Introduction
Along the years here at SaaStock, we’ve spoken to hundreds of upcoming trailblazers. Whether it’s their mission, values, or the product itself – some just make a different kind of mark.
We’ve given a platform to many of these SaaS startups, for greater reach into the wider SaaS network including exceptional players in the market such as Cledara, ProfitWell, Paddle – who have really taken their software up a notch and are making a real difference in the real world.
Today, we’ve taken a step forward and got in touch with a number of up-and-coming innovators within the European SaaS ecosystem. This is a carefully curated list: the 20 best SaaS startups within Europe in 2022.
These startups have shown exceptional growth and innovation in their product, marketing, and even company cultures. SaaS is really taking over the world, bit-by-bit, and we’re all for it!
So let’s get right into the top 20 list (in no particular order).
Amalia.io
Amalia.io is the leading EMEA new-generation solution for incentive and compensation management. Based on a no-code user interface, Amalia helps you model and compute any commission plan, no matter its complexity.
It has been designed for companies with more than 100+ sales representatives including: volume processing capacities, different payout frequency management, multi-language, multi-currency, payee record continuity, multiple sales hierarchies, quotas management, custom reports.
Amalia’s platform is used by 30+ companies from all sectors and team sizes across the world, including some of the top high-growth European start-ups. Unleash your team’s performance while aligning your Sales, Operations, Finance and HR teams with Amalia!
Circuit
Circuit is a bootstrapped SaaS company with $15M in ARR, and ~25 employees. They’ve been cashflow positive every year, and generated over $1m+ profit in 2021.
Circuit builds products that improve last mile delivery – starting first with a B2C app for delivery drivers, who pay out of their own money to finish work an hour earlier than usual. Circuit now have a B2B product too, Circuit for Teams, which takes this concept and sells it to entire fleets.
CreditLogic
CreditLogic is a next generation digital mortgage platform enabling banks double lending profitability. Designed and built for lenders by lenders, the platform enables banks instantly overhaul antiquated lending processes and transform customer experiences.
CreditLogic is both a validated and configurable SaaS product which can be deployed within weeks and is the proven and risk-free alternative to complex internal bank projects. CreditLogic powers data driven lending journeys with a full suite of consumer and lender tools. These include consumer and agent portals, multi-party workflows, automated case validation and credit scoring with access to an ecosystem of third party service providers.
CreditLogic is live in consumer channels of tier 1 banks. With strong customer references, CreditLogic is already delivering a 90% reduction in application processing times, positively driving customer satisfaction and reducing operational costs by 50%. The established leader in our launch market, Ireland, the business is targeting the large and growing global loan origination market with an addressable market of $32bn. Services are being extended to identified US and European territories over the next 12 months.
EqualTo
When managing sales commissions at our previous startups, we were using spreadsheets. It mostly worked when we were small, but it became a pain to manage as we grew bigger.
The products we saw on the market to manage sales commissions were all underwhelming. They had poor UX, were difficult to integrate with, and were too complex to maintain in-house. We didn’t want to be at the mercy of expensive consultants, so we reluctantly stuck with spreadsheets.
As it turns out, we were not alone. Many companies, even very large ones, still use spreadsheets or homegrown solutions for sales commissions.
From this insight came our vision for EqualTo: a platform that automates commissions while retaining the flexibility of spreadsheets, with powerful integration capabilities and an amazing user experience.
EqualTo is the product we wished we had at our first startup, now enabling other high-growth companies to drive value and motivation through commissions.
Fonoa
At Fonoa, we are transforming how digital-first companies stay tax compliant. We provide simple and modular API solutions that easily integrate into any existing workflow.
Our technology helps reduce manual processes, increase compliance and reduce the cost of operations when transacting and scaling internationally.
Through our tax automation software, we enable companies such as Uber, Zoom, Lime, Booking.com, GoStudent, and Teachable to expand their global offerings more quickly and stay tax compliant.
Frankie
When going through their own periods of anxiety and depression, Frankie’s founders experienced the outdated and ineffective employee mental health supports (EAPs) that companies have. After successfully building companies in other industries, James and Seb founded the first truly personalised and data-driven mental health platform for employees, and called it Frankie.
Frankie is a data-driven mental health guide that prevents burnout in modern teams. Frankie reduces stress, employee turnover, and sick days, while solving the blind spots of remote and hybrid working. Frankie delivers personalised exercises that develop mental fitness and secure video calls with coaches and therapists.
Frankie’s clients are ready to move past outdated employee mental health supports and move towards the future of employee mental health.
Frontu
Frontu is a mobile field service management platform that connects office employees with field representatives in real time. Using the native mobile app for Android, technicians can receive new jobs to their mobile device in real time, plan routes with navigation, collect payments and signatures from clients, capture and draw on images, and more. Through Frontu’s web portal, office employees can effectively assign tasks, monitor jobs, and control the entire process throughout.
Tools for field force task management enable office employees to assign jobs in real time and monitor their execution, including when the job was assigned, begun, performed, and completed. Frontu records and displays full work history on each assignment with detailed notes on completion or suspension. All raw data is collected into the system to provide users with visual statistical reports to help make fact-based decisions, and plan and forecast accurately. Time and location tracking features can detect exactly where workers are at all times, helping managers to efficiently assign or reassign tasks. All paper documents, such as job sheets, estimates, orders and invoices are digitized via Frontu, and can be easily shared with team members.
Frontu provides field force representatives with a native mobile app that alerts them when they receive a new task in real time via push notifications. Technicians are able to accept or reject jobs, which becomes immediately visible to their manager.
Graneet
In one of our cofounders’ family, there is a construction group, made up of 40 SMBs. He was interested in creating a startup in the space and did a consulting mission for them to help redesign all the processes around how to build quotes and how to invoice them properly.
Looking at what was already in place, we realized that all the companies were using Excel to manage their business, while all of the financial and administrative aspects of the construction industry are complex and super specific. We then helped them out to manage a tender offer to buy a financial management solution to implement the same processes in all of the companies and get out of Excel.
We were very disappointed with what we found was available on the market: legacy softwares with very poor UX, mostly OnPrem, very expensive, and indirect go-to-market through resellers. There was a clear opportunity to build a better solution for construction SMEs.
We started out by speaking with 60+ CEOs of Construction SMBs, built mockups and then demoed them to prospects via Zoom, pretending that there actually was a working solution. This got us our 3 first clients to sign.
HappyPal
HappyPal was co-founded by Alyssa Emmungil (COO), ex-head of development, and Rim Zerhouni (CEO), ex-strategy consultant and & ex-elected Works Council member of her firm. Their observation: the budgets deployed for employee benefits do not create the expected impact due to a lack of modern and adapted solutions.
They decided to drastically simplify the management of benefits and reinvent the experience in companies of all sizes. In 2020, HappyPal was launched.
HappyPal is the solution that reinvented the experience of benefits and finally makes it accessible to everyone. It allows companies to set up a 100% digital and personalized benefits program, in record time and with a minimum of administrative management!
Hublo
We started as a replacement management solution for healthcare institutions back in 2017. Realized the need for of new HR management in hospitals in the following years and above all during the covid pandemic when we led the #Renforts-covid initiative. And we’re now on a journey to make healthcare institutions great places to work.
Ledgy
Ledgy was founded by Yoko Spirig, Ben Brandt and Timo Horstschaefer, who were studying physics together at ETH Zurich. Yoko, Ben and Timo believed entrepreneurs would be vital to solving the world’s most pressing challenges.
They identified a key challenge that founders can’t build enduring businesses if they can’t empower and align teams and investors behind their mission. That’s why Yoko, Ben and Timo decided to build the global solution to manage company ownership.
Right now, equity and share ownership is fragmented and opaque. This means founders find it hard to motivate and engage employees using equity, and too many companies fail to open up equity to employees at all. Ledgy was built to change this.
Every country handles equity differently, which creates big problems for companies scaling internationally. Ledgy is the most powerful and flexible platform for companies running equity plans in multiple countries. In addition, Ledgy provides the simplest and most intuitive experience for employees accessing insights on their shares and share options.
Ledgy raised a seed round in 2018 and closed its $10m Series A round in autumn 2021, led by Sequoia Capital – Sequoia’s first ever investment in a Swiss company. Today, around 2,500 companies manage ownership with Ledgy, including some of Europe’s fastest growing ‘unicorn’ scaleups. More than 20,000 employees in total have access to insights on equity through Ledgy’s dashboards.
Pigment
Most Finance and RevOps teams still work with spreadsheets to run one of the most strategic processes for their organization: Financial and Sales planning.
Romain Niccoli, former Co-founder and CTO of Criteo, and Eléonore Crespo, former Analyst at Google and Index Ventures Investor, founded Pigment when coming down to one fact: spreadsheets were never meant to do strategic planning. That’s how they decided to build the most powerful and flexible business planning tool, enabling people and organizations to make better decisions.
Plan A
The Plan A co-founders Lubomila Jordanova and Nathan Bonnisseau independently dedicated themselves to the fight against climate change very early on and got involved in various initiatives. This was at a time when this topic still played a subordinate role in public discussion.
When they met in 2017, they shared a desire to combine their talents – Nathan comes from communications, Lubomila from finance. They founded Plan A on the belief that every company has the power to pave the way to a more sustainable future. That is why Plan A sees private companies as the most important vehicle when it comes to driving the transformation process decisively and sustainably.
Plan A wants to support them on their journey and provide them with a data-driven, science-based SaaS platform to achieve their CO2 reduction targets and improve their ESG performance. Plan A has already received several awards, most recently Generali’s SME EnterPRIZE Award 2021 and the prestigious The Europas Award 2021.
Plan A closed a Series A funding round of USD 10 million in November 2021 (HV Capital and Keen Venture Partners, joining Demeter, coparion, and Softbank as investors). Plan A is a B Corp certified business and adheres to strict social and environmental standards. As part of its Sustainability Initiative, the company has recently disclosed its carbon footprint of 85.74 tCO2e for the base year 2020 and has committed to decarbonise at least 80 % of its avoidable emissions by 2025.
Reveall
The past years have seen product teams rapidly gain influence within organizations, leading to a rise in customer-centric thinking. Still, there is often a big gap between the desire to be customer-led and translating that desire into decision-making. A major obstacle is that the landscape for UX & Product Management software is highly fragmented.
Where leading Sales, Engineering and Marketing teams have opted for a single system of record (e.g. Salesforce, Jira, Hubspot), Product teams still find themselves using several tools for collecting and storing customer insights, mapping customer journeys and planning & prioritizing their product roadmap.
As a result, data gets siloed, collaboration is stifled and decisions are still driven largely by gut feel and poor validation. Having experienced this pain first hand at companies like Recruitee, 3D Hubs, Skyscanner and Amazon, Ferdinand Goetzen, Marcel Hagedoorn and Dwayne Pascal set out to found Reveall – a platform that helps product teams leverage customer insights to build the right things, in the right way.
Reveall’s goal is to become the system of record for UX & Product teams by helping them create a a single source of truth for their insights, map their customer journeys and prioritize their product opportunities – all in one place. Teams at Schiphol, Signify, GrandVision and WeTransfer amongst others already use Reveall to make customer-led product decisions. Founded in Amsterdam in the summer d 2021, Reveall is a remote-first company and has raised 1.5m Euros in pre-seed funding to date.
Smartlook
Smartlook is an analytics solution for websites, iOS and Android apps that answers the “whys” behind your users’ actions. Understand precisely how customers interact with your site or app — watch recordings, create heatmaps, use automatic tracked events, and build conversion funnels.
Stop all the guesswork and see your data more clearly – on one central dashboard, which enables sharing and collaborating with colleagues. This means clear, data-driven decision-making for product managers, marketers, UX designers and developers to constantly improve each website by reducing churn rates, boosting conversions, identifying and fixing bugs, and improving your UX.
Smartlook started in 2016 and currently has more than 2800 paying organizations across the globe including companies like Paxful, Sky, Volvo, Vogue, Papa Johns, Miele, and Livestorm. The company has received numerous awards and recognition including G2 Crowd Awards for “Top 100 Software Products” and “Best Products for Marketers,” as well as being named on Deloitte’s Technology Fast 50 in Central Europe.
Suppeco
For 30 years, supply chain and supplier engagement has focused overwhelmingly on the numbers. Companies spend 60% of their total revenues on external suppliers. Yet a third of that negotiated value is lost over term through lack of relationship driven value and poor data retention.
Meet Suppeco, the award-winning transformational SaaS platform – delivering a paradigm shift in B2B attitude. Suppeco customers appreciate the importance of going beyond contract performance; seeking to drive exponential value through the top line – a truly reciprocal relationship, exploring trust, value, innovation, enhanced collaboration, shared R&D, and thought leadership.
Suppeco creates structure within the relationship space – an area that lacked any measurability is now manageable, structured & supports a substantive opportunity to drive value and growth. Suppeco creates unlimited environments for collaboration at scale, through frictionless access for customers, suppliers, and their teams across the ecosystem and supply chain.
Suppeco enables actionable visibility across the supply chain to promote real time value and improvement, substantially reducing time to action and time on task. Suppeco provides end-to-end visibility of stakeholder activity anywhere throughout the operation or supply chain, tracking standards, levels of service, compliance, or performance metrics, with full visibility of any improvement or corrective measures taken.
Suppeco delivers live interactive measurable insights anywhere anytime. Rather than waiting for users to log-in, automated workflows ensure never missing deadlines, KPIs, contract events, compliance, or audit inspections. Suppeco enjoys an orbit of API partnerships, but also implements on-demand, and can get to work driving value immediately.
TwicPics
For years, the web struggled with image and video performance issues. We ourselves scouted for services to alleviate the pain, but none seemed to address the problem in its entirety. We finally decided to develop our own solution. We incorporated the company in 2019 at the Station F incubator in Paris.
Today, TwicPics is available as a self-service SaaS product. It brings the infrastructure and a low-code solution that processes images and videos in real-time to provide the best possible visual quality and web performance while reducing websites’ carbon footprint.
A hundred customers later, we are now 15 in the company, operating from our very own offices, located in Paris, France.
Weezie
Located in Porto, Portugal, Weezie is a software house with a young and dynamic team that provides a solution to telecom operators. Weezie is a SaaS, cloud based product company that aims to automate, digitalize and simplify, in a disruptive way, the planning, deployment and management of fiber optic networks.
Workist
Workist was founded with the goal to automate repetitive work and give people the freedom to do what they love.
Workist uses AI to extract the relevant information from unstructured data, thus eliminating the need for manual data processing and enabling an automatic flow of information between entities. Workist’s solution has found great success in the B2B sector, where the exchange of numerous documents is required for every transaction.
Workist’s AI interprets incoming documents such as orders, order confirmations, invoices and more and translates the contained information into a format which can easily be processed by every ERP or CRM system. Because of the best in class document understanding of our AI, this is possible regardless of input format, language, layout or national conventions.
The extracted information is validated through the master data and a refined business logic, ensuring 100% reliable data. In the rare case, a document can not be processes with the required confidence, human assistance is requested, corrections are recorded, and the document is added to the training dataset. This enables a continuous increase of the automation rate.
The automatic processing of these documents, enables customers to significantly accelerate their O2C and P2P processes, while reducing the need for manual labor and improving processing accuracy. Additionally, employees are liberated from the mundane task of manual data processing have more time for value adding tasks, while customers enjoy faster order fulfilment.
Wurkr
We started Wurkr to fix a problem we had, to create an immersive real-time virtual online office to remove loneliness, cultivate culture and provide spontaneous collaboration. By the end of 2021, we raised £1.2m in seed investment, we got to 1.5m signups, 8500 organisations, across 110 countries and won the coveted Red Herring Top 100 Europe award. In 2022, we have stepped up a gear to scale the company and aggressively grow our revenues.
NOT JUST A SAAS CONFERENCE, A SAAS FESTIVAL.
These startups, amongst many other trailblazers, will be at SaaStock 2022 in Dublin this October – Europe’s largest SaaS festival. 5,000+ SaaS founders, execs and investors will come together to learn from industry experts, get hot leads, fill up their calendars with business development opportunities, and connect with their peers.
