Headline VP Taylor Brandt and BCV principal Zeeza Cole compiled this list in collaboration. You can follow them on Twitter here and here to keep up with their thoughts on the venture landscape, the future of work, vertical SaaS and more.
After spending months assessing the state of the industry, we are excited to publish our inaugural Vertical SaaS 50 list. We intend to make this an annual ranking, and walk you through our methodology below. Congrats to the talented founders and teams behind these logos!
The 2023 Vertical SaaS 50 List
This is an impressive group of companies and founders across a wide variety of industries, including healthcare, logistics, construction, transportation and more. We compiled this list based on submissions, conversations with many investors and founders, and based on signals found in Headline’s proprietary data-driven sourcing platform, Searchlight. Developed over the past 12 years, Searchlight tracks over 7 million companies annually around the world across billions of data points to identify breakout growth and high-potential startups across the four sectors that Headline invests in, including Vertical SaaS. Headline has invested in the earliest stages in leading Vertical SaaS businesses like AppFolio, Housecall Pro and Shopmonkey.
This list embodies some of the most promising early stage (pre-seed through Series A) companies, primarily based in the US. These companies have a combination of strong markets, founder-market fit, and tailwinds that set them up to build lasting businesses. We’re excited to see them continue to thrive.
Our methodology for the list is the application of the concepts we discussed in our market assessment from earlier this year. We focused on differentiation and execution across a broad selection of sectors including Seso (reaching the agriculture industry in the early stages of digitization), Walla and Snaptrude (reinventing early vertical SaaS winners (Mindbody and Autodesk, respectively)), and Coperniq (inventing industry-specific technologies for solar).
This list is just the beginning — we want to continue to support and highlight the next generation of best-in-class Vertical SaaS companies! We believe that we will see many transformational companies in this space over the next decade, and we are eager to invest in and develop a community of founders making this happen. If you are building in the space, please reach out to us at taylor@headline.com or zcole@baincapitalventures.com; we hope to include you in our next Vertical SaaS 50!