subscription Startups

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.

Hirewire is a mobile-first marketplace connecting job seekers and restaurants/hourly employers, founded by Joe Wynn in 2015 after he sold his previous company Campus Special for $25M. In their first year beta in Atlanta (Jan 2016), they acquired 4,000+ employers, 100,000+ job seekers, and placed 20,000 people in jobs, with over 50% organic growth. They've raised $4.1M and charge employers $50-$100/month per location, expecting to reach ~$200k/month in revenue soon.

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.

Vertigris is a Silicon Valley-based IoT hardware and SaaS company founded by Mark Chung and two co-founders that helps commercial buildings monitor and optimize electricity usage. They install magnetic sensor clamps on electrical panels paired with an iPhone-like gateway device, then provide recurring software services for energy management and predictive analytics. With 300 customers generating approximately $260k MRR ($3.12M ARR) and a goal to reach $5M revenue in 2017 (4x growth from $1.2M in 2016), they've raised $16M in venture capital and leverage Verizon's 900-person sales team as their primary growth channel.

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.

Cameron Harald is a business growth consultant who coaches high-level CEOs and executives to scale their companies. Starting with a $80,000 annual retainer as his baseline fee (doubling for larger clients like Sprint's second-in-command), he has helped companies like Justix grow from $80 million to $250 million in revenue over four years. He also generates income through book royalties (50,000 copies of "Meeting Suck" sold in the first year), speaking fees ($30,000 per engagement, up from $7,500), and equity stakes in portfolio companies.

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.

BigchainDB, founded by Bruce Poon, is a blockchain database platform designed to handle data-driven enterprise use cases that Bitcoin and Ethereum cannot efficiently support. Currently serving 5-10 customers at $5-10k/month with $50-60k MRR (targeting $100k by year-end), the company has raised $6 million and employs 20 people (mostly PhDs) to solve supply chain tracking, regulatory compliance, and data provenance problems across industries like pharmaceuticals, energy, and automotive.

Dev Slopes is a learn-to-code platform founded in March 2016 that generated $600k in first-year revenue primarily through affiliate partnerships on Udemy (90% of revenue) with over 100k students. They recently launched their own SaaS subscription model at $20/month, acquiring 130 subscribers in the first month ($2.6k MRR), with a goal to reach $1M annual revenue. The company raised $500k total ($190k from Kickstarter and $300k from private investor) and operates with an 8-person team.

Mobstack is a Bangalore-based SaaS platform founded in 2010 that pivoted in 2015 to focus on Beaconstack, a proximity-based marketing and analytics solution using Bluetooth beacon technology. The company has grown to $25k MRR with 100+ customers and 10,000+ beacons deployed globally, including a major deployment with Google at 117 Indian train stations. They've raised $3.5M in capital from Accel Partners, Cisco, and angels, and are on track to hit $500k ARR by end of 2017.

Book in a Box is a publishing service founded in 2015 that helps busy professionals and speakers write and publish books without spending years writing. By interviewing authors and converting their spoken content into professionally published books, they've grown to work with 500 authors in 2.5 years, generating $11.3 million in cumulative revenue with no debt or VC funding. They've scaled to 30 full-time team members and 100+ freelancers, averaging 25-30 new books per month.