When Slack CEO Denise Dresser was handed the reins last November, she was the third CEO in less than a year at the enterprise communications company.
The SaaS Stage lineup, including our discussion with Denise Dresser, is taking place on Oct 29th – learn more about the event here.
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Over 10,000 startup leaders will be attending this year’s event on October 28-30 in San Francisco.
We can’t wait to hear from Denise Dresser and more SaaS leaders at this year’s show.
Some may help businesses build a website, whereas others may just be useful for getting listed on search engines.
The startup also uses AI to ease businesses’ journey to digitize thousands of stores in one go.
Tarun Sobhani, co-founder and CEO of SingleInterface, told TechCrunch that the startup helps businesses grow their revenues by 15–20% using its products.
Sobhani and Harish Bahl, the founder of consumer internet investor and venture-building firm Smile Group, co-founded the startup in 2015.
Sobhani said the startup plans to add many people in the Asia-Pacific region to grow its presence.
SiftHub’s AI assistant is built on open-source large language models (LLMs), and is supported by retrieval augmented generation (RAG) technology, which uses additional data sources to fine-tune the quality of content generated by AI.
All that eventually brought her focus to sales and presales teams.
“Sales teams have a shadow team — a presales team or solutions engineers — and they are usually the unsung heroes of the organization.
Sales and presales teams lack the necessary tooling to handle this new selling environment.
We are excited to back the SiftHub team and be a part of their ambitious journey,” said Sanjay Nath, a partner at Blume Ventures.
In its early days, OctoAI focused almost exclusively on optimizing models to run more effectively.
With the rise of generative AI, the team then launched the fully managed OctoAI platform to help its users serve and fine-tune existing models.
OctoStack, at its core, is that OctoAI platform, but for private deployments.
Deploying OctoStack should be straightforward for most enterprises, as OctoAI delivers the platform with read-to-go containers and their associated Helm charts for deployments.
For developers, the API remains the same, no matter whether they are targeting the SaaS product or OctoAI in their private cloud.
Thus, SaaS startups are not category-specific, instead sharing a business model approach more than any particular industry focus.
Among myriad SaaS startups, those focused on selling to business clients — a group often called enterprise SaaS — are a magnet for venture capital.
Since then, investment into enterprise SaaS startups has slowed.
Enterprise SaaS startups raised $21.9 billion, $45.0 billion, $55.1 billion and $58.3 billion in 2017, 2018, 2019 and 2020, respectively.
Perhaps a rate cut or two and a strong enterprise IPO are the tonic required to really reignite venture investment into enterprise SaaS.
Mews, one of the startups building tools to help hotels manage IT better is announcing a growth round of $110 million to capture more business.
The funding — led by Kinnevik — is coming in at a $1.2 billion valuation post-money.
That is a slight up-round on the Series C that Amsterdam-based Mews announced at the end of 2022, when Mews raised $185 million on an $865 million valuation.
It said it now has more than 5,000 hotel customers, compared to 3,253 hotels a year ago.
Mews nominally looks after hotels and hospitality, but that could be hostels or Airbnbs or services for people in mixed-use real estate.
French startup Planity has been taking advantage of France’s love affair with hair salons to launch a SaaS product for these businesses in particular.
Over time, the company expanded to other types of beauty salons, such as barbers and nail salons.
The startup’s co-founder and CEO Antoine Puymirat first started working on online appointment booking in 2007.
Instead of creating an all-encompassing appointment solution, he chose to focus on beauty salons specifically.
The platform handles around 10 million bookings per month — 4 million of them are booked directly by the end customers on Planity.
That’s the driving idea behind Nile, a startup that aims to create this data system with serverless Postgres at its core.
This could be authentication, billing, and so on.”Unsurprisingly, that’s exactly the problem Nile tries to solve.
The idea here is that every SaaS company has a data layer at its core and since we are talking about SaaS companies, they all have to solve for multi-tenancy in some form or another, no matter whether they are in the B2B or B2C space.
Traditionally, the team argued, solving problems around data and database management was always an application problem rather than a database problem.
Nile is turning this on its head by making multi-tenancy a core feature of its Postgres solution and by separating the data layer from the compute layer.
The average company was using 130 software-as-a-service (SaaS) apps as of 2022, according to Statista — a volume that’s impacting productivity.
Today, Zuercher leads Prismatic, an iPaaS startup designing a solution to help business-to-business (B2B) SaaS companies connect their products to the other products their customers already use.
Zuercher co-founded Prismatic with Beth Harwood and Justin Hipple in 2019, aiming to streamline app integration development to let SaaS companies more easily connect to third-party software.
“SaaS companies are spending huge amounts of time and resources on integrations,” Zuercher said.
“We’re seeing intense demand across our portfolio of B2B software companies for a platform to help augment integration capabilities.
In October, Box unveiled a new pricing approach for the company’s generative AI features.
Instead of a flat rate, the company designed a unique consumption-based model.
Each user gets 20 credits per month, good for any number of AI tasks that add up to 20 events, with each task charged a single credit.
If the customer surpasses that, it would be time to have a conversation with a salesperson about buying additional credits.
Spang says, for starters, that in spite of the hype, generative AI is clearly a big leap forward, and software companies need to look for ways to incorporate it into their products.
