SaaS Startups

Velocity is a marketing intelligence SaaS platform founded in 2010 by David Dunne that helps agencies, brands, and analysts make data-driven marketing decisions. The company has raised $15 million to date, serves under 500 customers with an average ARPU of $6,000, and maintains over 90% annual retention. They're now pivoting toward AI-powered insights to accelerate how analysts derive actionable intelligence from their data.

Jumeo is a SaaS platform providing trusted identity verification services (ID verification, identity verification, and document verification) primarily for merchants in the sharing economy, fintech, and online gaming sectors. Founded in 2013 and led by CEO Stephen Stude since 2015, the company has raised $60 million and serves 350-400 customers across 40 countries with a 1,500-person team. Growing 46% year-over-year, Jumeo processed 26 million identity verifications in 2016 and is on track to exceed 30 million in 2017.

Work is a payroll and HR compliance SaaS platform serving cannabis businesses across 17 legal states. Founded by Keegan Peterson in 2015 after a friend's dispensary was dropped by traditional payroll providers, the company solves a critical gap: major payroll companies like Gusto and ADP cannot serve cannabis businesses due to banking restrictions. With over 200 companies and thousands of employees on the platform, Work is doing more than $40,000/month in ARR and has raised $3M from traditional VCs.

CleverTap is a mobile analytics and user engagement platform founded by Sunil Thomas and two co-founders in 2013. The company combines analytics with real-time user engagement (push notifications, email, in-app messaging) and raised $9.6M total ($1.6M seed, $8M Series A) from Sequoia and Excel. By May 2017, CleverTap reached $400K MRR and $5M ARR from 200 paying customers, growing from $1.5M revenue in 2016 through content marketing and direct sales.

Duetto Research, founded in 2012 by Patrick Bosworth and two co-founders (including Craig Weissman, former CTO of Salesforce), is a hotel pricing optimization SaaS platform serving over 3,000 hotel properties across 98 countries. The company has achieved remarkable unit economics with $17,000 annual ACV per property, ~$50M ARR run rate, 14-month payback periods on $20K CAC, zero customer churn in five years, and improved gross margins from 30% to 75% through operational efficiency.

Mural is a digital whiteboard SaaS platform that enables modern teams to collaborate visually on design thinking and complex problem-solving. Founded by Mariano Suarez in 2014 as a startup in residence at IDEO, the company has grown to serve 1,200+ companies with 45,000 monthly active users, generating $280k in MRR (~$3.36M ARR). The business is heavily enterprise-focused, with IBM accounting for 26,000 of their users, and operates with a long-tail revenue distribution and best-in-class gross margins north of 85%.

Front is a shared inbox management SaaS platform founded by Matilda Collins in early 2015 that helps teams collaborate on asynchronous communication (email, Twitter, Facebook, Twilio). The company has grown from 240K MRR with 1,200 customers in 2016 to 700K MRR with 1,700 customers by 2017, tripling revenue in 11 months through land-and-expand motions and a newly formed marketing team. Despite raising $14M total (including Series A), Front maintains an 88% gross margin, negative net churn, and operates lean with only ~$250K monthly burn.

Health Loop is a patient engagement SaaS platform founded in 2009 by physician Jordan Schlein and led by Todd Johnson (joined 2013), who previously sold his first healthcare IT company for $15 million. The platform automatically sends push notifications to patients after diagnosis or surgery to check on their health status and alerts doctors to potential issues, monetizing through enterprise subscriptions with health systems and physician groups at $120k-$150k ACV. Growing at 150% YoY with $4M ARR, 90%+ annual retention, and $21M raised in venture capital, Health Loop is capturing market share in the rapidly expanding value-based healthcare delivery space.

Park Bench is a SaaS platform that builds neighborhood-focused websites for real estate agents, allowing them to become the 'digital mayor' of their neighborhood by aggregating local content like events, deals, and news. Founded by Amanda Newman in 2014, the company has grown from 70K MRR to 628K MRR in one year, with over 1,000 customers paying $4,500-$5,000 annually upfront. Operating with 90% gross margins and a CAC of $676 on a $13,163 LTV, Park Bench is projecting $6.3M ARR with only $125K in initial funding, scaling profitably out of Toronto with a team of 30.

Komiko is a sales intelligence SaaS tool founded in 2015 by Hal, a former Microsoft Dynamics ERP leader with 20 years at Microsoft. The product helps customers understand which engagement patterns with clients are working by mining data from email, calendar, phone logs and CRM systems. Currently at $60k MRR with 2,000 seats across 50 customers, the company has grown primarily through inbound referrals and founder network, with zero customer churn to date.

Logs.io is a cloud-based log analytics SaaS built by Tomer Levy, launched in October 2014 and achieving product-market fit within 6 months. The company leverages the open-source ELK stack as a lead-generation engine, becoming the #1 content contributor to the ELK community and ranking #1 in Google for key search terms. With ~300 paying customers across 80 countries, a 10-40K ACV sweet spot, and a minimum $3.6M ARR run rate, Logs.io has raised $24M (including a $15.6M Series B in October 2016) and operates with 80% gross margins and sub-one-year payback periods.

Miracle is a SaaS platform launched in 2012 that enables large retailers like Best Buy, Walmart, and Urban Outfitters to operate their own third-party vendor marketplaces on their websites. The company has raised $22M in equity funding and serves over 125 customers across 25 countries, using a percentage-based pricing model tied to incremental revenue generated through the marketplace. Adrian Nossenbaum bootstrapped the initial development with proceeds from his previous exit (Split Games to Fnac) and built a 160-person team focused on enterprise B2B sales with a sub-one-year payback period target.

Packet Zoom is a mobile networking SaaS company founded in 2013 that optimizes mobile application performance in areas with poor network connectivity. CEO Shlomi Gian joined in mid-2016 when the company was pre-revenue and has grown it to ~$1M ARR with 68 customers through enterprise sales and strategic partnerships with CDN companies. The company plans to scale rapidly through partnerships with resellers and CDN partners, targeting millions in ARR by end of 2017.

Livepeer is a decentralized video transcoding and live streaming platform built on the Ethereum blockchain. It solves the problem of centralized video streaming services failing in censorship-prone environments by allowing users to earn tokens as miners and stake in the network. The platform incentivizes participation through token economics, where participants benefit from network growth similar to early Bitcoin or Ethereum adopters.

Bugsnag is a B2B SaaS crash monitoring platform founded by James Smith in February 2013 that helps companies detect and fix errors in their software applications. After bootstrapping to profitability in 6-9 months with $4.5K MRR, they raised $9.5M in venture capital (Series A from Benchmark for $7.2M) and grew to 4,000 paying customers and 60,000 total users. The company has achieved over $2M ARR with healthy metrics including sub-1% logo churn and net negative revenue churn, growing primarily through word-of-mouth and freemium adoption.

Mobile Walla is a mobile consumer audience platform that collects and processes mobile behavioral data to create targeted audience segments for enterprise marketers and sells raw mobile data to large companies like Oracle. Founded in 2013 with $4M in venture funding, the company initially generated revenue through media buying ($1M in 2014, $4M in 2015) while building its data platform underneath. In 2016, they pivoted away from media buying to focus exclusively on the SaaS and audience data business, achieving remarkable 20x year-over-year growth in data revenues ($12k in May 2016 to $250k in June 2017) with just 9 SaaS customers paying $8,500-$41,000/month and zero paid marketing spend.

Progressly is an enterprise SaaS platform positioning itself as the operational system of record for Fortune 1000 companies with extended value chains (energy, utilities, transportation, CPG). Founded by Nick Candito in 2014 after his experience at Relate IQ (acquired by Salesforce), the company has raised $10M and serves hundreds of customers with a mobile-first approach targeting field workers. With less than 300K MRR but a high-ARPU enterprise sales model, Candito aims to hit $5M ARR by end of 2017.

Likefolio is a fintech SaaS company founded by serial entrepreneur Andy Swan that analyzes tweets to identify shifts in consumer behavior and purchase intent for professional investors. The company operates two revenue models: a $2,000/month subscription service (Likefolio On Demand) for smaller hedge funds and boutique investors, and a robust API priced $100,000-$300,000 annually for quantitative funds, with the API model currently generating the majority of revenue. Andy has bootstrapped the company with a lean team of 9 (5 in Kentucky, 4 in Argentina) and deliberately avoided raising capital to maintain full ownership and strategic control.

Host Analytics is a SaaS company providing enterprise performance management software for corporate finance departments. Founded in 2001 as a consulting firm and bootstrapped for seven years before raising VC funding, the company has grown to serving 700 customers with a $40-50M ARR run rate and has raised $85M in total capital. CEO Dave Kellogg, who joined in 2014 when ARR was ~$10M, has grown the company 4X through a focus on nurture marketing, unconventional tactics like EBITDA stickers, and long-term customer relationship building in a market where only 5% adoption of cloud solutions exists.

Foursquare transformed from a hot consumer social network (valued at $650M in 2013) into an enterprise location intelligence powerhouse under CEO Jeff Glick's leadership starting in 2016. The company monetized its 70,000 free developer community through a tiered SaaS licensing model based on API calls, with over 90% of revenue now coming from B2B customers including Fortune 500 companies, tech giants like Apple, Microsoft, Samsung, and ride-sharing platforms like Uber. Their Pilgrim technology, built on nearly 12 billion cumulative check-ins (7 million per day), enables contextual mobile marketing and real-time foot traffic analysis that has made Foursquare an essential infrastructure layer in apps across the globe.