Which SaaS categories are growing in the US during this downturn?

First post of the my first newsletter.

A little background:

I have been personally tracking 150,000+ private companies across the US and other geographies over the last 2 years on different metrics fetched from the public web like headcount growth, headcount by region, CEO approval rating, employee reviews, job listings, product reviews etc. The motivation has been - intellectual curiosity to understand if a company’s performance can be assessed and bench marked against its competitors using public data.

The goal of this newsletter is to share insights on private high tech companies from billions of data points that I track every week. The target readers are investors, entrepreneurs and job seekers in high tech companies.

2022-2023 SaaS slowdown:

Like many other sectors, SaaS companies have also seen slowness in the last year - YoY ARR growth has slowed down by 33% in Q1.

Due to macro conditions, budgets of their users tighter and companies are trying to cut down on the cost of software services they use for running businesses.

Scenario in June, 2023:

Looking by category, some of the categories in SaaS are doing way better - when measured by growth in employee count as tracked from Linkedin.

Based on our data, employee headcount in Enterprise Software and B2B categories has grown by more than 5% on average last quarter.

Financial services and Fintech have struggled with almost no increase in headcount on average last quarter.

Companies in categories like Marketplace, Cloud computing and CRM have actually shrunk in employee headcount by almost 1%.

The data above covers the companies meeting the following following criteria

• Have raised more than $5M in total funding

• Most recently raised within last 2 years

• Largest employee headcount is in USA

Below are the fastest growing SaaS companies in “Enterprise Software” category

Below are top shrinking companies by headcount in “Cloud Computing” category.

About the data

The data seen above is from Crustdata - an AI powered data-driven market intelligence platform for private growth investors. It indexes billions of public data points on companies every week to provide an edge over the market.