SaaS Opportunities in 2020 and Beyond

In 2020, where are the opportunities for new SaaS offerings? The enterprise market is teeming with capable incumbents. This includes several dozen public SaaS & enterprise software leaders as well as hundreds of unicorns & minicorns which will continue to expand their scope.

The enterprise SaaS market is still in its early days. Of the ~$3.8T total IT spend, just ~5% is on SaaS. That number has a lot of head room, and there is a long way to go. The willingness of businesses to adopt cloud software is higher than ever.

Here are some areas we are seeing high-potential startups in:

Intelligent Software

Re-architecting mature offerings for newer paradigms such as data/ML-first is hard. => Opportunities abound for new entrants that leverage data natively and re-invent workflows across business functions (sales, marketing, HR, customer service, operations..) and industry verticals (transportation, logistics, manufacturing, retail, financial services…).

We are 3–4 years into the current era & continue to see many opportunities across the spectrum.

The Middle

Successful SaaS products move up-market as they add features and raise ACVs. As a result, mid-market and SMB customers continue to be underserved in many segments and verticals.

Deliver high value at the right price (and with the right GTM model) => a huge set of opportunities.

Meta SaaS and SaaS for SaaS

With the increasing multiplicity of SaaS tools across the stack, businesses need tools to manage provisioning, access control, data, & costs.

SaaS companies themselves need specialized products for functions such as prospecting, customer success, experience management, metrics management and financial planning.

Smarter, Narrower BI

Intelligent products that help cut through the clutter, given the proliferation of a variety of tools and multiple dashboards.

We are seeing a new wave of "insights" products that are intelligent, deep and narrow within specific functional areas such as sales, marketing, BI, finance et al.

Data Privacy and Management

As the focus on data privacy rises with recent legislation and public discourse, there are many opportunities to help enterprises better manage data and provide their end-users more control.

The Under-Digitized

There are still many under-digitized industry segments & functions that can benefit from the right software.

There is usually a reason why a segment is currently under-digitized, so market timing is key here.

This is just a shortlist in no particular order. There is way more going on in the world of enterprise/SaaS. Please feel free to add other areas in the comments.

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