Clouded Judgement

OCTOBER 11, 2024

Every week I’ll provide updates on the latest trends in cloud software companies. However, if we rewind the clock to a year ago, the budget flush at the end of 2023 felt stronger than most years. Selling software remained challenging in 2023 - despite budgets starting to grow again. Follow along to stay up to date!

Cloud 167

Cloud Cost optimization & reporting GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Software Review 167

SaaStr

JUNE 16, 2025

One CIO reported: “what I spent in 2023 I now spend in a week.” The Trust Shift : More enterprises are now hosting directly with model providers (OpenAI, Anthropic) rather than going through cloud providers—a complete reversal from last year when enterprises preferred cloud provider intermediaries for trust and compliance.

Enterprise 216

Enterprise AI Benchmarks Innovation 216

SaaStr

JULY 3, 2025

Oracle Cloud Infra signs $30B+ year deal with OpenAI 🚀Many ways to benefit from AI 😪And many ways to lose from it If Oracle can find a way … pic.twitter.com/1rOZrzaRw4 — Jason ✨👾SaaStr.Ai✨ billion in Q4 FY2025 Cloud Services became Oracle’s largest business, with non-GAAP operating income up 14% in constant currency to $5.7

AI 236

AI Enterprise Cloud Scale 236

SaaStr

JUNE 2, 2025

” Snowflake is “tackling a massive $350 billion market opportunity and a real need for our customers to bring Postgres to the Snowflake AI Data Cloud.” This acquisition builds on previous AI investments, including the 2023 purchase of Neeva, a generative AI search startup.

VP of Engineering 194

VP of Engineering AI Search AI Data 194

SaaStr

JUNE 20, 2025

The Great Spending Showdown: AI vs SaaS in 2025/2026 — What Every B2B Leader Needs to Know We’re witnessing the most dramatic shift in enterprise tech spending since the cloud migration began 15 years ago. Historical precedent : Companies that survived the cloud transition were those that disrupted themselves first.

AI Search 289

AI Search Artificial Intelligence AI CTO Hire 289

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

What VCs Are Funding in AI Today The AI funding landscape has evolved rapidly in 2023-2024. If 2023 was the “year of the demo,” 2024 should be the “year of production” – but most companies are still struggling to deploy AI successfully. This creates both challenges and opportunities for founders.

Technical Review 189

Technical Review Artificial Intelligence AI Marketplace as a Service 189

Tom Tunguz

JUNE 15, 2025

the dawn of the modern AI era) in late 2022 and a rebounding software economy in early 2023. This growth rate was catalyzed by the resurgence of interest in AI workloads after the launch of GPT-3.5 (the Meanwhile, Snowflake tends to operate between -30% to -40% net income margin.

Data 175

Data Compensation AI Cloud 175

SaaStr

MARCH 18, 2025

” – Colin Jones, CRO Emeritus at Wiz You may have seen the news that Google is making its biggest acquisition — by far — of Cloud and SaaS security leader Wiz for a stunning $32 Billion (!). In the end, we had roughly 4.” And it’s even more impressive than that. As it’s just 5 years after founding.

Scale 185

Scale Sales Hiring Scaling Sales Recruiting 185

SaaStr

JUNE 29, 2025

How a 20-year-old company found its second wind in the AI era TL;DR : Palantir just posted 39% YoY growth in Q1 2025, marking a stunning turnaround from the 13% growth trough of 2023. The Deceleration That Had Everyone Worried Let’s be honest: by mid-2023, Palantir looked like it was losing steam. a loss in 2023).

AI 261

AI Artificial Intelligence Software Review Technical Review 261

How To Buy Saas

JUNE 18, 2025

AI is already everywhere: in 2024, 78% of organizations reported using AI ( up from 55% in 2023 ). This surging investment spans AI chips, cloud platforms, and smart software. Compute Hardware: GPUs/TPUs and cloud/edge infrastructure for training and inference. Governments and companies now invest billions: the U.S. poured $109.1

AI 69

AI Scale Technical Review Software Review 69

How To Buy Saas

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

Salesforce: A Pioneer in Cloud CRM Salesforce, founded in 1999 by Marc Benioff, was a trailblazer in bringing CRM to the cloud. Through numerous acquisitions (ExactTarget, Tableau, Slack, and more), Salesforce built an expansive ecosystem of cloud services. Basic email integration available in Sales Cloud.

Scale 52

Scale Underperforming Technical Team Technical Review Marketplace as a Service 52

Chart Mogul

OCTOBER 17, 2024

Intruder provides ongoing monitoring to find security weaknesses in networks, websites, APIs, and cloud setups. Like many SaaS companies, their growth rate fluctuated throughout 2020 to 2023, and it was challenging for them to understand what they should do about it. What is Intruder?

Payment Solutions 52

Payment Solutions Payment Methods Payment Features Payments 52

Stax

JUNE 18, 2025

While both offer cloud-based solutions—but they serve very different purposes. in 2023 with a projected CAGR of 9.6% Horizontal SaaS Vertical SaaS Horizontal SaaS Target Audience Built for businesses in a specific industry or niche (e.g., Consider the following. While enterprise software grew at 11.1% through 2034.

Merchant Services 167

Merchant Services SaaS Payments Payment Services Payments 167

Sales Hacker

NOVEMBER 29, 2024

HG Insights has been writing market reports for years as the pioneer of tech adoption and market insights and is trusted by GTM leaders at the likes of Snowflake Five9 and Google Cloud to improve GTM efficiency. For the six-month period ending July 31, it pulled in $348 million in revenue, up 26% from the same period in 2023.

Investment 111

Investment Technical Review Development Team Review Scale 111

Sales Hacker

MAY 9, 2025

In 2023, we saw a surge of SaaS brands adding anything AI-powered or AI-driven into their website headlines. With 30+ years of experience scaling revenue teams across FinTech, SaaS, cloud computing, and communications, Marcy has held executive roles at Boomi and PayPalwhere she led an 800+ person global team.

AI Search 91

AI Search AI Scale SaaS 91

Stax

OCTOBER 13, 2024

Research shows that 64% of small businesses use accounting software and the market for accounting software solutions is projected to be worth $4.3billion by 2023. QuickBooks is different; it is a cloud-based solution and you can access all the features on the web across all your devices. Which Accounting Software Platform is Better?

Payment Methods 88

Payment Methods Payment Solutions Payments Payment Services 88

Panintelligence

DECEMBER 9, 2024

AI SaaS further elevates this model by providing scalable, cloud-based AI technologies - such as Machine Learning (ML), Natural Language Processing (NLP), and Causal AI - without requiring heavy investments in infrastructure or specialized talent. from 2023 to 2030. What is AI SaaS? trillion by 2030, growing at a CAGR of 36.6%

SaaS Payments 52

SaaS Payments Merchant Services Payment Services Artificial Intelligence 52

SaaStr

OCTOBER 16, 2024

So yes, while it’s true that challenges are real for those in the right-hand column above – overall cloud spend is still up 20%. Google Cloud , Azure, and GitLab, all tied directly or indirectly to AI, are seeing massive acceleration. But Google Cloud, Azure, and GitLab are all benefiting and on fire.

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Scale AI SaaS 317

SaaStr

JUNE 30, 2025

This represents the second significant price adjustment in the last several years, following a 9% increase across their entire product portfolio in 2023. These changes align with Atlassian’s cloud-first strategy, making on-premise deployments significantly more expensive relative to cloud alternatives. 2023: $31.4B (+18.3%

Pricing 295

Pricing Payments Payment Solutions SaaS Payments 295

How To Buy Saas

MAY 26, 2025

The LLM is typically hosted on servers (or accessed via cloud APIs) and integrated into applications. The estimated cost in cloud compute was around $4.6 Step 7: Deployment (Integration into SaaS) Once the model is trained and fine-tuned, its ready to be deployed. million for that single training run.

Artificial Intelligence 64

Artificial Intelligence Data Software Review SaaS 64

Stax

MARCH 18, 2025

On top of that, 69% of Americans online in 2023 said they used digital payment methods to make a purchase. Modern digital payment processing systems Modern digital payment processing systems leverage cloud-based technology, APIs, and digital wallets to quickly and securely process transactions. billion transactions and $9.76

Payment Services 88

Payment Services Merchant Services Payment Methods Payment Solutions 88

Sales Hacker

DECEMBER 6, 2024

Director of Customer Success at Decisions), Marko Buric (Head of Cloud Customer Experience, Bay Area Enterprise at Google), Joanna Johnston (SVP Customer Success at Gong), and Erin Guagenti (VP of Customer Success at Productiv). By late 2023 and into 2024, the earlier volatility stabilizes more than previous years. Lets get into it.

Customer Success 107

Customer Success Technical Advisors Sales Hiring Scale 107

How To Buy Saas

JUNE 10, 2025

Extensive Knowledge: Trained on vast data up to 2023, it provides factual answers and cites sources in Plus/Enterprise versions. Pro is currently available via Google Cloud and the Google AI subscription. It comes in versions like Claude 4 Sonnet (2024) and Claude 3 Opus (2023). Word via Copilot). Pricing Google Gemini 2.5

AI Search 49

AI Search AI Artificial Intelligence Software Review 49

Sales Hacker

FEBRUARY 25, 2025

We actually, we’re going to do this one in 2023. As everyone knows, 2023 was madness for a lot of folks. Look, look at the clouds from the mountaintop kind of, kind of thing? These were early years of just the cloud and SaaS. Scott Barker: Absolutely. Lots to cover. So we’ll, we’ll dive right in.

Sales Hiring 84

Sales Hiring Marketing Technical Review Sales Recruiting 84

Sales Hacker

JANUARY 28, 2025

That was my, really my big start in cloud and SaaS. And at that time, the cloud and SaaS industry was just exploding. The cloud and the SaaS movement. And so you got like CRM and you got an entire office suite and these two cloud leaders and with kind of us in the middle. [00:12:00] And we tied those two things together.

Sales Hiring 102

Sales Hiring AI Scale Cloud 102

SaaStr

FEBRUARY 21, 2025

The initial years were challenging – he bootstrapped the company and worked to convince an industry traditionally resistant to technological change to adopt cloud-based solutions. He recognized early on that cloud-based solutions could solve many of the communication and coordination challenges inherent in construction projects.

Construction 242

Construction Education Leadership Company Culture 242

SaaStr

MARCH 19, 2025

And the dollar value has gone up, it’s doubled since 2018 , although down from a 2023 peak. Not just with the big public Cloud companies. Now this isn’t necessarily bad: First, it’s not new. 20% of deals even in 2018 were start-ups buying start-ups. And start-ups have gotten bigger. So they can pay more.

Acquisition 216

Acquisition Startup Cloud Data 216

Sales Hacker

JUNE 13, 2025

For cohorts in late 2022 and 2023, only ~6–9% of companies raised a Series A within a year. It’s so much bigger than just cloud or SaaS. At the start of the cloud era, software was a ~$350B market. It took 15 years to grow the cloud economy to $400B. The real crucible is graduating to Series A.

AI Search 94

AI Search Sales Hiring Sales Recruiting Scale 94

User Pilot

MAY 17, 2025

billion people were using 5G by the end of 2023, and that number is still climbing. Thanks to cloud computing and in-app logic, its become easier to build these flows. 5G is making real-time features smoother than ever.

Mobile 90

Mobile Payment Solutions Trends Payments 90

Tom Tunguz

FEBRUARY 2, 2023

Google: [We] are pushing Google Cloud to Profitability. One surprising nuance from the Google call: Revenue growth in GCP was again greater than Google Cloud, reflecting strength in both infrastructure and platform services. With an operating loss of $480m on 7.3b Amazon: Net sales increased $21.4

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) 310

GCP(Google Cloud Platform) Cloud AWS Sales Hiring 310

SaaStr

SEPTEMBER 20, 2023

Discover Bessemer Venture Partners’s annual State of the Cloud report, going through trends, benchmarks, and metrics that underpin the Cloud economy. The past twelve months have been relatively turbulent for Cloud founders. What does this mean for Cloud companies? What does this mean for Cloud companies?

Cloud 306

Cloud Payments Software Review Payment Solutions 306

SaaStr

OCTOBER 6, 2023

So how are the top SaaS and Cloud companies doing in 2023? Bessemer’s latest Cloud 100 answers the question. Their top 100 SaaS and Cloud companies — the “Cloud 100” — are almost all at $100m+ ARR, and growing on average 55% year-over-year. But They’re Much More Profitable.

Cloud 288

Cloud Forecasting Retention SaaS 288

SaaStr

JULY 18, 2022

Gartner: businesses will spend $100,000,000,000 more on software in 2023 than 2022. Yes, $100B more in 2023. in 2023, up from 9.6% That means $100 Billion more software spend in 2023 than 2022. Cloud spending is still expected to grow even faster in 2022 than 2021 , from 18.4% in 2022, to over $900 Billion.

Venture Capital 347

Venture Capital Software Cloud Forecasting 347

SaaStr

NOVEMBER 24, 2023

So the IPO market sort of, kind of, reopened a bit in 2023 — after being closed for 2 years for the most part. No on else really followed them in tech, and in the end, 2023 will still end with an IPO Whimper, low public multiples, and limited liquidity for Unicorns. But for purposes of IPOs, tech multiples, etc. We’ll see.

Cloud 351

Cloud SaaS Enterprise Branding 351

SaaStr

JUNE 12, 2023

We’re SUPER excited to announced that Expensify has returned as a second-time SaaStr Annual sponsor for 2023 Annual on September 6-8, this time as a Unicorn Sponsor! We’ll see you, Expensify, and 12,000+ of the Best in SaaS and Cloud at 2023 SaaStr Annual in the SF Bay Area, Sep 6-8!! It’s free to get going!

Payment Solutions 321

Payment Solutions Payment Features Travel Cloud 321

SaaStr

JANUARY 12, 2024

” — mostly from folks who had a tougher 2023. 2023 wasn’t hard for everyone: First, it was mainly hard for folks that sold into “tech”, broadly speaking : Monday sells mainly outside of tech — it crushed 2023. Not So Bad, Actually So 2023 wasn’t all bad. Now let’s be clear.

Sales Hiring 317

Sales Hiring Cloud Startup Pricing 317

SaaStr

AUGUST 18, 2024

Many, many folks in SaaS and Cloud are still growing like a weed. And because SaaS and Cloud overall is still growing a stunning +20% a year, that means tons of jobs are still being created. I love this summary from Adam Schoenfeld at Keyplay enriching the Cloud 100 list: Net net, hiring is way up in the Cloud 100.

Cloud 324

Cloud Scale Startup SaaS 324