If you are interested in B2B SaaS companies, you will be interested in a recent list published by Battery Ventures.  Battery partnered with its portfolio company, Glassdoor, to publish a list entitled, “50 Highest Rated Private Cloud Companies to Work For.”  The list purports “to highlight the cloud-computing companies where employees report the highest levels of work satisfaction.”

B2B SaaS Focus

The list centered on “private cloud companies that were B2B focused–instead of providing consumer services”.  It was not immediately clear to me why Battery chose a B2B SaaS focus, but Battery noted eight of its portfolio companies made the list, so perhaps that is reason!  In any case, those of us who are B2B nerds thank them for this bias!

To be included on the list, B2B SaaS companies also had to have:

• 200 or more employees as of July 2016.
• raised funding sometime in the last three years and
• 30 or more overall employee reviews on Glassdoor.

(That last criterion also probably introduced a bit of the Battery Ventures and West Coast bias into the list.)

Industry Breakdown of Highly Rated Private B2B SaaS Companies

The article includes a good summary of the data, but I sliced the data slightly differently:

As you can see, the list contains many of the usual suspects in hot sectors:

• IT applications (which for me includes anything sold to the IT department, e.g. infrastructure, security and performance monitoring)
• Sales and marketing applications
• Analytics or BI tools
• Teamwork and HR-focused applications

Procure to Pay SaaS Companies

More surprising to me was the inclusion on the list of six companies involved in the procure to pay space:

• Tradeshift (which I have blogged about here and here)
• Docusign (okay, not really Procure to Pay, but the CEO is former Ariba!)
• Taulia (e-invoicing and supply chain finance)
• WorkMarket (a contingent labor/freelance marketplace)
• Coupa (see here) and
• Icertis (a contract lifecycle management company which was entirely new to me.  This one deserves further exploration!)

Vertical B2B SaaS Companies

I have a special interest in vertical B2B Saas companies and the list includes four such companies:

• Procore Technologies which is in the construction management space (see here and here for instance)
• Addepar which sells software to the investment management industry (see here).  (I had never heard of Addepar, but I like companies that sell to the 1%.)
• nCino which sells software to banks (that does not get my blood pumping) (Maybe part of Bottomline Technologies is a comparable?) and
• Accela which sells software to the public sector.  This is a fascinating space.  (NIC Inc. might be a comparable.)

I’ve already been watching some of these companies closely, looks like I will need to expand my horizons!