As we cross into the last quarter of 2019, it’s a great time to take stock of the startups looking set to make waves throughout the end of this year and well into the next. We’ve pulled together a rundown of twenty exciting and ambitious young ones, all of whom are bringing fresh and exceptionally well-engineered solutions to the SaaS space. They are all newborns learning to walk and talk, metaphorically speaking.
In curating this list of the industry’s bright hopes, some clear themes emerged, and we can safely expect these trends to remain at the forefront of the industry well into 2020. Unsurprisingly, a strong focus on data reigns supreme. The ability to efficiently collect and then correctly leverage this lifeblood of modern business has the capacity to make or break an enterprise. It’s great to see so many creative SaaS solutions on offer to help steer businesses to success. AI comes into play too of course; accelerating our abilities across all aspects of strategy.
There’s also a general trend towards simplification of the process – either via automation or by combining functionality within one multi-tasking product. With many teams already struggling under the load of multiple platforms and applications, this is definitely something to be welcomed! Here’s to a data-driven, sleekly automated, highly functional future.
Machine Labs
Customer retention and repeat ordering increasingly represent the holy grail of profitability. This means that savvy database marketing is essential, and smart segmentation is becoming ever more effective. Machine Labs offer a beautifully designed, AI-powered product that has the capacity to supercharge your eCommerce marketing. Having undergone their first round of seed funding in June of this year (and securing investment from the likes of Scottish Enterprise and Techstart Ventures, we’ll be watching Machine Labs with great interest in 2020.
Whyse
Knowledge is power, and the insight of an engaged, expert community is especially potent. A world where information is easily and freely shared sounds ideal, but without structure, the result is often chaotic. Valuable acumen lost in the noise, and the same ground being covered over and over again. Having undergone their first round of seed funding in April 2019, Whyse are here to provide a dedicated home for the knowledge of your community. A structured and well-organized platform enables members to access a common pool of information benefiting from feedback and transforming insights into actionable assets. A sleek integration with the ubiquitous Slack means that Whyse is ready to become your workplace’s new “source of truth” in 2020.
Chatvisor
It’s no great secret: improved customer experience is topping the list of New Year’s Resolutions for most businesses in 2020. Consumer expectations are shifting, in the world of SaaS and beyond. Today’s modern customer expects a much more personal and tailored experience from the brands that they choose to interact with. Chatvisor, founded in early 2018 and seed funded in June of this year, provides a holistic customer engagement and support platform, powered by next-level web analytics and co-browsing. Their USP: three solutions under one roof. In addition to omnichannel customer service and in depth experience analytics, their Messenger Marketing chatbot builder offers the chance to leverage conversational commerce via your business’s Facebook channels.
Expense Cube
Spending money is fun. Claiming it back, less so. The irony of keeping track of faded paper receipts, or manually scribbling down your mileage, within the context of a high tech SaaS career is not lost on most of us. Born on the first day of 2019, ExpenseCube offer a new dawn for those seeking to simplify their expenses. A real boon for those working within the contractor space, their product offers four-fold functionality. Accurately scan and track receipts on the go. Keep count of mileage to easily claim back against tax. Track time spent across multiple projects and clients. Finally, manage your expenses in complete compliance with HRMC. This cloud-based solution looks set to help a lot of busy businesses save time and money in the year to come.
Salespath
Salesforce has grown into a true behemoth of the CRM scene. As their offering and product range has expanded, businesses are increasingly fine-tuning their use of the platform through smart integrations. SalesPath offers one such integration, enabling powerful additional lead capture. By connecting Salesforce with LinkedIn, they promise the ability to build connections, rather than lists. Their sidebar enables you to cross-reference, edit and add new records to Salesforce without leaving the page you’re on. By leveraging the best of both platforms, SalesPath has the capacity to be a huge time saver for those looking to build and manage high-quality leads.
Relefant
Another solution to the swirling chaos of internal wikis everywhere, Relefant comes charging to the rescue of organizations struggling under the weight of mismanaged internal knowhow and company information. Promising to bring increased productivity and efficiency through better-structured and easily navigable shared knowledge, Relevant also calculates that they can save businesses serious money. According to a study conducted by McKinsey & Company, knowledge-workers waste up to 30% of their workday looking for internal information. For a company with 2000 employees on an average $25 per hour salary, that amounts to €22m wasted a year. Time to address the Relefant in the room?
Neurolytics
In a frankly staggering fusion of human science and cutting edge technology, Neurolytics represents the exact kind of SaaS wizardry we’ve been hoping 2020 would bring. Hiring is one of the greatest challenges facing modern businesses, and as our employment culture shifts towards ever more established remote models, video interviews are increasingly ubiquitous. Neurolytics uses the latest techniques from neuroscience and psychology to help you reach hiring decisions based on actual data, as opposed to gut instinct. This magic is achieved by measuring psychophysiological biometrics and then leveraging AI to give recommendations based on various predictors of performance, engagement and cultural fit. Dialing into calls wearing a smart shirt and pajama bottoms suddenly feels like a risky business…
Ninjodo
Repping APAC, Ninjodo offer a simple yet powerful CRM for small & medium business owners who are feeling overwhelmed and disorganized. They help by streamlining a whole host of frustrating tasks within one sleek tool. Combining day-to-day emailing and customer management tasks, with your sales and workflow management, nothing slips through the cracks. Reminders, customer profiling, and emailing can all be automated. With all sales, contacts, emails, forms, and payments synchronizing effortlessly, you’re free to focus on broader business goals. A whole host of helpful integrations (Xero, Mailchimp, Gmail, Woo Commerce to name a few) also help to get all of your apps singing from the same hymn sheet.
Outmind
The number of times in a day that we all fall prey to the digital equivalent of not being able to find your glasses (which are on your head) is staggering – and a huge time suck. Outmind are here to fix the issue once and for all, by providing one intuitive search for all your tools. Instead of wading through multiple platforms to locate a specific document or email, integrate all your data points via ready-to-use connectors and be instantly served up the most relevant results. Dodgy typing? Not an issue; Outmind’s judgment-free machine learning algorithms will get to know all of your misspelling quirks. It’s not just files that Outmind can help you locate; stop wasting time trying to find the owner of files you need access to, with instant and automated results revealing the top three people to ask right away.
FunnelFox
Automation is the name of the game for sales in 2020, as teams are freed from repetitive grunt work and empowered to channel their skills towards getting real results, human to human. Offering a headless CRM for sales, customer success, and support, FunnelFox works server-side to help streamline, organise and generally reduce stress. All updates are captured automatically, meaning reps can focus on prioritizing and closing deals. Additionally, FunnelFox Data Capture enables you to integrate your sales stack, meaning dreaded data silos are neatly sidestepped.
Customer Labs
The self-styled “digital marketer’s wingman,” Customer Labs promises the ability to track without the need to code. Revolutionary, intuitive UI enables your marketing team to keep tabs on form submissions, purchases, conversions, products viewed, adds to cart, product details – all without the need for any dev knowledge. For those looking to gain a better, deeper understanding of their customer base (without having to deal with Google Tag Manager) Customer Labs offers a powerful, and simple to use, option right out of the box. As marketing direction becomes ever more data-driven, this looks to be a very appealing solution for folk looking for a little help in setting their course.
ScopeMaster
Founded in 2018, ScopeMaster obtained seed funding in November of the same year and promises to provide something of a crystal ball for software project leaders. A specialized text analyzer, it runs an analysis of user stories, parsing, interpreting, testing, cross-referencing and sizing, before reporting back on their quality. In doing so, it identifies potential ambiguities, duplicates, omissions, inconsistencies and complexities and promises to help you fix, typically 30 – 60% of all requirements issues and approximately 10% of all project defects. Leveraging NPL to overcomes the vast range of possible expressions of requirements, Scopemaster reduces rework, shortens schedules and lowers the cost of most software projects. In a fast-paced industry, this represents a fantastically helpful tool for reducing time to market.
Strategy Tools
A plan: we all need one. Increasingly though, collaboration on clear strategy can feel chaotic and clunky. For those looking to move beyond spreadsheets and meetings that seem to go on forever without achieving anything to show for the time spent, Strategy Tools offers a powerful strategy ecosystem, combining tools, simulations, software and a community hub. Optimized for distributed teams, project boards are collaborative, enabling anyone to work on them at any time, anywhere – and for everyone to be kept in the picture in real-time. Currently open for free Beta sign up, this Norweigan startup really do seem to have all angles covered with their comprehensive approach to nailing efficient and effective modern strategizing.
GraphAPI
We all know the value of a well-balanced stack, but with so many options competing for attention in today’s tech space, a little guidance can be invaluable. Luckily, for those wishing to implement an effective strategy, Graph-API, “the API First Platform” are on hand to help. They build scalable stacks for help creators, innovators, and change-makers keen to transition to a sustainable digital future. Offering assistance via partnership for those looking to implement results-driven API strategy, they’re ready to help turn your business into a platform.
Swordfish
In the age of automated mailshots and indifferent blanket messaging, a personal reach out can work wonders. However few of us have the time to trawl for personal contact information online. Swordfish, founded this year, helps you sidestep the secretaries and switchboards, serving up direct phone numbers, email addresses, and social profiles instantly. Running as a Chrome extension, they integrate with LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Github, and many other platforms and search engines. The ability to sync with Salesforce ensures your enterprise team’s CRM remains perfectly synced, with no duplicates.
Worldwatch
Another freshly minted 2019 startup, WorldWatch is an AI-powered market intelligence platform that promises to give users a 360-degree view of their world as never experienced before. Data is pulled from a number of sources (with the opportunity to curate your own watch list) and users can put together their own personalized preconfigured signals, such as mergers, acquisitions, product launches, and tenders, to get real-time insight into customers, competitors or markets. Data is only as powerful as your ability to interpret it, and WorldWatch appears to be a seriously interesting option for those looking to get a solid handle on theirs in 2020 and beyond.
DataMammoth
DataMammoth is a B2B sales intelligence platform that already counts Google, Apple, FedEx, PayPal and AirBnB amongst its happy customers. The promise; better leads, faster. Their database of more than 20 million contacts is refreshed in real-time, ensuring the data you’re served up is always reliable and current. Advanced search parameters can be used in any combination, and location-sensitive search functionality gives you the chance to laser target your hunt. With an unlimited amount of saved searches available, you’re also able to pick up right where you left off.
Phyron
The positive impact of video on conversion is proven beyond doubt. Its presence on product pages boosts not only traffic (Cisco predicts that by the end of 2019, 80% of consumer traffic will be driven by video) but also increases dwell time by an average of 2.6 x. The issue has always been the high investment (both financial and in terms of time commitments) required to keep content relevant. Phyron are here to change that, with a dynamic, affordable video solution. Their product creates automated product videos for all your inventory in real-time, and keeps them updated. The service includes hosting and streaming, as well as a dashboard to keep track of all statistics.
Folk.app
Keeping their cards pretty close to their chest at the moment, Folk are a new player in the contact management game. Designed for teams and individuals, sign up is now open for early access. If you want to find out more, head over to their site to request access.
Dataform
Headquartered in London, UK, Dataform were founded in 2018 and completed a successful first seed round in July of this year. They offer the chance to detangle your data, building SQL workflows that transform raw info into trustworthy datasets ready for analysis, directly from your BigQuery, Redshift or Snowflake warehouse. In today’s increasingly data-driven world, being in control of a solid warehouse is of paramount importance, and Dataform really do appear to have thought of everything when it comes to efficient and powerful management.
Exciting, isn’t it? If you too are a SaaS startup, wanting to fast track your way to 2020 and growth you should consider joining the SaaStock Startup Programme, tailored for B2B SaaS startups. It will give you access to an uncanny amount of knowledge, mentorship, exposure, and guidance. Here is what a few startups got out of last year’s program. Be sure to apply for the SaaStock19 Startup Program one by September 20th.
