What Does It Take to Raise Capital, in SaaS, in 2020?
How does the SaaS Funding Napkin look like in this crazy year?
If you were hoping that this post would contain the definitive answers to these questions, I’ll have to disappoint you and ask you for some patience. Sorry. It’s not like we have no idea at all — we’ve obviously seen a lot of financing rounds, inside and outside of our portfolio, and we’ve made a number of new SaaS investments ourselves. But we’re hoping that some of the nice people reading this post will help us improve the quality of our answers.
But let’s take a quick step back. About four years ago, we tried to come up with a back-of-a-napkin answer to the question of what it takes to raise capital in SaaS. The rest is SaaS history. OK, that’s a little pretentious, let’s say it’s napkin history. 😜 In any case, it’s become a tradition for us to ask that question and publish an updated version of the napkin once a year. ¹⁾
In the first two years, the napkin data was based on what we had seen in the market and anecdotal feedback from a few other investors. In 2018 and 2019 we sent out a Typeform to a much larger number of SaaS investors, so the dataset became much more solid over time.
In this (weird) year, we thought that it would be great to go beyond our network and try to get an even more comprehensive view of the market. So if you’ve raised financing for your SaaS startup in the last ~ 11 months, invested in a SaaS company, or have reliable data about your neighbor’s Series A, it would be awesome if you could answer a couple of questions:
Note: Typeform’s “conversations” mode is still in beta. If you experience any issues, please use this version.
Thanks in advance!
¹⁾ If you have an interest in napkinology (the study of the history of napkins), you can find the ancestors of the modern SaaS Funding Napkin here: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019. You might also want to check out one of its cousins, the AI-first SaaS Funding Napkin, or a more distant relative, the Marketplace Funding Napkin.
