a platform that lets users of B2B software create their own apps – extending the platform's functionality through what would traditionally be called plugins, add-ons, or custom integrations.

The real play is that these apps can now be built by ordinary business users, not developers. Users describe what they want in plain language, and Legato's AI assembles the application from API calls, following the logic the user defines.

For this to work, the underlying B2B platform needs to expose an API. Legato's AI then composes the right sequence of calls to build whatever the user specifies.

The platform includes a suite of specialized AI agents that handle different parts of the process: a product manager AI that writes specs, a designer AI that produces a functional UI, and a QA AI that tests the result for bugs.

Once built, an app can be kept private (for personal or internal team use) or published to a public marketplace where any user of the parent platform can access it.

For B2B platform developers, this unlocks several compounding advantages. Users can self-serve the long-tail use cases the platform team will never prioritize – the niche workflows that matter to specific customers but would take years to reach the official roadmap. Creators who charge for their apps generate a new revenue stream through marketplace commissions. Business partners can build specialized, industry-specific solutions that attract and retain customers with vertical needs. And enterprise customers can adapt the platform to internal workflows without waiting for the vendor’s professional services team.

Legato was founded last year, and has just raised its first $7 million.

02 /Why It Matters

Plugin and extension ecosystems are already standard in major B2B platforms – Salesforce, SAP, ServiceNow, and dozens of others all have them. And it's a real business: app sales through Salesforce AppExchange totaled $2.7 billion in 2024 and are projected to reach $6.6 billion by 2031.

The problem is that building these extensions has always required developers. Business users understand what they need and roughly how it should work – but they can't write the code. Developers can write whatever you spec – but they rarely understand the messy reality of what business users actually do all day.

Good apps emerge only when a business-savvy person works side by side with an engineer. That's not only rare; it also doubles the time and cost of building anything.

Legato's bet is that it can eliminate this gap entirely – not incrementally improve it, but leap over it. By making app creation accessible to non-technical users, it dramatically reduces the time between identifying a need and having a working solution.

The company argues that "time to value" – how quickly a customer can get meaningful returns from a B2B platform purchase – will become the new competitive battleground, replacing the old "feature breadth" arms race. That claim is more plausible than it might sound.

Legato sits at the intersection of two well-established trends.

One established pattern is product-to-ecosystem evolution. The iPhone's ascent is the canonical example – the App Store transformed a clever phone into an indispensable platform because independent developers could extend it in ways Apple never would have built. Partner Fleet ([related review](/review/prevrati-svoj-produkt-v-ajfon)) gave B2B platform developers a fast path to embed an app marketplace into their products; they raised $1.8 million in November last year.

A parallel trend: AI-generated micro-app marketplaces. Wabi ([related review](/review/zabud-pro-app-store)) launched a marketplace of AI-generated apps (still in closed beta) and raised $20 million last November. Fifth Door ([related review](/review/kuda-smotrjat-faundery-uzhe-zarabotavshie-milliard-dollarov)) built a similar marketplace specifically for games, also raised $20 million in November.

Legato brings the same concept into the B2B world – letting any software platform spawn its own specialized, user-generated app ecosystem.

03 /Opportunities

One of the most reliable strategies for market dominance is turning a product into an ecosystem. When third-party developers can extend your platform, you gain critical mass of functionality without building it all yourself. Every app creator becomes an organic growth driver – they have skin in the game around the platform's success.

But historically, ecosystems were built on a "us and them" model. "Us" = the platform developers and their partners. "Them" = everyone else who uses it.

Legato's blog argues this model is evolving – from "partner ecosystems" to "co-creation with users." That's a genuinely deep insight, and it extends well beyond software. Here are a few deliberately simple examples.

Why do restaurant menus get designed exclusively by executive chefs and management? Why can't the people who actually eat there participate in shaping what gets offered – not by submitting suggestions that go nowhere, but through an actual process that feeds into menu development?

Why do protein bar companies design new products based on internal assumptions about what consumers want – only to see most launches fail despite focus groups and market research? Why can't the people who eat these bars participate in product design through a transparent, structured process?

The answers have always been: nobody thought to design for that, and traditional product development is too slow and specialist-dependent to include outsiders.

That's changing. Keychain ([related review](/review/chtoby-moshhno-vyrasti)) has raised $90.4 million for an AI platform that helps design packaged food products. A brand can simply say "I want to launch a gluten-free protein bar" – and the platform instantly returns recipe options, ingredient sourcing, and contract manufacturers who can produce it to spec.

From there, it's one step to bringing consumers directly into that creation process – from co-developing new product variants to a Kickstarter-style marketplace where consumer-designed products get produced and sold.

AI has compressed the time and cost of creating both digital and physical products so dramatically that the idea of consumer-co-created ecosystems is no longer theoretical. It's already being built.

So: which unexpected industry could you build this kind of co-creation platform for?