Investors place significant bets on the SaaS sector due to its promising profit potential and ongoing growth, supported by data. In 2023, SaaS startups received 47% of venture capital investments, marking a significant share of total funding. Looking ahead to 2024, which SaaS startups should be monitored closely?
DayOne Capital, N1 Fund, Airbridge Equity Partners, J&T Ventures, and FIRSTPICK have shared with Vestbee their watchlists. The only condition was that the funds couldn't mention their portfolio companies.
Andra Bagdonaitė, Partner at FIRSTPICK
Evergrowth is an AI-powered sales platform. It provides sales teams with deeper, actionable insights into accounts and prospects, facilitating targeted and personalized engagements. It raised a €2 million pre-seed round in February, led by US VC Impellent Ventures and Lithuania’s Practica Capital.
Spike is a B2B Generative AI and data tech startup for the digital health industry. It provides health and fitness data interpretation-as-a-service on top of user-generated data from Wearables and IoT devices.
The company has closed a €3.2 million oversubscribed seed round co-led by Practica Capital and TheVentureCity with participation from Silicon Valley, New York, and Berlin-based investors, including CEAS Investments, Plug & Play Ventures, Geek Ventures, and Axel Springer Porsche (APX).
Trace.Space helps companies that work on complex hardware products to manage engineering requirements. For example, the processes on how engineering teams plan, keep track of and communicate changes in requirements throughout the product development lifecycle. It has raised $1.5 million from VCs such as Hungary’s Fiedler Capital and Latvia’s Change Ventures.
Supersimple is a data analytics platform for B2B SaaS companies that helps teams understand complex data without code. Its AI-powered solution allows employees in the company, including non-data teams, to answer their ad-hoc data questions to get data insights and make better decisions. In April, the startup raised a €2 million pre-seed round, led by Estonia’s Tera Ventures.
Pepijn van den Berg, Associate at Airbridge Equity Partners
Four years ago, there was a global shift towards more remote and hybrid work. For companies, this significantly increased the complexity of onboarding new employees. Without physical onboarding, it became difficult to ensure that new employees have the right laptops and IT equipment. Workwize is a SaaS platform that enables companies to buy and maintain all their laptops and IT equipment in over 100 countries. Using their platform, you can buy, repair, pick up, and store equipment in all these countries, allowing you to hire anywhere in the world while efficiently reusing your equipment.
They won the Startup of the Year award from MTSprout and, within three years, have become a dominant player in this new software category with clients such as Monzo, Monday.com, EQT, and Prezi.
Within book publishing, only around 5% of a publisher's book catalog can afford current advertising methods. That means there is a huge long tail of underserved and undermarketed books, representing a significant opportunity for publishers, authors, and readers. Addressing this, Shimmr has developed an AI tool that is able to analyze and understand all aspects of books, allowing them to create tailor-made marketing materials that are automatically matched with and deployed to the relevant audience. This results in customized and personalized marketing efforts that can be run on autopilot.
Moreover, their end-to-end tool continuously self optimizes. Something that, in the words of an editor-in-chief, means every book is now able to find its reader.
Out of the 140 million women giving birth annually, 90% experience physical and mental difficulties the year after. The majority goes unsupported due to a lack of systematic support for new parents in the workforce, and undiagnosed due to postpartum care being underserved and offline globally. This comes at a massive cost to the individual and their family but also to key stakeholders such as healthcare, insurance companies and employers as almost 40% leave their employer after parental leave and 30% go on sick-leave.
Leia Health is on a mission to solve this by digitizing the parental journey, offering personalized support with both a B2C and B2B angle. Their platform not only features data-driven health insights, but also a parental leave feature to streamline off and reboarding planning and communication between employees and managers. In doing so, they want to redefine parental health for the next generation of parents.
András Fehér, Associate at DayOne Capital
Working with Turbine.ai over the past two years, we gained insight into how AI can accelerate drug development in the TechBio space. Novogaia, founded recently by Tess Bevers from the Netherlands and David Kubanek from the Czech Republic during EF's latest London Batch, aims to use Deep Learning Gene LLMs to unlock the remaining 90% of fungal biochemistry.
Understanding the challenges of entering the pharmaceutical industry without being an established player, they began gathering traction in the agricultural industry, which has lower entry barriers and is more open to early-stage collaborations.
There are a vast number of companies trying to use your call recordings and transcripts for different purposes. Airtime, founded by two experienced Hungarian entrepreneurs, seems to be becoming the best choice for product managers who want to gather user feedback from anything from sales calls to user interviews. Due to their extreme focus on building a seamless, easy-to-use product, many of our portfolio companies are already using it.
Founded by a Bulgarian diaspora founder and ex-Twitter CTO Greg Pass, they are venturing into one of the hottest areas of the Application Layer AI space, building your AI teammate. Although the space is extremely crowded, and they are still in beta, their product is surprisingly easy to use, thanks to its numerous integrations and pre-built blueprints.
Andriy Gulyi, Head of Analytics and Investment at N1 Fund
GO TO-U is the only platform with unique booking features for EV drivers. It focused on EV users' charging problems and maximized charging stations' revenue. With ML, it predicts electricity consumption and optimizes EV drivers' demand. Now, GoToU has a list of EU contracts and is building global traction.
Revizior is a marketing platform that zeroes in on the needs of SMEs. It's all about retaining and bringing back customers, and it does this effectively through a robust NPS and feedback system. With Revizior, SMEs can take their marketing game to the next level.
Adam Kocik, Managing Partner at J&T Ventures
IP Fabric provides automated network assurance, which gives the actionable insights into the state of your network and prevents potential network outages or damages. Must-have SW for network management, not only for traditional network engineers, but also for accelerating network automation projects.
Infrastructure as a Code platform, creating pre-defined workflows, fastening company's deployment. Raised already more than 20m USD. Lastly, from Insights Partners
All in one platform for managing the entire API lifecycle. From API governance, security to API analysis and documentation. This startup has potential to become only tool for API maintenance.
The promising Czech startup, offering the unification platform for seamless app development and monitoring. This startup has shown very promising results over past months, while having only 1 investment round so far.
Financial frauds are one of the rise, and thus unique automated tool helping banks and Fintechs to combat this crime is getting more important. It has also attracted the investors such as Notion Capital, Google Ventures, Index Capital and Credo Ventures.
