15 SaaS Startups in the IPO Pipeline

What SaaS startups are on the road to an IPO? This list includes startups likely to become public companies in the next three to five years. 

The baseline selection criteria for this list of SaaS startups are as follows:

• Pre-IPO startups with valuations near or above $1 billion (“unicorns”).
• Companies that deploy a software-as-a-service recurring revenue model whereby software is developed and maintained by the vendor and sold to customers “as a service”.

The SaaS business model has proven to be more lucrative and sustainable than the legacy “software in a box” model.

Advanced web browser technologies, faster internet connections, and cloud hosting have made it easier to deliver products over the web and scale to meet customer demand.

Our list focuses on mid-to-late-stage startups with significant venture capital backing. Venture capital investors eventually want to cash out. An IPO or acquisition are two exit scenarios. 

Some on our list may falter or be acquired. But most, I expect, will become viable public companies. 

Investors can own two of the startups (#1 and #4) on our list via the Fundrise Innovation Fund, a venture capital fund available to all U.S.-based investors 18+ for a $10 minimum investment. 

SaaS Startups List

1. ServiceTitan

ServiceTitan is a cloud SaaS startup empowering home service businesses such as HVAC, plumbing, electrical, pest control, builders, and many other industries to manage their entire businesses. 

The software supports all aspects of trade businesses, including marketing, scheduling, dispatch, payments, timesheets, payroll, and customer service management. 

Founders Ara Mahdessian and Vahe Kuzoyan met on a college ski trip. Both were ethnic Armenian immigrants studying software engineering at Stanford and USC.

Each of their fathers owned residential contracting businesses. That summer, the duo teamed up to build software to help streamline their fathers’ businesses.  

Founded in 2012 in Glendale, CA, the business has more than 11,000 customers, generating over $200 in annual recurring revenue (ARR).

Non-accredited investors can own ServiceTitan shares via the Fundrise Innovation Fund. The Fund purchased a $9.9 million stake in ServiceTitan in 2023. 

The ServiceTitan IPO is expected in December 2024. 

Read more: ServiceTitan IPO — Prepare to Invest in December 2024

2. Canva

Canva is a Sydney, Australia-based SaaS startup used for creating graphic designs. It competes with legacy design products like Adobe. 

But Canva is not for professional graphic designers. Canva is for everybody else. 

Instead of hiring a graphic designer to create images for social media and online businesses, the Canva software provides more than 800,000 templates that users can modify for their needs. 

Standard template sizes are optimized for common photo size formats, such as Pinterest pins, book covers, and Facebook or Instagram posts. 

The software empowers anyone with a computer or smartphone to make professional-looking graphics for any use.

The software is easy to use and offers a free version with paid upgrades. Once free users rely more on the software, they pay for an upgraded account that supports Canva’s recurring revenue SaaS business model. 

“Fueled by the global demand for visual communication”, Canva is a profitable company, boasting 60 million users and $1 billion in annualized recurring revenue. 

Read more: Canva Stock — How to Invest Before the IPO

Please note: This is a testimonial in partnership with Fundrise. We earn a commission from partner links on AccessIPOs.com. All opinions are my own.

3. Flexport

Flexport is a global logistics and supply chain SaaS startup that helps business customers manage their international shipping and supply chains from a single platform. 

It’s the leading cloud software and data analytics platform provider for global trade. 

The software empowers more than 10,000 customers to track global supply chains, including ocean, air, and trucking, to make data-driven decisions and streamline businesses. 

Founder Ryan Peterson recognized that international shipping processes were stuck in another decade and saw an opportunity to disrupt the trillion-dollar freight industry.

Peterson relinquished CEO duties in early 2023, only to return six months later in an uncordial leadership flip-flop. Private investors seem agitated, so it may take a few years to recover and follow through with an IPO. 

Flexport was part of the Y Combinator W14 batch of early-stage startups and is a member of CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list. Investors can own Flexport stock via the ARK Venture Fund.

Read more: Flexport Stock — How to Invest Before the IPO

4. Grammarly

Grammarly is one of multiple direct consumer cloud SaaS startups in the IPO pipeline. The startup uses AI and complex learning algorithms to assist writers in composing error-free publications. Think Microsoft Word’s spell and grammar checker on steroids. 

The service analyzes sentences to determine correct grammar, spelling, clarity, tone, readability, plagiarism, and other factors to help improve writing without a human editor.

Grammarly also provides a generative AI writing assistance tool for escaping writer’s block and dozens of integrations with web browsers, websites, and other productivity software. 

The company offers a limited free service and a premium subscription service for professionals or anyone looking to improve personal or published content. Your author is a long-time subscriber of the service and highly recommends it. 

Grammarly is based in San Francisco, CA, but has founder origins and offices in Kyiv, Ukraine. It has been vocal in its repudiation of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. 

Read more: Grammarly Stock — Will Grammarly IPO Next Year?

5. Rippling

Rippling is a cloud SaaS human resources (HR) startup that provides management services for employee payroll, benefits, expenses, and more in a centralized platform. It also provides IT support for device and application management and financial management. 

The founder is Parker Conrad, who previously founded Zenefits, a similar company that came under regulatory scrutiny in 2016. Conrad resigned from Zenefits in 2016 for inadequate compliance controls, primarily for using unlicensed brokers to sell health insurance.

Conrad quickly started his next company, Rippling, which attracted venture capital funding from multiple high-profile firms. 

Rippling has quickly grown to a multi-billion dollar valuation. 

The HR SaaS space is crowded with legacy companies such as SAP leading the pack and Rippling competitors Gusto and Justworks providing similar services on modern enterprise IT platforms.

Rippling’s headquarters are in San Francisco, CA. 

Read more: Rippling Stock — Will there be an IPO?

6. Gusto

Gusto is one of multiple cloud HR SaaS startups on our list that provides payroll, benefits, hiring, time management, tax, and other human resources services to U.S.-based businesses. 

The easy-to-use software helps businesses manage employees and contractors, making it an all-in-one resource for growing companies. 

Formerly known as ZenPayroll, Gusto launched from the Y Combinator winter batch of 2012. Its Silicon Valley network has attracted several well-known entrepreneurs, celebrities, and venture capitalists. 

Well-known individual investors include Aaron Levie (Box), Matt Mullenweg (Automattic/WordPress), Tobias Lutke (Shopify), Kevin Systrom (Instagram), Evan Williams (Twitter, Medium), Patrick Collison (Stripe), Jerry Yang (Yahoo), Sam Altman (Y Combinator), Jared Leto (Actor), and Ashton Kutcher(Actor).

Gusto was founded by Joshua Reeves and Edward Kim and is based in San Francisco. 

Read more: Gusto Stock — Will Gusto IPO Next Year?

7. Airtable

Airtable is one of several cloud collaboration and productivity SaaS startups. Its main product is a spreadsheet-like tool that allows users to create, organize, and manage team data in a real-time, flexible, and collaborative manner.

The signature product’s primary functionalities include: 

• creating and customizing data fields
• enabling users to easily add records
• visualizing data in various formats

The key user benefits of Airtable are its versatility, collaboration features, and integrations. Users can tailor use cases to their specific needs, making them suitable for various applications, such as project management, content creation, and customer relationship management (CRM).

Airtable integrates with popular productivity software such as Google Drive and Dropbox to import and export data file attachments.

The Airtable collaboration space shines when users share data and build no-code custom apps across workstreams. For example, different teams can assemble and share a customer list with several data fields and use it to design a sales email funnel or to shape a new product. 

Collaboration software is competitive, but each has a specific niche or nuance. Asana, Trello, Basecamp, Notion, and Monday.com are all competitors. 

The company was founded in 2013 by Howie Liu (CEO), Andrew Ofstad, and Emmett Nicholas. Its headquarters are in San Francisco.

Read more: Airtable Stock — Will the Airtable IPO Happen Next Year?

8. Miro

Miro is another workplace productivity SaaS startup. Its signature product provides a digital platform to empower teams to collaborate, visualize, and brainstorm remotely or in person. 

The digital whiteboarding functionality lets teams draw diagrams, share ideas, and map out work as if they are in an office with a regular whiteboard.

Miro and its user base provide thousands of templates to help teams get started and hundreds of integrations to connect with other productivity and office software products. 

Digital collaboration tools have become increasingly popular since the COVID-19 pandemic as workers are more frequently scattered and remote. Miro differentiates itself from other tools such as Atlassian, Asana, Notion, or Airtable with a best-of-breed whiteboarding capability.

The company is profitable but has used venture capital funding to accelerate growth. It now boasts 50+ million users and claims it services “99% of the Fortune 100 companies”.

Miro was founded in 2011 as RealtimeBoard and rebranded in 2019. Its primary offices are in San Francisco and Amsterdam.

Read more: Miro Stock — Let’s Whiteboard the Miro IPO Scenarios

9. Notion

Notion joins the list as one of many workplace productivity and collaboration SaaS startups for individuals, teams, and businesses. The company operates as a cloud-native SaaS business.

The platform provides an all-in-one tool for project management, wikis, note-taking, task lists, document storage and organization, and team collaboration. Notion has also added an AI component to help automate tasks and suggest operational improvements.

It has a limited-capability free version to attract new customers and tiered paid versions that offer full access. 

The company was founded in 2013 in San Francisco.

Read more: Notion Stock — Will Notion IPO Next Year?

10. Addepar

Addepar is a Mountain View, California-based wealth management SaaS company founded in 2009 by Joe Lonsdale and Jason Mirra. Lonsdale was a founder of Palantir Technologies in 2004 alongside Peter Thiel. Mirra was an early Palantir employee. 

The company provides a data platform for wealth management, enabling registered investment advisors (RIA) to monitor and manage their clients’ assets across complex investment portfolios. Its goal is to create more transparency in the financial system.

Addepar’s platform allows advisors to aggregate assets in one place, enabling portfolio trading, rebalancing, and analyzing real-time portfolio data. A significant differentiator is the integration capabilities, connecting systems and workflows with hundreds of existing financial platforms. 

Over $4 trillion in assets are managed on the Addepar platform, trusted by more than 850 firms, including family offices, financial advisors, and institutional investors.

Read more: Addepar Stock — Will Addepar IPO Next Year?

11. Automation Anywhere

Automation Anywhere is a robotics process automation (RPA) software company for enterprise organizations. Its products are cloud-native and sold as a service (SaaS), helping customers use technology to automate repetitive office tasks. 

RPA software integrates with modern and legacy IT systems to bridge system gaps, improve efficiencies, and replace manually driven business workflows.

It also integrates with Microsoft Office programs like Excel to automate repetitive tasks. 

Automation reduces costs to free time for more mission-critical projects while increasing compliance, reducing human errors, improving customer service, and streamlining operations. 

The sales pitch for RPA always sounds magical. It’s not.

RPA requires specialized software, trained users, and willing management to make investment decisions to improve operations. 

However, for large organizations, RPA is often worth the investment. That’s why companies like Automation Anywhere have grown revenues significantly over the past decade. 

Read more: Automation Anywhere Stock — When is the IPO?

12. Patreon

Patreon is a web-based SaaS startup that empowers creators to earn a living through online membership subscriptions. Creators earn income by allowing fans to support their work and providing exclusive content, rewards, and perks to paying subscribers.

The company was founded in 2013 by Sam Yam and Jack Conte (CEO). Conte and his wife, Nataly Dawn, are musicians that perform under the monikers Pomplamoose and Magaziine. 

He was looking for a way to monetize his YouTube audience besides native ads. 

Though initially popular with YouTubers, Patreon now serves podcasters, writers, artists, musicians, and creators of all kinds. 

The platform bills patrons — those who subscribe to creator content — monthly. The monthly subscription model helps maintain a predictable income stream to support the creator’s work.

Several third-party applications integrate with Patreon, helping creators optimize, automate, and grow their businesses. 

It claims more than 8 million patrons are supporting 250,000+ creators on the platform. Top creators have more than 40,000 subscribers and earn more than $100,000 per month, according to data from Graphtreon. 

Read more: Patreon Stock — Will Patreon IPO Next Year?

13. OnlyFans

More risqué than Patreon, OnlyFans is a content subscription service and social media platform that empowers creators to earn money from online fans.

Popular with adult entertainers and social media influencers, creators charge a subscription fee to fans for premium photos and videos only available behind a paywall.

Users can buy bonus content and personalized media for an additional cost. 

OnlyFans takes a flat 20% fee and earns about 12% after costs. Creators can charge whatever they like and keep the remaining 80%.

The business model eliminates the need for advertising and intermediaries (e.g., film producers, traditional adult websites), giving the creators more control of their content and business. 

Its popularity has transcended the adult industry and is now utilized by athletes, musicians, celebrities, comedians, health and spiritual experts, fitness gurus, chefs, and makeup artists. 

The company has more than 100 million users and has paid out more than $3 billion in creator earnings. In 2020, the company generated $2 billion in sales, according to Bloomberg, and $300 million in profit, according to The Information. 

Competitors offering similar services include Fansly, Substack, and Patreon.

Read more: OnlyFans Stock — Will This Private Purveyor of Private Parts Go Public?

14. Figma

Figma s a software platform for collaborative design and application development. The business is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) model, proving user web-based tools for a recurring fee. 

Founded by Brown University students Dylan Field and Evan Wallace in 2012, Figma empowers remote collaborative user-interface design and whiteboarding (akin to Miro).

The company inked a deal to be acquired by Adobe in September 2022. But the companies decided to end their merger in December 2023 due to regulatory roadblocks. Regulators perceived the deal as anti-competitive due to similarities to the Adobe XD product. 

Now that Figma is operating as an independent company, we’re watching its next moves, which could include a new private funding round, fresh acquisition suitor, or Figma IPO. 

Read more: Figma Stock: Will Figma IPO After the Failed Adobe Deal?

15. Ramp

Ramp is a fintech and SaaS startup offering corporate credit cards, expense and travel management, procurement, and accounts payable software to small startups and large enterprise organizations. It helps companies automate tedious expense and reporting tasks. 

The company was founded in 2019 by the founders of Paribus, a pricing tracking app acquired by Capital One. 

The corporate credit card and expense management area of fintech is crowded, with Brex, Gusto, Navan, and Rippling increasingly overlapping each other with similar product offerings. Ramp stands out as a well-funded late-mover, improving the user experience and technology stack to position itself for scaling. 

Read more: Ramp IPO: Will Ramp Stock Begin Trading Next Year?

SaaS Startups Summary

Here’s a quick summary of our list. Continue reading below the table to learn more about these SaaS startups. 

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Additional Resources

Clean Tech Startups in the IPO Pipeline