Vertical SaaS Weekly Roundup (July 16th, 2022)
Every week (or so) we will share the most interesting Vertical SaaS news with our community, we'd love to hear your thoughts, feel free to hit reply or send us a note at info@verticalsugar.com
1. Embedded Plants!: Yes, you read that correctly, Embedded Plants. Plantboy, let's anyone "sell plants without the dirty work". They grow, pack, and ship plants directly from their greenhouse straight to your customer’s door.
Our 2 cents: Embedded e-commerce! We predict this will eventually exist for many product categories, allowing vertical SaaS players to add additional revenue streams for their customers. For example: Launch27, a Vertical SaaS for Cleaning Services companies, can allow their customers to also sell plants for the cleaner to put in people's homes after they finish cleaning.
2. Auto Salvage Vertical SaaS: APFusion Raises $6.5 Million in Series Seed. APFusion started with an aftermarket parts B2B marketplace and is now expanding to a vertical saas solution for Auto salvage providers.
Our 2 cents: Combining supply chain capabilities with Vertical SaaS systems makes perfect sense and is yet another advantage Vertical Software will bring to it's clients
3. Indonesian Logistics & vehicle tracking SaaS McEasy raises $6.5M - More than 85 percent of businesses in the transportation and supply chain sectors rely on pen and paper for their operations. A lack of education among small and medium business owners on the technologies available to increase logistics efficiency, means many are persevering with time-consuming manual processes. Link
Our 2 cents: Vertical SaaS is just getting started in developing countries and will have a massive impact given even lower capabilities to leverage best of breed
4. China: Unverified but interesting, SaaS Financing in H1 2022 exceeds CNY 13.7 billion ($2B), with what they define as Vertical SaaS \ Cross-border being most favored. Sepecifically they mention that, Investors have great interest in cross-border SaaS providers that specialize in station building, logistics, marketing and supply chain services. Link
Our 2 cents: hard to predict exactly how chineses software landscape will evolve given that it has not been liner to the US, however we believe Vertical SaaS will reign supreme here as well. It has the potential to even exceed other nations if there are state sponsored horizontal layers built for extra productivity (e.g., supply chain payments and insurance)
5. India: Axilor launches second fund of $100-million - the seed-backer looks to continue backing startups in areas of enterprise software-as-a-service (SaaS) working on specific vertical specializations and supply-chain technologies as well as fintech, healthcare, and agritech. Link
Vertical SaaS VCs growing in India, massive opportunity that will also create more organization and connectivity in one of the worlds biggest and "messiest" countries.
Stay Vertical!
Suga