How to scale your SaaS organisation? Follow the 2021 data.
As a specialist SaaS VC, we’ve seen a massive shift over the past year as investors across public as well as later stage private markets got excited about our sector. Growth rates dipped initially when Covid-19 hit. But as digitisation accelerated across many industries, public SaaS multiples moved to all-time highs, several private SaaS startups became unicorns and even more raised $100m+ in financings.
It continues to be an incredible time to be a SaaS company. As founders get access to more and more sources of capital much earlier in their lifecycle, sometimes it’s easy to push the hiring accelerator too soon, and maybe even in the wrong direction.
Off the back of these fundamental questions, a few more came to mind: how fast should my overall headcount be growing? Within the overall team, which departments/roles should be prioritised at each stage? Does this differ across geographies? And so on.
I didn’t come across any article that directly answered these questions, especially (i) that’s recent, and (ii) that’s data-driven. So, I decided to do a deep dive and try answering these questions based on data from all 423 SaaS fundraises that happened globally in the month of May 2021 (1). For this article, I have compared Europe and the US particularly in more granular detail mainly because of Oxx’s investment and internationalisation focus. That reduced the dataset to 337 SaaS financings, which was still statistically big enough to draw conclusions from, so that seemed like a good starting point. I then layered on data about these companies’ teams, to understand how they’re growing headcount in various departments (2).
