The software-as-a-service (SaaS) industry has boomed over the last decade due to the growth of online technology. There are now more opportunities than ever to start a SaaS company, and the best part is that investors are starting to take notice.
In this article, we will teach you about some of the top SaaS startups to watch and what their business models consist of. These companies have raised a lot of money in recent years, and they show no signs of slowing down.
Best SaaS Startups to Watch
Every year, new startups pull to the forefront of their industry through exciting innovation, tech, and industry-disrupting business models. We’ve rounded up the most exciting, fast-growing SaaS startups of 2024 that startup-lovers, investors, and aspiring entrepreneurs should follow.
Disclaimer: With so many exciting startups launching and growing worldwide, we aren’t able to cover them all. Furthermore, the startups that are listed below are not officially ranked and are listed in no particular order.
1. Upmetrics
- Location: Surat, Gujarat, India
- Founders: Paresh Balar, Vinay Kevadiya
- Founded In: 2017
- Funding: N/A
- Investors Include: N/A
Upmetrics is an AI-powered business planning and financial forecasting platform for small businesses and startups. Their tools include an AI business plan generator, content generation, financial forecasting, and a pitch deck builder. The platform emphasizes collaboration and accessibility, aiming to make business planning understandable for all. Upmetrics has served over 110,000 entrepreneurs and partnered with institutions like Hampton University and SCORE to support aspiring business owners.
2. Eloomi
- Location: Copenhagen, Denmark
- Founders: Claus Johansen, Peter Hindkjaer
- Founded In: 2015
- Funding: Private Equity, $78.7 Million
- Investors Include: Great Hill Partners, Kennet Partners
Employee training is challenging, but Eloomi can make it a little easier for everyone. Its platform includes tools for onboarding, compliance training, and continued learning. It also offers surveys that can increase employee engagement and motivation, as well as reports that provide useful insights about employees, like identifying who has particular talents and who needs to improve in specific areas.
3. ClickUp
- Location: San Diego, California
- Founders: Alex Yurkowski, Zeb Evans
- Founded In: 2017
- Funding: Series C, $537.5 Million
- Investors Include: Meritech Capital Partners, Tiger Global Management
As a workplace productivity app and project management tool in one, ClickUp can replace a host of separate applications. You can customize tasks, build documents, manage teams, and monitor and manage your goals. The cloud-based software integrates with multiple programs like Asana, Jira, and Airtable, and the ClickUp app has desktop, mobile, and browser-integrated versions.
4. Arrow
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Rolan Reichel
- Founded In: 2018
- Funding: Seed, $50,000
- Investors Include: ARCADIAN Fund, Cosmos Global Holdings, EXPERT DOJO
Social media is a crucial marketing channel for businesses of all shapes and sizes. Arrow‘s AI-powered platform automates social media marketing, saving business time and money while executing a powerful and effective social media marketing strategy. The startup makes it simple to create, schedule, and publish a well-crafted content schedule to increase engagement across all major social media platforms.
5. Calendly
- Location: Atlanta, Georgia
- Founders: Tope Awotona
- Founded In: 2013
- Funding: Series B, $350.6 Million
- Investors Include: ICONIQ Capital, OpenView
Calendly is a hub for scheduling meetings and appointments without sending numerous emails back and forth. This digital calendar caters to individuals, teams, and companies while integrating with other productivity tools. You can add it to your website to streamline scheduling, automate communications before and after meetings, let invitees vote on meeting times, and more.
6. Tripleseat
- Location: Atlanta, Georgia
- Founders: Alex Lassiter, Nick Miller, Tom Merrihew
- Founded In: 2013
- Funding: Private Equity, $57.7 Million
- Investors Include: General Atlantic, Storm Ventures, Vista Equity Partners
Tripleseat is an event management software built for the hospitality industry. Using their innovative platform, restaurants, hotels, and venues can easily manage and grow their bookings by 30% on average without increasing their workload. A B2B SaaS tool, Tripleseat is built to make business growth manageable for the hospitality industry.
7. RightBound
- Location: Kirkland, Washington
- Founders: Ran Oelgiesser, Rotem Dafni
- Founded In: 2019
- Funding: Series A, $27.5 Million
- Investors Include: IBI Tech Fund, Innovation Endeavors
RightBound says that sales development is a “tango between you and your prospect, between pitching and qualifying.” This startup wants to get in on the dance by providing an all-in-one platform that can optimize sales and development by taking care of repetitive prospecting routines, including account research, list building, outreach orchestration, and cadence tracking. Features include autonomous prospecting, self-optimized multi-channel outreach, and more.
8. Simply Do
- Location: Cardiff, United Kingdom
- Founders: Lee Sharma, Will Webberley
- Founded In: 2015
- Funding: Seed, $1.5 Million
- Investors Include: Philip Roberts, Andrew Diplock
Simply Do bills itself as an “end-to-end technology solution to capture, prioritize, and action great ideas.” It provides an organizational framework to shepherd projects from the initial idea to final implementation. In addition, it allows employees to contribute ideas through a web browser or mobile app, track those ideas as they are managed by multiple people, and measure the impact of innovative steps the company is taking.
9. Iterable
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Andrew Boni, Justin Zhu
- Founded In: 2013
- Funding: Series E, $342.2 Million
- Investors Include: DTCP, Capital One Ventures
Iterable is a cross-channel marketing automation platform that helps connect a brand’s experience with how its customers engage with the company online. It seamlessly integrates email, mobile push, SMS, in-app notifications, web push, social media marketing, and more. Each channel can be personalized to serve a unique purpose, and companies like Doordash and Stack Overflow have used it to drive conversions successfully.
10. Seedata.io
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Founders: Enrico Faccioli, Matt Holland
- Founded In: 2021
- Funding: Pre-Seed, $963,000
- Investors Include: Cylon, Dr. Chai Patel
Seedata.io believes that protecting a company network’s perimeter is the most important way to prevent data theft. To that end, it seeds its customers’ data with trackable records and uses artificial intelligence to look for potential cyberthreats that may have exposed those seeds outside of customers’ systems. This allows the company to detect if and when corporate security protections have been breached and help its customers reduce incident costs.
11. Eqtble
- Location: New York, New York
- Founders: Ethan Veres, Gabe Horwitz, Joseph I.
- Founded In: 2021
- Funding: Seed, $2.8 Million
- Investors Include: Initialized Capital, SB Opportunity Fund
Eqtble uses AI to provide companies with insights about their workforce, including headcount, diversity, equity, and inclusion. There are also tools for setting and tracking goals, improving engagement, and reducing attrition. Eqtble seamlessly integrates with more than 150 human resource tools and human capital management systems without requiring any technical knowledge.
12. Fuse Autotech
- Location: Bloomington, Minnesota
- Founders: Andrew Walser, Elie Wurtman
- Founded In: 2020
- Funding: Series A, $13.5 Million
- Investors Include: Target Global, PICO Venture Partners
Buying a car is always a hassle, but Fuse Autotech aims to make it more intuitive, more transparent, and faster. Using the company’s platform, customers can find, purchase, and finance vehicles online directly from dealerships. An easy-to-use, automated sales process speeds up transactions, and just one person can complete an entire vehicle transaction from start to finish.
13. Phyllo
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Achintya Gupta, Akhil Bhiwal, Mohit Kumar
- Founded In: 2021
- Funding: Series A, $17.8 Million
- Investors Include: Nexus Venture Partners, RTP Global
Phyllo’s APIs allow app developers to seamlessly integrate with creator and independent work platforms to improve their customers’ digital experience. Its Connect API lets apps and creator platforms like YouTube and TikTok exchange data while keeping customer data private. Phyllo’s Reputation API provides details about a creator’s identity and reputation directly from the source platform, with the creator’s consent. There are also APIs that provide a continuous stream of other data from creators.
14. Hightouch
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Josh Curl, Kashish Gupta, Tejas Manohar
- Founded In: 2018
- Funding: Series B, $92.2 Million
- Investors Include: Y Combinator, Bain Capital Ventures, ICONIQ
Consolidating customer data into one actionable location is critical to streamlining business processes. Hightouch helps companies sync their customer data to their customer relationship management (CRM) software, making it simple to leverage customer data to develop more impactful ads.
15. AgentSync
- Location: Denver, Colorado
- Founders: Jenn Knight, Niranjan Sabharwal
- Founded In: 2018
- Funding: Series B, $111.1 Million
- Investors Include: Tiger Global Management, Nine Four Ventures
Working in the insurance industry, AgentSync offers modern tools that can help with producer management capabilities. They can provide real-time insights, unparalleled visibility, data security and privacy, seamless onboarding, compliance scorecards, and NIPR bulk processing. AgentSync does the heavy lifting for companies and also prevents regulatory violations before they occur.
16. ProtonVPN
- Location: Geneva, Switzerland
- Founders: Andy Yen, Jason Stockman, Sushil Kuman, Wei Su
- Founded In: 2016
- Funding: Seed, Amount Undisclosed
- Investors Include: FONGIT
As the name suggest, ProtonVPN is a VPN service that was created by the team behind ProtonMail. It is a Switzerland-based company and it has a strict no logs policy. The VPN service has both free and paid plans with the latter offering more features such as higher speeds, more servers, and access to Netflix. The company helps keeps business and individual computers secure and private by sending the traffic through a VPN service that hides IP addresses.
17. Alkami Technology
- Location: Plano, Texas
- Founders: Gary Nelson, Sean McElroy, Stephen Bohanon
- Founded In: 2009
- Funding: Series E, $385.2 Million
- Investors Include: D1 Capital Partners, General Atlantic, Stockbridge Investors
Alkami Technology is a SaaS company offering cloud-based financial management services and digital banking solutions, allowing banks and credit unions to provide first-class customer experience. With the Alkami platform and third-party solutions, financial institutions are able to better onboard retail and businesses, engagement, and more.
18. Printify
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Artis Kehris, Gatis Dukurs, James Berdigans
- Founded In: 2015
- Funding: Series A, $54.1 Million
- Investors Include: Eastward Capital Partners, Rob Eldridge
Printify is one of the companies that helped propel the print-on-demand industry. It’s an eCommerce platform that connects merchants with on-demand manufacturers who will produce and ship custom products, such as T-shirts, mugs, phone cases, and more. Printify offers a wide range of products from different manufacturers so that merchants can find the perfect fit for their business. Anyone on Amazon, Etsy, eBay, and other platforms can integrate Printify into their online store.
19. Keboola
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Founders: Milan Veverka, Pavel Dolezal, Pavel Dolezal, Petr Simecek
- Founded In: 2017
- Funding: Series A, $36.5 Million
- Investors Include: Viking Global Investors, Presto Ventures, Reflex Capital
Keboola is a cloud-based platform that helps companies manage, collaborate, and automate data projects. Users are able to either create projects on the platform themselves or leverage a network of experts to help expedite the process.
20. Shapr3D
- Location: Budapest, Budapest, Hungary
- Founders: István Csanády
- Founded In: 2015
- Funding: Series B, $21.8 Million
- Investors Include: Point Nine, Creandum
Shapr3D works with CAD to bring it into the modern era. The platform is mobile and intuitive which should appeal to anyone who’s ever found CAD software to be too complicated. It allows users to quickly sketch out ideas and turn them into three-dimensional designs that can be exported to other software for further refinement. The company offers a subscription service that gives users access to all of the features and updates as they become available.
21. Hopin
- Location: London, United Kingdom
- Founders: Johnny Boufarhat
- Founded In: 2019
- Funding: Non-equity Assistance, $1 billion
- Investors Include: DFJ Growth, Untitled Investments
Hopin is looking to connect communities throughout the world through virtual, hybrid, and in-person events. Using this model, companies are able to connect with more potential customers and build a more engaged community. The platform offers features such as live chat, video conferencing, and breakout rooms to make networking more engaging. There are also options for those who want to host events that are entirely online or in-person.
22. Netcrumb
- Location: United Kingdom
- Founders: Dragos Ivanov
- Founded In: 2018
- Funding: N/A
- Investors Include: N/A
Netcrumb is a SaaS company focused on providing free software that can take text inputs and turns them into real-life voices. The platform has a range of voices from male to female that users can choose from. The voices are even available in different accents depending on the country you choose. With one click, users can take their speeches and convert them into audio in order to add to their website or blog. The company is currently in beta and is working on adding more features such as the ability to download audio files.
23. skio
- Location: New York, New York
- Founders: Kennan Davison
- Founded In: 2021
- Funding: Seed, $8.4 Million
- Investors Include: Y Combinator, Adjacent
Shopify hasn’t always been the best platform to use for subscription-based models, but skio helps to change that. skio is a Shopify app that helps to manage subscription-based products and businesses. It handles all of the billing, shipping, and customer management for businesses so they can focus on other aspects of their business. The app also offers a customizable checkout process so that businesses can brand their subscription service.
24. Truework
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Ethan Winchell, Ryan Sandler, Victor Kabdebon
- Founded In: 2017
- Funding: Series C, $118.9 Million
- Investors Include: Sequoia Capital, Khosla Ventures
Instead of lending institutions waiting weeks to verify income and employment, Truework makes it easy by creating a one-stop platform that does the work for them in a fraction of the time. This will help close mortgages faster and give instant access to data that contains over 35 million US employees. Developers will be able to easily use the API to integrate into their existing business. Any application process can become easier and have less friction involved.
25. Sprig
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: Gagan Biyani, Matt Kent, Morgan Springer, Neeraj Berry
- Founded In: 2013
- Funding: Series B, $90 Million
- Investors Include: Andreessen Horowitz, Accel, First Round
Sprig is a research company that helps make the entire product development lifecycle more efficient. Companies can use the platform to conduct research with users wherever they are. This empowers businesses to make better product development decisions and prevents wasted resources. There are in-product surveys, concept and usability testing, and post-launch feedback.
26. Retool
- Location: San Francisco, California
- Founders: David Hsu
- Founded In: 2017
- Funding: Series C, $141 Million
- Investors Include: John Collison, Daniel Gross
Retool puts the technology control back in the power of companies. The software company has developed a platform that builds internal tools remarkably fast. Companies no longer have to work with UI libraries, piece together data sources, or figure out access control. All of their internal tools are made of Tables, Lists, Charts, Forms, Wizards, and Maps to make designing incredibly easy. Companies will spend less time researching and more time building the applications they need.
FAQs
1. What is a SaaS startup?
A software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup is a company that provides software solutions over the internet. Instead of buying and installing software on your computer, you access it, usually through a web browser, from the provider’s servers.
2. Who funds SaaS startups?
A variety of investors fund SaaS startups, including venture capitalists, angel investors, and corporate VCs. Different investors require different types of returns like equity, debt, and convertible notes, so it’s important for startups to know what each investor is looking for.
3. How many SaaS startups are there?
In 2021, there were about 25,000 different SaaS companies in the world. In marketing alone, there are about 7,000 companies involved in the SaaS category.
4. How do I start a SaaS startup?
There are various ways to start a SaaS startup, but the most common is to develop a product and then find customers willing to pay for it. You’ll need a clear idea of your target market, what problem you’re solving for them, and how you will make money. It’s also important to have a strong team in place with the skills needed to execute your vision.