A good decade ago, the most sought-after startups in Silicon Valley were SaaS startups. The idea of building a digital product and selling it over the internet created an exciting digital gold rush.
Products like Google, Facebook, DropBox, Amazon were all driven by revolutionary digital software. However, as companies began to spend millions to build their product they realized that they had to get people to use their products before they could make money. They needed users who would pay them directly or indirectly for using the service. All great digital services start off free because it’s hard to sell something on the internet unless you have a lot of users.
This is where SaaS (software-as-a-service) business models came about, this way you’re constantly getting new customers in exchange for giving away your product.
More importantly, SaaS is very scalable, meaning if you’re building software, instead of building and spinning up your own servers or cutting deals with other big companies who can provide servers for you. They can provide servers at a very cheap price since they serve millions of users every day and operate at a massive scale, hence, you can focus on just building the product itself if it’s connected to a pay-as-you-go business model (SaaS).
What are SaaS startups?
From giants such as Microsoft to small companies like Slack and Trello – SaaS startups are ambitious companies that create new apps daily to provide online services for users.
SaaS startup is a scalable software delivery model, providing more than just the software, but also maintenance, support, training, and consulting. These types of startups have no need for large upfront costs and can go to market quickly with minimal investment.
It has become an important part of the software industry since it allows users to access the software online or through mobile apps, rather than having to download software and update it regularly. SaaS can be used by organizations of all sizes, with it offering great benefits for SMEs who wish to operate while remaining flexible.
World’s rising SaaS startups you need to know this year
While there are many cool SaaS startups out there, we’ve shortlisted the top 19 SaaS companies that are expected to be recognized as the world’s top SaaS startups in 2022.
Flow XO
Flow XO is a powerful automation product that allows you to simply and quickly build incredible AI chatbot solutions that will help you communicate and engage with your customers across a wide range of sites, social media platforms, and applications.
This computer-generated application is capable of having a virtual conversation with a human. Moreover, it can do that in such a way that they don’t really feel like they are talking to a computer. Even though a chatbot shouldn’t pretend to be a human, it’s very beneficial when it is able to act like one.
Shortcut
Shortcut, the first project management platform for software development that brings every team across the organization together, is the software you need if you are aiming to build better products. Thus, Shortcut enables teams to track their progress, gather customer feedback, keep all work in one place, and manage your backlog.
Being aware that product and engineering don’t always see eye-to-eye on how to manage their work, the team of this SaaS startup is dedicated to helping cut through that by providing both teams the features they need without forcing them to use the features they don’t.
Beamer
Beamer is a smart notification center and changelog app to keep your customers up to date on the latest version of your product or website. It allows you to easily post alerts and updates using pop-ups, top bar, snippets, and tooltips to suit every need.
When you join the Beamer network, you can show your users that you know their specific needs with personalized messages. This includes product updates, new features, events, and more. Moreover, this SaaS startup will make sure you don’t lose your customers with one-size-fits-all marketing, by tailoring your notifications based on the specific product your customer is interested in. Also, translating your posts into different languages is another great advantage
Ontraport
Ontraport, a CRM and automation platform, is designed for businesses that are ready to scale. This SaaS startup is giving you all the tools you need for selling, marketing, and managing a business online. Hence, now you can run your business in one centralized, easy-to-use platform.
These features are giving you the chance to move ideas faster, know more about each contact to make better decisions and deliver more memorable experiences, and finally, grow bigger and faster.
CleverReach
CleverReach one of the most promising SaaS startups in 2022, focused on improving the way we do email marketing. Using CleverReach you can manage up to 250 recipients and send up to 1000 emails per month.
Some of the great facts that make this one of the SaaS startups marketers must know is that there are no setup fees and obligations, you will ensure regulatory compliance with double opt-in, reach recipients’ mailboxes directly, bypass spam control, automatically filter and remove invalid or incorrect addresses and more.
Nitro
Nitro will help you to accelerate your business with 100% digital document workflows and powerful productivity for all. This SaaS startup enables organizations to drive better business outcomes and offers comprehensive business solutions. This includes powerful PDF productivity, industry-leading analytics, and unlimited eSigning, all supported by the customer success team.
With over 2.8 million licensed users and 13,000+ business customers in 155 countries, Nitro is undoubtedly one of the most innovative SaaS startups that are becoming crucial for improving business workflow. Furthermore, the fact that 68% of the Fortune 500 trust Nitro proves the efficiency of this startup even more.
Craft CMS
Craft CMS is another one of the most successful SaaS startups that stands out from the crowd. This SaaS provides a multifunctional open-source platform with an easy user interface for building customized web digital experiences and it enables you to monitor changes in real-time.
A few of the many features Craft CMS has are, secure and sported, integration-ready platform, a worldwide community, world-class localization, and literally everything else you need to empower your entire creative process. Moreover, from the user-friendly interface to a completely customizable back-end, with Craft CMS, everything you interact with is designed to make sense.
Daily
Daily is simply an API-powered service that enables customers and users to integrate video and audio chat into their products. This WebRTC video and audio platform for developers will handle all the hard things about common video call use cases for you, with sensible defaults.
Their media server infrastructure is custom-built for real-time video and audio, at scale, anywhere in the world. With decades of experience building video and audio infrastructure, streaming applications, and APIs you can consider this SaaS as your best WebRTC-focused DevOps team.
Loom
Loom, one of the best entrepreneur apps as well as one of the top SaaS startups in California, provides customers with a video messaging tool with quickly shareable content. You can use Loom to record desktop, microphone, and camera simultaneously, and that makes it an essential tool for hybrid workplaces.
People retain an order of magnitude more information via video than text, hence leveraging the features of Loom provides you with a more efficient, expressive, and effective way to communicate. Founded in 2015, Loom until today has more than 14 million users and 200k companies.
Hiver
Simply put, Hiver is a Google Chrome extension that adds multiple features to your Gmail inbox and enables you to access shared inboxes to collaborate efficiently. This is one of the top SaaS startups that allows users to collaborate on generic email addresses.
This SaaS is the world’s 1st Gmail-based helpdesk and gives you access to shared inboxes right insight Gmail. Furthermore, it delegates incoming emails with a single click, enables you to write notes to team members to add context, and helps you track metrics and team performance.
Booxi
In the past few years, B2B appointment setting became popular for a reason, and one of the SaaS startups that stands out by making appointments easy is Booxi. This appointment scheduling platform for retailers is trusted by thousands of retailers in 80+ countries and it’s dedicated to making commerce more human.
With a belief that a business’s biggest asset is people, and their goal is to facilitate your connection with customers. To do so, you need to integrate Booxi into your website to enable easy online appointment scheduling. Moreover, you can configure, integrate, deploy and analyze data at your fingertips.
Eventdex
Eventdex developed software that streamlines each step of event planning and execution. That means, from registration, ticketing to websites, onsite engagement, to business matchmaking and analysis, this SaaS will take care of everything and will deliver high-quality events like no other.
Event planners are embracing all-in-one event management software to remove the complexity of managing virtual, hybrid, or onsite events. Thus, by pairing careful planning with smart technologies, Eventdex, reaches a global audience and experiences next-gen event planning.
Scout App
Built for developers, by developers, Scout App is application performance monitoring you must know in 2022 if you want to spend less time debugging and more time building. With Scout App, you can pinpoint, prioritize, and fix issues by tracing logic that ties bottlenecks to the specific line of code causing them.
When increased response time is identified, you need to click and drag over the timeframe in question to analyze all endpoints and pinpoint anomalies. Next, Scout App quickly shows you the exact endpoint or endpoints causing the issue and deep tracing logic shows you response time distribution across all requests. With all that you can easily identify specific slow request outliers against your average and identify common traits with Crossfilter.
Delivra
Delivra is a sophisticated email platform that designs custom solutions to help marketers automate highly personalized, event-driven campaigns to increase the long-term loyalty and lifetime value of their customers. Their deep integrations, powerful segmentation, and event-triggered, multi-channel automation, make it so much easier for marketers to fully customize engagement strategy and even drive more revenue.
This promising SaaS startup provides a hands-on approach and helps businesses that have advanced email marketing needs. Hence, using Delivra you can build effective campaigns in minutes, reach and grow your audience, automate personal experiences, and improve your marketing strategy with insights and teamwork.
ReportGarden
The next of the world’s best SaaS startups these years helps online ad agencies create analysis and performance reports for their clients. ReportGarden gives clients an easy way to group PPC, SEO, and social accounts into one client report, manage keyword rankings and perform SEO audits with simple SEO analysis to drive quality traffic to the client’s website.
Additionally, you can create live dashboards with real-time ads and analytics data that clients can easily access at any moment, understand the principal KPIs resulting inefficient performance, audit your PPC accounts, manage PPC budgets at a multi-account level, and more.
Fuse Autotech
Fuse Autotech knew there had to be a way to improve the customer experience at the dealerships, so they created one. More specifically, Fuse Autotech is a finance management system that consolidates online and in-store technologies for a seamless customer experience from start to finish.
This SaaS company provides one go-to application that streamlines vehicle transactions, reduces the cost to sell, ensures sustainability, and maximizes profits. Even though changing decades of tradition and the only way all this has been done was challenging, now it all pays off because this improved customer experience is better for both, the customers and businesses as well.
Eqtble
Eqtble, an HR startup, helps businesses drive insights about their employees by leveraging AI. The vision of this SaaS startup is to create a world where companies use the platform to enhance equity, inclusivity, and diversity in their organizations.
With this next-gen analytics, businesses can better understand the company’s DEI, engagement, growth, and attrition. Hence, with those deep insights about the workforce, decision-makers can make better decisions based on trusted data.
Phyllo
Phyllo is a SaaS startup that developed a product that empowers developers to seamlessly integrate with creators and independent work platforms to transform their customers’ digital experience.
Better consent management means increased customer trust in your business. Hence, by redefining API infra, Phyllo brings a paradigm shift in your customer’s control over their data and privacy. Creators are prompted to link their work platforms, select the desired platform from the list, get a clear disclosure of what information is mandated by your business, and more.
Backbone AI
Bad product data is killing the sales growth, hence Backbone AI uses advanced AI technology and collaboration features to automate the data connections between manufacturers, distributors, and suppliers.
Their platform can be easily customized for different supply chain data use cases. From eCommerce catalogs, industrial products, and food and beverage, to construction management and procurement auditing, Backbone AI provides features and opportunities to automate the data connections of every business.
What all these SaaS startups have in common
There are a lot of startups that make SaaS products. Some of them sell to millions of customers, others barely sell to a thousand. Some were bought for billion-dollar valuations, some were bought for less than $10 million.
However there are a few things SaaS startups above have in common, and the first thing is – a very committed CEO and founders. Having a startup is challenging in so many ways. You have to sacrifice a lot of things to achieve your goal, and only the most committed leaders succeed in achieving their dreams.
The next thing successful SaaS startups have in common is product-market fit. This can be arrived at, or hacked, in many different ways, but roughly, if you aren’t growing at least 10% a month, and at least 6% a month thereafter, you have to be aware that you don’t quite have a product-market fit yet, and pivot in order to achieve that.
Passion and belief in your journey and patience are just other characteristics startup owners have that contribute to achieving the desired results.
More must-read stories from Enterprise League:
- Most innovative solutions to save the world, developed by most promising environmental startups.
- Innovative logistics startups forever changing delivery services.
- World’s best beauty startups to watch this year.
- These are the most innovative aerospace startups in 2022.
- 19 wholesale tea suppliers creating unique and high-quality natural teas.
Related Articles
Importance of cross-cultural communication: Why it matters
The importance of cross-cultural communication in the workplace and how it drives workplace success. Find out how to harness the benefits of global culture.
Top 5 mistakes made in shareholder agreements
Shareholder agreements are vital, but they need to be done right. In this article, we outline the top 5 mistakes to avoid when drafting a shareholder agreement.
Difference between VPNs for businesses and consumers
VPN services offer essential security features for online businesses and average web users. In this article, learn the difference between these two types.
Importance of cross-cultural communication: Why it matters
The importance of cross-cultural communication in the workplace and how it drives workplace success. Find out how to harness the benefits of global culture.
Top 5 mistakes made in shareholder agreements
Shareholder agreements are vital, but they need to be done right. In this article, we outline the top 5 mistakes to avoid when drafting a shareholder agreement.
