This site uses cookies to improve your experience. To help us insure we adhere to various privacy regulations, please select your country/region of residence. If you do not select a country, we will assume you are from the United States. Select your Cookie Settings or view our Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Used for the proper function of the website
Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
Cookie Settings
Cookies and similar technologies are used on this website for proper function of the website, for tracking performance analytics and for marketing purposes. We and some of our third-party providers may use cookie data for various purposes. Please review the cookie settings below and choose your preference.
Strictly Necessary: Used for the proper function of the website
Performance/Analytics: Used for monitoring website traffic and interactions
When SaaStr Fund made the first investment in RevenueCat back in 2018, nobody could have predicted that this “simple API for managing in-app subscriptions” would become the infrastructure powering 33% of all mobile subscription apps and reach a $500M valuation in 2025. The SaaStr Fund Thesis: Mobile Subscriptions Will Explode.
” Investing for growth has been pretty flat year over year for SMBs, which means there is money there, but they’re holding onto it. Then, in 2017, with around $50M in revenue, BILL added payment capabilities. ’ Bill is approaching half a million customers, so has a good pulse on small businesses. That was probably 2012.
.” The Numbers Behind the Discipline: 2008 : $4M Series A from Emergence Capital (300x return, reportedly returned entire fund 7x over) 2012 : $18.8M net income, 111.5% revenue growth year-over-year 2013 IPO : $129.5M We have the capital we have – make a profitable business in the capital we have. Okay, well, don’t kid yourself.”
5 Things Vanta Got Right and 5 They Got Wrong getting to the first $10m ARR When Christina Cacioppo co-founded Vanta in 2017, security compliance was an afterthought for most startups. They invested heavily in podcast marketing with attribution pixels showing significant ROI. Fast forward to 2025, and Vanta is valued at $2.45
Think your customers will pay more for data visualizations in your application? Five years ago they may have. But today, dashboards and visualizations have become table stakes. Discover which features will differentiate your application and maximize the ROI of your embedded analytics. Brought to you by Logi Analytics.
Why It Matters : This is forcing LPs to completely rethink their investment strategies and cash flow planning. Defense Tech Has Quietly Become a Major VC Category The Surprise : Defense tech VC investment jumped 2x in 2023 and stayed at that level in 2024 , with 15 active unicorns now valued at $50B collectively.
Jonathan Vassel, CRO at Toast helped scale the company from $20M ARR in 2017 to $1.7B+ ARR in Q1 2025 and a stunning $25B market cap. A look back here at the top 10 learnings from his deep dive with Sam Blond on SaaStr CRO Confidential Most SaaS companies sell horizontally to desk workers across multiple industries.
His investment portfolio spans fintech, biotech, and deep tech, reinforcing his passion for driving progress across industries. Before founding Synthesia in 2017, he co-led Immersive Futures, shaping the UKs VR/AR industry and working with the UK government to establish Londons first high-quality volumetric capture studio, Dimension.
When Observe was founded in late 2017, the decision to build 100% on Snowflake was controversial enough that it cost them founding team members. ” The partnership hierarchy insight : Snowflake focuses on a limited number of partners—dozens, not hundreds—but invests significantly in each.
Introduced in the seminal 2017 paper “ Attention Is All You Need ” by Google researchers, the transformer architecture has become the dominant paradigm in AI models. But invest in good preprocessing, and you set the stage for a more efficient and effective learning process.
Okay, let’s go on invest. So that means you’ve got the right economics and then you use your, I would say, a high-end resource towards a bigger segment where you know you will have better return on investment with bigger deals. But I would say the first mental model is always to look at early signal.
The Numbers Don’t Lie: A Tale of Two Eras The Golden Age (2017-2018): When VCs Were Heroes Looking at 2017 funds—the darlings of the previous cycle: 81% returned capital after 5+ years Median IRR of 11.5% (that’s actually good!) A $10M investment in Anthropic’s Series A is now worth $500M+ on paper.
which was acquired by Oracle in April 2017. Previously, Michael was the co-founder and chairman of Moat, which was acquired by Oracle in April of 2017. So if I think about the way, so Yext, I, I started, I invested in Yext in 2008. Pain because people invested into a sales environment that didn’t materialize in 2023.
Start your social media marketing strategy by pinpointing where your ideal customers are active, to get the best return on investment (ROI) for your business. Despite only launching in 2017, it’s one of the fastest-growing apps in the world and recently overtook Google as the most visited internet site.
That’s what happened to Pepsi in 2017 for their ad that featured Kendall Jenner, which co-opted protest imagery to sell soda (and promptly got called out for trivializing real social movements ). If the post sparked DMs, follow-up content ideas, or user-generated content (UGC), that’s a sign your audience is invested.
Comparing 2017 averages to seven year highs, we observe Series A, Series B, and Series Seed round sizes are effectively at their all-time highs, ignoring some minor differences. In 2016, venture capitalists reduced their investment in staff companies by 1 ⁄ 3 , falling to $2.8 billion from $4.2
Over the last seven years, software startup investing has changed quite a bit. Which of these markets are growing the fastest for investment dollars? The chart above breaks out 14 different software categories and shows the amount of dollars invested in each category indexed to 2010 levels.
So Carta has some of its latest data on VC performance and it’s pretty interesting: There’s a lot going on this chart but let me break it down from a founder perspective: The median 2017 fund is 7 years into a 10-14 lifetime — and is sitting at 1.8x “TVPI” But it’s not quite that good. So back out 20%.
The slowing of venture investment more broadly across the US serves as a backdrop to San Francisco’s particularly strong correction. If we compare San Francisco to the Valley by round, Series Bs and Series Ds have increased markedly in the valley in 2017. Note, the levels still exceed 2010-2013. But the 50% decline is real.
As the year is coming to an end I’d like to share a few thoughts on what we’ll be looking for in the SaaS world in 2017. Two of our most successful SaaS investments to date, Zendesk and Typeform , owe a large part of their success to what I like to call a “10x” improvement in user experience over the status quo.
After the correction earlier this year, public valuation multiples had reset to those of 2017. Before this announcement, US venture-backed software M&A was tracking to its worst year since 2017, at about $7b, down from $71b last year. Congratulations to team Figma on building their impressive business.
From time to time, I chart the fastest growing categories of startup investment in the US for seed through Series C. Here are 2015 , 2017 , This year, I was certain the categories would have been influenced by COVID19.
Because in the Best of Times, there’s always more money to invest in top performers — and even mid-pack performer s. That really leaves just $120m to invest. (Yes, Yes, there are ways to “recycle” to get the amount available to invest up, but that’s not super important for this analysis). checks on average ($2.5m
(Note: I wrote a version of this in 2017 when times were good. And more importantly, they are invested in you. Make sure net negative churn is at least covered and invested in. Maybe they can invest a little more, maybe they can’t. So here’s the 2020+ version). __. Hopefully, things are great. In the media.
They wanted to invest in apps, not APIs. And they had to go months with no money at all. “If you are in survival mode, you need to think through ever investments you make now, weighted toward survival first, but the best outcome after the crisis is over second.” But at that time, fundraising was really tough.
Now is the time to invest, in team and product at least. Salesforce Growth: 2021 $20.8B Guidance 2020 $17.1B 2014 $4.1B. Thank you Ohana! — Marc Benioff (@Benioff) August 25, 2020. If you haven’t done a SaaS start-up before, it’s different. Next year, you will have a $14m, or an $18m, or maybe even a $20m+ business.
2013: first investment. Worth $2B by 2017. Solo founder. First product doesn’t work, no revenue for 3 years. 200m from Silver Lake. 2016: IPO at $1.15B market cap. 2020: Worth $7B today. Zendesk : Founded 2006. Raised $500,000 (!) in first angel round in 2007. IPO in 2014 at $1B. Crossed $1B in ARR in 2020. Today worth $16B.
Despite what we’ve seen post-2020/2021, there has been a surge in AI investments, with AI companies at the infrastructure layer hitting a hundred times valuations at early funding stages. This is a level that hasn’t been commonly encountered since 2017-2018. There are worries over the persistence of low public multiples.
Customers invest in not just products, but relationships. If you compare them over 10 year lifetimes, you’ll see you should probably invest much more in the bigger customers. Invest — at least in your bigger customers — as if they are worth 10x what they are worth today. Invest like that.
This was around 2017, and CS became simpler and focused on post-sales, retention, and reduced churn. The quicker you can be smart and make early investments that pay off, the better off you’ll be. Braze invested in this, and the leadership team agreed to do so. This revenue chart is 2017-2021 before Braze IPO’d.
Late stage market dynamics are changing as hedge funds and mutual funds seek other areas to invest. In 2017, there will be a lot of comparison between the prices public bound companies fetch at IPO compared to the last round private valuations as the public window opens. So, which is the hardest round to raise in 2017?
Software companies don’t invest once in R&D & then sell copies of the software as we did in the 90s on CDs. In 2017, the industry migrated from ASC 605 to ASC 606, which are financial arcana as esoteric as it reads. It’s software-as-a-service. So the costs of developing & maintaining the software are ongoing.
CEO Peter Gassner is truly of the most impressive founders I’ve personally met and you can take a look at our deep dive from SaaStr Annual 2017 here not long after they’d IPO’d: One of many remarkable things about Veeva: it burned about $3m on the way to IPO. In basically one venture round and a bit of angel investing.
What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? For over two decades, Creandum has specialized in early-stage investing, Seed and Series A. Some of our most notable investments include Spotify, Klarna, Bolt, Neo4j, Pleo or Factorial.
And it has been since 2017 or so! Invest long here. In the early days, invest heavily in any partners you have even 1 or 2 joint customers with. Invest in what is working. Salesforce’s biggest source of new revenue isn’t CRM or even support. It’s partners and platform. But that took time.
That’s way, way up from just 22% of revenue from $100k+ deals in 2017. ” The Slack Fund is tiny. “As of January 31, 2019, Slack Fund has invested $10.1 He was granted an additional 3m shares in 2017 and 1.3m The S-1 is full of enterprise case studies, from Oracle to Fox to Splunk. more in 2019.
What’s your most recent disclosed investment? What’s your sweet spot for investing — check size, stage, type of deal? The common threads of my investments are companies creating a new category or disrupting the definition of a current category. #3. What’s different about your fund / how you invest and support founders?
— Drew Houston (@drewhouston) January 30, 2017. Now, it’s generating huge cash flow at $2B and also investing in a much broader product suite. Today we announced that @Dropbox is the fastest SaaS company ever to reach a $1 billion revenue run rate! pic.twitter.com/Rn13KiwnyG. Let’s see how it plays out at $3B in ARR.
One of the clearest examples of how lopsided the services-to-software dynamic can be is from Mulesoft’s S1 filing in 2017. GenAI will empower companies to do more with software than ever before, and it will also increase the value of the software itself, unlocking new areas for innovation and investment.
But as the chart above shows, the median amount invested in seed rounds continues to increase at about 40% annually. This trend started in 2014 and has continued through the first quarter of 2017. The anomaly in 2017 is due to an outlier. In 2016, the number of seeds has fallen by a 27.6% reduction in the number of seed rounds.
But in 2017, brands matter more than ever. Invest in Your Brand and Customer Marketing. This is the one investment everyone skimps on, but always works. Being a CEO isn’t a lonely job on a daily basis, but too many tough decisions are made too solo, without a good mentor. Add one to the team. Drive Up Your NPS.
From 2015 to 2017, Braze grew eightfold. Navigate market dynamics over time—from employee base to customer investment—instead of making hasty decisions. Growing sustainably over time requires a balance between how much you pay to grow today and where you invest for the future. Stick to your convictions. Impressive, right?
Peter was part of an amazing batch of CEOs that Emergence Capital invested in, including me. Watch her session from Annual 2017, and if you aren’t inspired, you are doing it wrong: #3. But here are a few that stood out so much, that I truly learned something profound from them: #1. Peter Gassner, CEO of Veeva.
In December 2017, the amount raised in ICOs nearly equaled the amount raised by Series A investments globally. In the early 2000s, the billions of dollars invested enabled the Internet. About a third of the ICOs in 2017 raised some form of institutional capital before ICO.
We organize all of the trending information in your field so you don't have to. Join 80,000+ users and stay up to date on the latest articles your peers are reading.
You know about us, now we want to get to know you!
Let's personalize your content
Let's get even more personalized
We recognize your account from another site in our network, please click 'Send Email' below to continue with verifying your account and setting a password.
Let's personalize your content