Who will break out of the UK to be the next SaaS IPO?

Entering into our third year and with a dozen events behind us, at SaaStock we have had the rare chance to observe how the SaaS industry in Europe is developing.

The SaaS Revolution is in full throttle, and we are fortunate to be centre stage to watch it grow. As, Philippe Botteri, Partner at Accel pointed out at the first Cloud Europe 2017, Europe’s momentum has accelerated, and the continent is a fertile ground

With our inaugural SaaStock on Tour 2018 event in London next week, we decided to have a deeper look at the successes and the potential breakouts we may see so close to home.

To date, there has only been one UK IPO, Mimecast. Its CEO, Peter Bauer will be one of our speakers on March 21st and will share many interesting nuggets and lessons about the story.

You can still grab a ticket and hear Peter speak alongside a dozen other exciting speakers, as well as meet investors and a host of fellow SaaS kindred spirits.

Here are the 20 companies, that we think could be the next breakout success:

Peakon

Peakon is a platform for measuring and improving employee engagement. Based on decades of organisational research and an application of statistics, Peakon has enabled companies such as Trinity Mirror, Secret Escapes, Randstad and Urban Airship to create happier, and more efficient workplaces. Peakon automatically collects employee feedback through automated surveys, analyses it and delivers clients back the insights they need to improve their business.

https://peakon.com/
CEO: Phil Chambers. Phil appeared on a panel about hiring and onboarding people at SaaStock17.
Founded Date: 2015
Funding To Date: $33M form the likes of Balderton, Sunstone and EQT Ventures

Onfido

Onfido builds trust in an online world by helping businesses digitally verify people’s identities. Using machine learning technology, Onfido validates a user’s identity document and compares it with their facial biometrics. The identity can then be cross-referenced against international credit and watchlist databases.

http://www.onfido.com/
CEO: Eamon Jubbawy
Founded Date: 2012
Funding To Date: $60.3M with the likes of Crane Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Indivest Partners.

Paddle

Paddle offers software makers a single platform for the entire software sales process. The company’s mission is to help software businesses succeed — enabling them to focus on creating products the world loves. Hundreds of developers and software companies rely on their checkout and licensing solution to sell their products globally, as well as using powerful analytics and marketing tools to understand and grow their businesses. The company has been recognised by Deloitte UK Fast 50 as the fastest growing software company in the UK and ranked 6th in tech overall, having grown our revenue by over 3,000% in the last three years.

https://paddle.com/
CEO: Christian Owens. He recently appeared on the SaaS Revolution Show talking about customer engagement.
Founded Date: 2012
Funding To Date: $17.1M form Notion, Kindred Capital and others

TripTease

Triptease is a travel SaaS company that empowers hotels to recapture guest relationships, increase direct bookings, and reduce their reliance on online travel agencies.The platform integrates with a hotel’s website and booking engine to optimise conversion, improve price transparency and strengthen the relationship between hotel and guest.
Tracking millions of consumer booking journeys across thousands of hotel websites, the company has an unmatched data scale that is used to provide conversion optimisation and to benchmark information to each hotel they work with.

http://www.triptease.com/
CEO: Charlie Osmond
Founded Date: 2012
Funding To Date: $20 M from Notion, BGF Ventures and others

Beamery

Beamery has built Recruitment CRM software that enables companies to approach recruiting like customer acquisition — from outbound prospecting and pipeline building to targeted nurture and engagement. This gives companies a huge competitive advantage, providing a complete talent intelligence hub and helping companies build relationships with candidates that are not applying. Using machine learning algorithms, Beamery determines which prospects are most interested and helps recruiters prioritise. Companies can then nurture top candidates with personalised drip-marketing campaigns and move them through their hiring funnel.

http://beamery.com/
CEO: Abakar Saidov
Founded Date: 2014
Funding To Date $7M from Index Ventures, LocalGlobe and others

Syft

Syft is an online staffing platform for hospitality and warehousing companies that gives employers direct access to high quality, trained and experienced flexible staff. Syft offers employers control and choice over who they hire. It saves them time and money while also providing consistency. The app currently helps workers in London, Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds and Birmingham get access to thousands of shifts.

https://www.syftapp.com/
CEO: Jack Beaman
Founded Date: 2015
Funding To Date £8.7M

MOVE Guides

MOVE Guides reduces barriers between people and places so companies and individuals can work everywhere. Over 100 global companies, including industry leaders such as Procore, Societe Generale and Slack, rely on the MOVE Guides global mobility management platform to deliver relocation management, expatriate management, tax and payroll, and immigration data across more than 100 countries. The result is improved operational efficiencies, compliance and employee satisfaction and engagement. MOVE Guides’ philanthropic initiative — Mobility4All — provides a percent of revenue and employee time towards programs benefiting people fleeing poverty and conflict.

www.moveguides.com
CEO: Brynne Kennedy. We recently wrote about how Brynne applied a framework for disruptive innovation when she first started.
Founded Date: 2013
Funding To Date: $88.4M from Beacon Capital, Notion, and others

Exponea

Exponea develops an analytics and marketing automation platform to identify, segment, and analyse customers and create automated campaigns in real time. Its platform and brainpower help e-Commerce businesses get maximum value from collecting, analysing, and acting upon customer interactions.

https://exponea.com/
CEO: Peter Irikovsky
Founded Date: 2015
Funding To Date: €10M

CloudSense

CloudSense offers the only solution that manages the entire sales cycle from product design and order capture through to fulfilment, all within Salesforce, accelerating the sales and delivery process. With notable success in the telecoms and media sectors, CloudSense has a world-class team of consultants that specialise in transforming businesses including the BBC and O2 to improve performance in the digital age.

http://cloudsense.com/
CEO: Richard Britton
Founded Date: 2011
Funding To Date: $77M

UK Cloud

UK cloud creates UK Public Sector cloud solutions. Since the company inception, they have disrupted the market by producing innovative cloud solutions to meet the ever-evolving needs of the UK Public Sector. As a result, the sector has saved millions of pounds, delivering improved citizen services while supporting the growth of the UK digital economy.

https://ukcloud.com/
CEO: Simon Hansford
Founded Date: 2011
Funding To Date: $4M

Receipt Bank

Receipt Bank began life as the first software company to automate the collection and data extraction of receipts and invoices. Today, they provide technology that unlocks the value of accounting data, automates the bookkeeping process and helps build more valuable accountant-client relationships. It’s AI, and automation technologies are used by over 5,000 accounting & bookkeeping firms and tens of thousands of small business customers globally. Adopted by hundreds of new firms every month and is growing 100%+ year on year.

https://www.receipt-bank.com/
CEO: Alexis Prenn. Alexis is one of the speakers at SaaStock on Tour London and will talk about the 7-year journey of perfecting metrics, the key to succeess in SaaS.
Founded Date: 2011
Funding To Date: $65M including Insight Venture Partners and Kennet Partners.

Click Travel

Click Travel is a £200M turnover modern travel management company that reduces the cost and complexity of business travel management. Taking care of the entire lifecycle of business travel, from flights and ground transportation to accommodation and car parking, the company helps people love business travel again.

http://www.clicktravel.com/
CEO: Jill Palmer
Founded Date: 1999
Funding To Date: Bootstrapped

Biosite systems

Biosite systems provide biometric workforce management, site security systems and business intelligence solutions to over 500 construction sites across the UK. Leading construction companies trust Biosite for standardised biometric site access control, fire safety and workforce management at site level — and for the intelligent analysis of data and visibility of multiple site operations at a corporate level.

http://www.biositesystems.com/
CEO: Li Wang
Founded Date: 2010
Funding To Date: £4M

Administrate

Administrate is a comprehensive training management solution for managing training and learning. With its streamlined course scheduling, resource management, CRM, reporting, marketing, eLearning, and more it reduces the need for spreadsheets and complex, and often, poor reporting.

www.getadministrate.com
CEO: John Peebles
Founded Date: 2010
Funding To Date: $7M

Poq

Poq offers a SaaS platform to help large retailers join app commerce. Retailers such as House of Fraser, Missguided and MADE.com use the Poq app commerce platform to create highly effective and fully customised native apps in record time. This helps bridge the gap between the mobile and in-store experience and to futureproof their future revenues. Poq is a Strong Performer in “The Forrester Wave: Mobile Commerce and Engagement Platforms, Q1 2016.

https://poqcommerce.com
CEO: Oyvind Henriksen
Founded Date: 2011
Funding To Date: $8.6M from Seedcamp, Beringea and others

GoCardless

GoCardless is a next generation payments company that makes collecting payments by Direct Debit easy for everyone from individuals to multinational corporations. GoCardless is creating a new global payments network based on the bank to bank payment systems. Using this network, the company deliver a direct debit solution fit for the digital age. They allow users to easily collect payment from customers, automate processes and ensure and maintain a long-term and cost-effective relationship with them.

gocardless.com
CEO: Hiroki Takeuchi
Founded: 2011
Funding To Date: $47.3M from Accel Capital, Balderton Capital, and others.

Kalo

Kalo lets companies easily onboard, manage, talk with, and pay their external workers. Since then, customers from tech to fashion — including Google, Asos, IDEO and Airbnb — have been able to throw away their tangle of spreadsheets and invoice emails and work together with their freelancer and vendor teams in a clean, beautiful experience.

http://www.kalohq.com/
CEO: Peter Louis Johnston
Founded Date: 2014
Funding To Date: $25.1M from Kindred Capital, Valar Ventures and others

Perkbox

Perkbox is an online platform that provides employee and customer engagement services to its users. The platform features perks, rewards, recognition, wellness, real-life engagement, and administration. Furthermore, it provides recruitment and retention solutions to its users.

http://www.perkbox.co.uk/
CEO: Saurav Chopra
Founded Date: 2014
Funding To Date: $14.3M from Draper Esprit and others

Brandwatch

Brandwatch is the world’s leading social intelligence group offering marketers a portfolio of social and content marketing technologies. The Brandwatch Analytics platform gathers millions of online conversations every day and provides users with the tools to analyse them, empowering the world’s most admired brands and agencies to make insightful, data-driven business decisions. The Vizia platform distributes visually-engaging insights to the physical places where the action happens. The Brandwatch platform is used by over 1,300 brands and agencies, including Unilever, American Airlines, Whirlpool, Asos, Walmart, British Airways, and Dell. Increasing its worldwide presence, the company has offices around the world including Brighton, New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Stuttgart, Paris and Singapore.

http://www.brandwatch.com/
CEO: Giles Palmer. We profiled Giles and his journey to make product decisions at scale.
Founded Date: 2005
Funding To Date: $64.7M from Partech Ventures, Highland Europe, and others

Decibel Insight

Decibel Insight reveals exactly how users behave on websites and apps, making it easy for enterprise businesses to quantify and improve the customer experience at every digital touchpoint. Powered by machine learning, the award-winning technology processes hundreds of revolutionary behavioural metrics — from mouse movements and device rotations, to pop-ups and errors — capturing an accurate picture of every user’s on-page experience. The world’s largest brands — including Lego, General Motors, British Airways, and Allstate Insurance — use Decibel Insight.

https://www.decibelinsight.com/
CEO: Ben Harris
Founded Date: 2013
Funding To Date: $9M from Eight Roads Ventures, and others