We built this list in collaboration with Headline, and wrote this piece with principal Taylor Brandt.

Today, we recognize 50 emerging vertical SaaS companies with our second annual Vertical SaaS 50. 

As with last year’s inaugural list, we compiled a set of the most compelling companies based on submissions and conversations with founders and investors. We then further narrowed down the candidates by stage (pre-seed through Series A), geography (North America), funding history (less than $25M raised) and momentum.

The 2024 list honors 50 new emerging companies building in large markets with strong tailwinds, that have founders with earned insights in their respective domains, and display early signs of product-market fit. We continue to see solutions in highly fragmented industries that are heavily document-based. As with last year, we see strong AEC (architecture, engineering and construction) and logistics representation. This year, we have also included companies in the legal and financial services sectors. 

While the sector representation is largely the same as in 2023, we are unsurprisingly seeing a greater emphasis on AI. Recent breakthroughs in AI have enabled new capabilities for vertical SaaS. In particular, applied LLMs provide a level of standardization to industries that run on unstructured data and lack uniformity. Several honorees this year leverage unique data sets to train LLMs, others use generative AI as a feature within their product and some even utilize it to power internal workflows. Regardless of the application, it is clear that these technological advancements are ushering in a new category of industry-specific solutions.

We are energized by the wave of talent building in vertical SaaS we’ve met over the past year. This list represents a small portion of founders building industry-specific software and we want to keep hearing from the next generation of best in class vertical SaaS companies! If you are building a vertical SaaS company or have recommendations for our 2025 list, please reach out to us at zcole@baincapital.com and taylor@headline.com.