Finding the right investors and understanding what they want to see from founders and businesses is a struggle all too familiar for SaaS leaders. 

SaaStock’s events, media, and growing SaaS community break down the barriers between founders and investors to facilitate new opportunities and make forging those relationships easier. We connect founders and investors through dedicated networking and share insights from global investors with our community. 

All of this gives SaaS founders and executives a peek behind the curtain that uncovers:

• What investors are seeing in the market,
• How they identify investment opportunities,
• And how startups can stand out when they seek funding. 

With SaaStock USA fast approaching, we searched the archives for key investor insights from our events last year and look forward to what you can expect from this year’s conference.

1. You need to unlock growth before you can scale

Speaking at SaaStock USA, Tae Hea Nahm, Co-Founder and Managing Director at Storm Ventures, described how companies can unlock high growth by finding what he calls “go-to-market (GTM) fit”.

In practice, a company with GTM fit has:

1. Found urgency amongst it’s ICP,
2. Nailed their go-to-market fit model,
3. And built a repeatable go-to-market playbook to find and win customers over and over again.

It involves finding your champions and making them the hero of your GTM strategy. One thing to remember is that your champion might not be the decision maker but they will be the one to drive sales and usage going forward.

Watch the full session below:

2. Founder misconceptions about the funding process

Investors are approached by hundreds of companies. One way to make sure you reach the top of the list is to avoid common mistakes made by other founders. 

During a panel session on what matters to investors, Tae Hea Nahm (Co-Founder and Managing Director at Storm Ventures), Cathy Gao (Partner at Sapphire Ventures), and Miguel Fernandez Larrea (Co-Founder and CEO at Capchase) shared common misconceptions that founders have about the funding process and how to avoid them.

Misconception #1: You should fundraise when cash is running low

Capchase CEO Miguel Fernandez Larrea believes that startups should “always be fundraising”. Whether for equity funding, revenue based financing, or other forms of capital. 

Instead though, many founders wait until they’re nearing the end of their runway before starting the process. He explained why this is detrimental and advised that founders look to raise six months before they run out of cash. 

Leaving it beyond that point can impact your valuation, or result in a structured round, with more conditions in the agreement. For debt financing, it’s unlikely you’ll succeed at all because the risk is too high. Or as Miguel says, “it’s equity-like risk for debt-like returns”. 

Misconception #2: Raising huge amounts of money proves your business’ worth 

Sapphire’s Cathy Gao shared that many founders over-index the amount of capital they need to raise per round. She explained that while large sums and round figures look great on a press release, they are a measure of your fundraising capabilities, not how successful your business is.  

Instead, she encourages founders to take a step back and think about what is required for your business to reach its milestones. That means, focusing on what you need to prove out your business model, and go-to-market strategy – rather than the nominal valuation or total amount raised. 

Misconception #3: Assuming everyone in a VC firm thinks the same way

Finding the right investment at the right stage is crucial. Storm Ventures Co-Founder Tae Hea Nahm discussed how founders approach this by looking for the right firm. 

While important, he explained that this approach assumes that everyone within a firm thinks the same way in terms of priorities and metrics. 

This is a mistake that can trip founders up. Comparing himself to his Co-Founder – Tae Hea says that while both have over 20 years experience in early stage B2B software investment, how they approach it is actually very different. 

He recommends that founders look beyond the firm to the individuals within it. Instead of asking whether a firm is right, ask whether an individual investor is philosophically the right fit.

Watch the full panel here. 

3. Tell a story beyond the numbers

How founders can tell a story beyond the numbers is a common theme across investor sessions at our events. This is particularly important for Pre-Seed through Series B where there’s likely to be less historic data to work from. 

Speaking at SaaStock Dublin, investors from Notion VC, Bessemer Venture Partners, PointNine Ventures, and Dawn Capital shed some light on how to do this successfully. 

Firstly, make sure the data points you share add value to your narrative. Anant Vidur Puri, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, provided an example whereby an SMB software company said that it had only lost 1% of customers to date. While true, the company had been running for 18 months, had 3x growth over the last 12 months, and only sold up front annual plans – and so, in reality, less than 20% of customers had actually had a chance to churn. 

Beyond the numbers, investors will be looking for a deep understanding of your ICP and how you can sell to them. This could initially be a smaller, more targeted segment but you’ll be expected to know how you can grow that audience. This might be growing vertically, going deeper into your niche or horizontally and expanding across borders.

Watch the full panel.

Investor insights at SaaStock USA 2024

We’re bringing more investor insights to Austin in May with a jam packed content agenda, workshops, networking opportunities, and social events. 

Hear from investors:

• How to execute a successful pivot to grow: Creating a new product category – Mary D’onofrio, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners and Ev Konstevoy, CEO, Teleport.
• From $0 to a $3B valuation: Unconventional secrets behind Remote’s growth –  Christine Esserman, Partner, Accel and Marcelo Lebre, Co-Founder, CEO and President, Remote.
• How to scale your technical SaaS startup beyond $50M ARR – Casber Wang, Partner, Sapphire Ventures and Kyle Hanslovan, Co-Founder and CEO, Huntress.
• Lessons from over $50B in exits: What makes a business worth more? – Thomas Smale, CEO, FE International.
• Building successful products in the AI era – SC Moatti, Managing Partner, Might Capital.
• A comedy of ARRs: How to approach fundraising in the profitability over growth era – Brandon Gleklen, Principal, Battery Ventures.

Check out the full agenda

Network with investors:

From our dedicated networking area and the ability to book meetings ahead of time through our app to workshops, roundtables, and social events – SaaStock is full of opportunities for Pre-Seed to Series C founders to connect with investors. 

We also offer founder and investor matchmaking and the chance for early stage startups to take part in in the global pitch competition, available through our Startup Program. 

Join us in Austin, May 13-15

Join us and 1500+ SaaS founders, operators, and investors in Austin for all of this and more. 

Tickets are selling fast – get yours now. 

Read more about what’s on:

• Rising stars: Top startups at SaaStock USA
• Top 3 SaaS challenges in 2024: How SaaStock USA will help you overcome them

With just a few weeks until we touch down in Austin for SaaStock USA, we’re gearing up to welcome some of the industry’s most exciting early stage startups.

From sales enablement, to organic growth, and generative AI, our Startup Program brings together the companies set to change the face of SaaS. 

In this post, we’ll introduce you to some of the innovative startups participating in the program this year.

First up, what is the SaaStock Startup Program? 

The SaaStock Startup Program supports businesses on the journey to $10m ARR by facilitating connections with investors, giving exposure to SaaS leaders, and providing in-depth content sessions.

Participating startups benefit from a series of workshops at the pre-event Startup Day. The program then continues throughout the main conference, where enrolled startups showcase their product to global SaaS leaders in the Startup Zone on the expo floor. They are also invited to pitch in the Global Pitch Competition in front of leading VCs, generating much-needed brand awareness and increasing the odds of securing funding. Our investor matchmaking sessions guarantee meetings with top global VCs and Angels, further increasing chances of sourcing investment for your business.

75% of Startup Program floor space is already sold out for SaaStock USA – apply now to secure your spot.

Rising startups at SaaStock USA

Let’s find out who’s joining us in Austin. Below are nine of the startups with Rise packages this year, and why they’re tipped for success in 2024.

1. Establish

Establish exists to get early-stage founders capital and credibility. After receiving private backing itself, the team created a three pillar framework to increase the likelihood of startup success, including: product narrative, gaining traction, and securing investor meetings. 

Over the last 12 months, Establish has published its clients in 1,000 media outlets, generated 3,500+ investor meetings, and raised nearly $100M.

Founder: Michael Hummel

HQ: California, Kentucky

Employees: 11-50

2. MySalesCoach

MySalesCoach helps busy sales managers and aspiring, coachable reps reach their true potential with expert, 1:1, frequent coaching. 

After discovering that typically less than 5% of sales managers time is spent on coaching, Founders Keving Beales and Mark Ackers felt compelled to do something about it. 

With MySalesCoach managers can give their team access to personalised 1:1 and team coaching, and a platform that encourages accountability. Growing quickly, MySalesCoach customers include SDR’s, AE’s, Leaders, and CS teams at the likes of Deel, Klaviyo, Atlassian, and Cognism.

Founders: Keavin Beales, Mark Ackers

HQ: Newcastle, UK

Employees: 2-10

3. Peaka

Peaka is a ‘logical data warehouse’ or platform that allows teams to merge disparate data sources into a single data layer.

With the Peaka platform, teams can immediately pull in, join, and query data from relational and NoSQL databases, SaaS tools, and APIs— all without a data warehouse or extract, transform, and load (ETL) processes. Customers including Popupsmart, Actioner, and Hop are benefiting from holistic views of their data, improved data protection processes, and cost savings compared to alternative solutions. 

Founder: Mustafa Sakalsiz

HQ: Palo Alto, California 

Employees: 11-50

4. Ripcord.io

Ripcord is the first all-in-one sales demo enablement platform built to increase sales demo close rates and decrease the onboarding time of new sales hires. 

Ripcord fosters a culture of collaboration and constant learning by enabling on the job training, in real time. The Ripcord platform records and analyzes calls and online meetings, and shares the transcription and audio with the team in real time. Rather than shadowing or listening over shoulders, Ripcord streamlines processes allowing teams to reliably train new hires, all while providing tools that help generate more viable demos.

Founder: Frank Tommaso

HQ: Virginia Beach, Virginia

Employees: 11-50

5. Sendspark

Sendspark is an AI-powered video platform for sales and marketing teams to make personalized videos at scale. 

Employees at companies including Salesforce, HubSpot, Snowflake, and Qualtrics use the platform to create and send personalized videos to strengthen relationships with customers at every stage of the buyer journey.

Founders: Bethany Stachenfeld, Brandon Escalante

HQ: San Antonio, Texas

Employees: 11-50

6. Stratabeat

Stratabeat is an organic growth agency for B2B SaaS and technology companies. It provides advanced SEO, content strategy, content development, web design, and conversion optimization services.

The team’s approach integrates extreme creativity with data, neuroscience, and behavioral intelligence to help clients increase traffic, generate leads, and capture more revenue. Stratabeat’s impressive client set includes Freshworks, Appfolio, and Affectiva. 

Founder: Tom Shapiro

HQ: Burlington Massachusetts

Employees: 11-50

7. Subscript

Subscript is the modern, flexible, and affordable way to invoice customers and track B2B SaaS metrics.

In 2022, Subscript raised $3.75M seed funding towards its mission to make subscription metrics easy. To do this, the platform aggregates data from existing sources, including billing, accounting, and CRM software, to create a single source of revenue truth. With less time spent manually reconciling data, SaaS leaders have the numbers and time they need to make data-driven business decisions more easily.  

Founder: Sidharth Kakkar, 

HQ: San Francisco, California

Employees: 11-50

8. Vectara

Vectara is an end-to-end platform for product builders to embed powerful generative AI features into their applications with extraordinary results.

Vectara’s simple API makes powerful AI use cases accessible for companies with little to no AI experience. With it, teams can quickly, safely, and affordably integrate best-in-class conversational AI, question/answering, and semantic search into their applications. 

Founders: Dr. AMR Awadallah, Amin Ahman, Dr. Tallat Shafaat

HQ: Palo Alto, California 

Employees: 11-50

9. xFusion

xFusion helps startups scale by providing customer and back-office support as a service.

Not your average out-sourced customer support, xFusion provides a fully managed service to help CEOs win back their time, expand top-line revenue, reduce churn and boost customer lifetime value (LTV).

Founders: Jim Coleman, David Tran

HQ: Denver, Colorado

Employees: 51-200

Apply now to join the Startup Program at SaaStock USA

SaaStock USA brings together 1500+ SaaS founders, investors and operators – your peers, customers and prospects. 

SaaStock is all about facilitating human connections and our Startup Program is dedicated to setting growing businesses up for success. 

It’s an opportunity to meet SaaS pioneers, learn from the best, network with potential customers, meet with potential investors – and ultimately have a great time. You’ll leave, empowered with the knowledge you need to drive your business forward.

75% of the floor plan for this year’s Startup Program is already sold out – apply now to secure your place. 

Interested in attending? Get your tickets here!

In this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show our host Alex Theuma is joined live from the #SaaStock2023 Podcast Stage by April Dunford, co-founder & CEO at Ambient Strategy, who shares how to craft a story to stand out and win.

 

“Part of it is opening up the eyes of the customer, looking at the problem in maybe a different perspective or maybe a different way – introducing some concepts that maybe they never thought about. So most sales pithces do not have a section of that pitch that specifically covers discovery. So if you look at when marketing builds a sales pitch, they literally will have this pitch, and if you look at it, you’d be like “well, where does the discovery happen?” and marketing is like “I don’t know, that’s some weird sales thing, maybe they do that before”. And that’s a crazy way to think about discovery – discovery should be something that’s woven into the actual narrative of the pitch itself.”

 

April shares:

• Why defining your positioning is key to a good sales pitch (and how to do that!)
• How to contextualise differentiated value to your customers 
• How to use the low-hanging fruit of a sales pitch to your advantage
• Why the discovery phase needs to be baked into the setup and structure of the pitch
• The best process for testing a new sales pitch (and why it’s not with existing customers or A/B testing on homepages)
• How to get marketing and sales to build effective pitches together

and more!

 

Listen to the full episode, watch the video below and subscribe to the SaaS Revolution Show podcast today.

Watch now, or listen to the audio-only version below:


 

Listen to the audio now:

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If you want similar tips and are looking to achieve success all year round, check out the SaaStock Founder Membership:

A private community of ambitious SaaS founders scaling to $10MM ARR. Get a support network of peers, connect with likeminded founders around the globe, and learn proven strategies from industry experts. Apply now to scale up your SaaS.

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And if you can’t wait another week for our next podcast, listen to our previous two here:

In this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show our host Alex Theuma is joined by Thibaut De Lataillade, Global Vice President of Product at Gartner Digital Markets, who shares what software buyer regret is and how to avoid it.

 

“Work on the right things and great results will follow. It sounds very simple, but it means a lot. I mean, it means every day focusing on what matters and being able to say no to low leverage activities.“

 

Thibaut shares:

• The pros and cons of having four brands under the Gartner Digital Markets umbrella
• Why 60% of software buyers experience regret (and how no industry is exempt from that!)
• How a misalignment between sales and implementation can lead to over-promising and under-delivering
• Why validated, credible user reviews are crucial
• Understanding the regret warning signs
• Why he recommends The Culture Map by Erin Meyer

and more!

 

Listen to the full episode, watch the video below and subscribe to the SaaS Revolution Show podcast today.

Watch now, or listen to the audio-only version below:


 

Listen to the audio now:

 

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If you want similar tips and are looking to achieve success all year round, check out the SaaStock Founder Membership:

A private community of ambitious SaaS founders scaling to $10MM ARR. Get a support network of peers, connect with likeminded founders around the globe, and learn proven strategies from industry experts. Apply now to scale up your SaaS.

---

 

Want to join the pioneers at the forefront of The SaaS revolution? Subscribe to our newsletter today to get exclusive content, receive actionable value-based insights and create your Rocketship SaaS.

Plus – follow us on social! Check out our profiles on , X, , , Instagram, and TikTok.

And if you can’t wait another week for our next podcast, listen to our previous two here:

In this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show our host Alex Theuma is joined by Itamar Novick, Founder & General Partner at Recursive Ventures, who his insights and advice on how to raise your first round.

 

“I think that your odds of success building a startup are much higher if at least one person on the founding team has some orientation to do sales, right? If everybody’s technical and everybody’s introverted, who’s going to talk with customers? Who’s going to succeed in doing that?”

 

Itamar shares:

• Why he doesn’t want to make Recursive Ventures a multi-partner fund
• His decision to intentionally not take board seats
• Demystifying pre-seed investment rounds
• His advice on not raising money from VCs unless a founder *wants* to build a VC backable company – that means showing a path to $500k – $1B in revenue for seven to ten years from now
• Why fundraising is a sales effort – as well as high quality collateral, founders need to be able pitch very well and very quickly
• Why he encourages entrepreneurs to consistently build relationships with people in the startup and VC ecosystem

and more!

 

Listen to the full episode, watch the video below and subscribe to the SaaS Revolution Show podcast today.

Watch now, or listen to the audio-only version below:


 

Listen to the audio now:

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If you want similar tips and are looking to achieve success all year round, check out the SaaStock Founder Membership:

A private community of ambitious SaaS founders scaling to $10MM ARR. Get a support network of peers, connect with likeminded founders around the globe, and learn proven strategies from industry experts. Apply now to scale up your SaaS.

---

Want to join the pioneers at the forefront of The SaaS revolution? Subscribe to our newsletter today to get exclusive content, receive actionable value-based insights and create your Rocketship SaaS.

Plus – follow us on social! Check out our profiles on , X, , , Instagram, and TikTok.

And if you can’t wait another week for our next podcast, listen to our previous two here:

In this episode of the SaaS Revolution Show our host Alex Theuma is joined live from the #SaaStock2023 by Lucie Buisson, Chief Product Officer at Contentsquare, who shares her lessons in product.

 

“My job is not to create the product anymore – my job is to create the team that is going to create the product. So you need to be ready to be less focussed on the product and more focussed on building the teams that build the product.”

 

Lucie shares:

• Why generating traction, retaining customers, and having validation from the market is crucial before creating a second product
• The importance of journey mapping; particularly when expanding geographies
• Why being CPO means being less focused on the product and more focused on building the team
• Contentsquare’s journey from $30M ARR to $100M ARR
• The value of starting small
• The importance of an alpha, a beta and a progressive deployment phase when building a second product
• How product and marketing can (and should) work effectively together

and more!

 

Listen to the full episode, watch the video below and subscribe to the SaaS Revolution Show podcast today.

Watch now, or listen to the audio-only version below:


 

Listen to the audio now:

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If you want similar tips and are looking to achieve success all year round, check out the SaaStock Founder Membership:

A private community of ambitious SaaS founders scaling to $10MM ARR. Get a support network of peers, connect with likeminded founders around the globe, and learn proven strategies from industry experts. Apply now to scale up your SaaS.

---

Want to join the pioneers at the forefront of The SaaS revolution? Subscribe to our newsletter today to get exclusive content, receive actionable value-based insights and create your Rocketship SaaS.

Plus – follow us on social! Check out our profiles on , X, , , Instagram, and TikTok.

And if you can’t wait another week for our next podcast, listen to our previous two here:

By Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel

 

Last year, the global cloud ecosystem experienced a deep reset. As I took to the SaaStock stage in Dublin last year with my colleague Richard, the figures (see Accel 2022 Euroscape) were pretty grim: $1.6T of public market cap had been lost on the global Euroscape Index and private cloud funding was down more than 40%. The question the software world was asking at the time was: “how far can everything keep falling?”

 

The good news today is that the bounceback is underway. In fact, according to our 2023 Euroscape report, a recovery is happening far faster than post-2000. Back then, it took the NASDAQ Index 14 years to return to 80% of its peak. Today, it’s taken just 18 months to reach the same milestone and this is due to a combination of solid balance sheets, the exponential growth of AI and the resilience of the US, European and Israeli cloud ecosystems.

Looking at the data more closely, what is the path to recovery looking like for software founders?

The market’s recovery has been fuelled by GenAI.

What is clear from the figures is that a new normal has emerged and everything has reverted back to the levels we saw in 2019. Global Euroscape multiples are reverting to the 10 year pre-covid average (6.1x NTM revenue) and, if we look at the venture financing market, $31B has been invested in private cloud companies across Europe, Israel and the US in 2023 YTD. This is not far from 2019’s $27B invested over the same timeframe. Similarly, new cloud / SaaS unicorn creation is tracing pre-covid levels, with 11 created in H1 2023 vs H1 2019’s 12. However, don’t be fooled. While the figures are reminiscent of those seen in 2019, the driving force for innovation and recovery has been GenAI.

 

 

Almost two thirds (60%) of the new cloud / SaaS unicorns created over the past 12 months are GenAI native, including Synthesia, AI21 Labs and Stability AI. In addition, there have been more than 20 investment rounds of over $100M each in GenAI companies across Europe and Israel and almost 40 GenAI rounds over $100M in the US. GenAI’s impact has also been seen on the public markets, fuelling Nvidia’s climb to the $1T club.

Europe and Israel maintain cloud strength, but there’s everything to play for with GenAI.

Europe and Israel maintain their relative strength against the US ecosystem, with total European and Israeli VC funding in SaaS / Cloud in 2023 YTD standing at more than half (53%) of that in the US. This sees the region continue its climb from securing 36% of US cloud / SaaS VC financing in 2019 and 46% in 2020. However, the US is leagues ahead when it comes to GenAI funding. The $14.1B invested in the US’ seven largest GenAI deals towers over Europe and Israel’s $0.9B, with most of the US investments so far going into foundational models where the US has had an advantage. The largest rounds have been seen in companies such as OpenAI, Inflection and Anthropic.

That being said, GenAI is a secular trend and we’re still at the very early innings. Europe’s deep GenAI talent pool continues to shine through, with Stable Diffusion springing out of LMU and promising startups such as Mistral and Synthesia being created across the region. As we see investment moving from large models to more specialised models focusing on specific industries, such as construction, pharma and legal, we expect to see Europe and Israel catch-up with the US in the funding stakes. In addition, European talent has produced 50% more AI journal publications than the US, with a similar citation rate.

The impact of GenAI should not be underestimated.

 

 

Over the last 12 months’ return to reality, GenAI has been the trend to watch. It’s transforming the software paradigm and unleashing previously unimaginable opportunities. We’re seeing a dramatic impact across three key areas:

Enterprise automation: this is proving the best path to deliver on the promise of AI. GenAI is pushing the boundaries of automation, enabling enterprises to automate incredibly complex processes. For example, companies such as UiPath, which has been using AI to deliver enterprise automation at scale, are now incorporating GenAI into their platforms to deliver even greater impact to their customers.

Media creation: GenAI is drastically reducing both the cost and time taken to create digital media, as well as creating new use cases. Take, for example, Synthesia. The company’s platform can reduce video production time by 95%, making it a cost effective solution, but it also improves engagement by replacing text with avatars and enabling instant video creation for communication and learning. There’s also Assembly.ai, which enables companies to build AI applications with voice data and turns voice calls into text to categorise calls, analyse sentiments or redact confidential information.

Cybersecurity: Cybersecurity continues to be a key trend, with the five fastest growing Euroscape companies dominated by cybersecurity: SentinelOne,CrowdStrike, Zscaler. With cloud exploitation growing by 95% in 2022 (CrowdStrike’s Global Threat Report) and key challenges securing human and machine identities as well as the software supply chain, this looks set to continue. Now, GenAI is being incorporated into cybersecurity solutions to improve their capabilities. Snyk, the leading developer security company, uses GenAI to analyse vulnerabilities in code and suggest fixes. Cyera, an early leader in cloud data security, uses AI to precisely identify the contents of cloud data stores and earmark sensitive data.

As our data shows, Europe and Israel are well positioned to take advantage of the rise of AI with multiple research and talent hubs across the region. We’re excited by what the next decade will bring to the cloud ecosystem.

 

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Philippe Botteri is a Partner at Accel. He has worked in the venture industry for the last 16 years, with a particular focus on cloud computing and security investments. His VC career started back in 2006 in Silicon Valley and, over the next five years, he witnessed the cloud and SaaS ecosystem gain momentum and many foundational SaaS companies emerge. Moving back to Europe in 2011 when he joined Accel, Philippe spotted the green shoots of Europe’s first cloud companies emerge and, by 2016, was publishing his annual Euroscape report, which maps out the top 100 European and Israeli cloud and SaaS companies.

Philippe’s portfolio over the last decade represents some of the most recognisable cloud companies globally. Prior to Accel, Philippe was with Bessemer, based in Menlo Park, where he helped build the firm’s cloud practice, working on investments including Cornerstone OnDemand (NASDAQ: CSOD), Eloqua (NASDAQ: ELOQ) and Criteo (NASDAQ: CRTO). He started his career with McKinsey&Co. Philippe is from Paris and graduated from Ecole Polytechnique, where he is a member of the Entrepreneurship Advisory Board, and Ecole des Mines.