Software is eating the world. Here is the SaaS market by the numbers.
The Data
For this article, we looked at data from Crunchbase. We queried all companies tagged as SaaS, Software, or Apps. If you want to explore the data yourself, check out one of Crunchbase’s premium subscriptions.
Crunchbase is a crowdsourced database of company data. The data skews toward success as entrepreneurs are not eager to publish their mistakes and it’s the last thing on the teams mind as the shutter a venture and start to look for their next opportunity.
That being said, it is a great source to identify rising trends among the market winners and is a source for the “rest of us” who may not be managing an investment portfolio with access to higher end tools.
Market Basics
# Companies
that call themselves
SaaS, Software, or App
Total funding
for these companies
to date
Rate of Market Entry
Rate of Exit
Average Acquisition Price
Profile of a Successful SaaS Company
Not overfunded…
Average Total Funding for a SaaS Company that is Acquired
(Last 5 Years and throughout the 2000s)
Not too big…
Nimble, not past prime…
Where is investment going?
Where the growth is…
Logistics, Machine Learning, Health Diagnostics, Computer Vision, and Cloud Computing lead the way as hot growth categories.
Top 20 Categories for Investment in 2016
- Logistics
- Delivery Service
- Enterprise Software
- Machine Learning
- Computer Vision
- Health Diagnostics
- Mobile
- Cloud Computing
- Hardware
- Health Care
- Analytics
- Mobile
- Messaging
- Photography
- Big Data
- E-Commerce
- Video
- CRM
- Customer Service
- Business Intelligence
Where the Companies are…
The Bay Area leads in IPOs and Acquisitions in the space followed by New York, Los Angeles, Boston, London, and Washington DC.
What’s a SaaS Product Manager to Do?
Additional Reading
- Crunchbase – Crowdsourced database for entrepreneurs and investors everywhere
- The Pacific Crest Annual SaaS Survey – Fantastic survey of private SaaS companies full of helpful benchmarks to set goals for your organization
- Totango Annual SaaS Metrics Report – Totango’s annual survey of SaaS metrics and benchmarks
- Tomasz Tunguz on SaaS – Tomasz is a partner at Redpoint that blogs regularly on SaaS metrics and market analysis

Ross Reynolds works a product manager in brand protection and media. He currently is VP of Product & Marketing for Marketly, a startup in Silicon Valley. He likes building products and helping new ventures grow.
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