The verticalization of SaaS across all operating functions within the enterprise is rapidly approaching a tipping point. The average enterprise spends $6 million per year on SaaS platforms trying to keep up with the FAANG cohortand Be More Like Bezos. Enterprises are licensing technologies just to compete.  Or, they’re simply buying up startups.  

So what makes B2B SaaS platforms so valuable?

The hallmark of technological innovation in B2B has been the application of Big Data and AI-driven analytics to create new automated workflows and marketplaces across verticals and increase connectivity between clients and enterprises.   Here’s why that matters.

AUTOMATED WORKFLOWS

Almost all businesses are made up of a complex network of stakeholders and decision processes that all need to maintain perfect cohesion and cadence to achieve success.  Most of these are only growing more complex and the need to streamline existing processes and/or develop new ones is vital for sustained growth.

COVID has also changed everything or (more accurately) sped everything up.  Nowhere is this more apparent than with Future-of-Work platforms. As tech companies like Twitter and Facebook gear up for longer-term remote work solutions, future-of-work has cemented itself as one of the most sought after opportunities in venture capital.  Perhaps that’s because the future of work doesn’t just entail gearing up home offices. It also involves gig workers, freelancers, hiring tools, tools for workplace organizing and automation and the framework around which all of these things can exist.

Companies are now engaged in fully re-imagining how we work. Products that solve meaningful problems in the areas of productivity, brainstorming, communication tools, and workflows are some of the more obvious areas of opportunity.  Yet, the potential for creating the infrastructure required to facilitate remote and global teams is perhaps even greater.

Thanks to products like Siri from Apple and Echo from Amazon, voice technology is increasingly becoming a daily part of our lives. But voice recognition technology isn’t just for turning on the lights or requesting a weather report.

 Advancements in voice technology have made using our voices to interact with software products easier and more prevalent in our day-to-day interactions with tech products. According to Google, 20% of mobile queries are voice searches and voice search has grown 35X since 2008!

 Voice technology is creating entire new ecosystems. Thanks to Alexa and Google Assistant platforms, developers have created tens of thousands of voice applications that look to eventually rival the mobile app economy. The burgeoning field of smart automobiles, for example, is just one untapped market where Voice will be transformative.  

ANALYTICS

Best-in-class enterprises across verticals have rushed to embrace data analytics for a reason. In today’s digital marketplace, the nature of the game has changed.  To succeed, business decisions must now be made based on an enhanced understanding of customers’ preferences and behavior in both online and offline environments. 

Data and analytics programs represent the foundation to help enterprises better understand their customers and drive innovation to maintain a competitive advantage.

 eCommerce platforms have also been transformed in the age of COVID.  There is little reason now to think we’ll ever return to anything resembling the previous “normal” when it comes to how we buy and consume goods. 

Technologies that help navigate the big selling platforms like Walmart, Amazon and Instacart are in the best position to succeed. Enabling brands to optimize ad spend on eCommerce sites like Amazon will only become more important as the pandemic stretches onwards and our new buying habits become more ingrained. 

In addition, platforms powering the backend of the eCommerce experience — from Try-At-Home technologies to Consumer Insurance — are also primed for future success. 

Lastly, the rising tide of eCommerce is also impacting ancillary sectors like Fintech where companies have rushed in to support areas of need (such as securing credit checks, fraud prevention, cross border payments, etc.).

MARKETPLACES

We are now entering an era of marketplaces run by AI. Data is used for training models and making corrections and delivering a tailored experience to each customer. From healthcare to financial services, there are a variety of products that have been brought to every enterprise thanks to data and automation. 

Today, these marketplaces are being transformed  by AI to give unprecedented leverage to organizations that employ it while democratizing previous walled-garden marketplaces in the process. 

 Fintech platforms are creating new, highly lucrative investment markets in a low yield world and driving exponential ROI in the process.   They are transforming investment risk to return profiles through the securitization of assets with best-in-class data. 

They're allowing LPs (and anyone else) the ability to invest in alternative asset classes (such as farmland or private debt) that drive high rates of return without having to plunk down correspondingly exorbitant monies to participate. By democratizing investment, financializing “everything”  and demystifying process through data and transparency, the investment ecosystem has been fundamentally altered. 

 Fintech platforms are  also helping to disintermediate the financial management market.   They are effectively obviating the “experts” in these markets through higher or equal-to yields and lower fees while also effectively eliminating institutional opacity through data, speed and scale.   They are making markets more efficient, driving better corporate/personal use of balance sheets and forcing traditional banks to adjust, partner or acquire. 

 In all of these industries and more the verticalization of SaaS platforms across all operating functions in the enterprise are only accelerating. There is an ever-growing need for businesses of all shapes and sizes just to maintain competitiveness.  

The emergence of data as the fuel for AI is driving enterprises to unify and structure their existing and newly adopted systems to create real-time data transparency across all facets of the organization. 

B2B platforms that improve underlying infrastructure and legacy systems (particularly in those industries that have yet to be transformed by the advanced application of data and automation) will continue to offer unique opportunities for venture capitalists with technology— once again — leading the way.