smb-software
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BambooHR Put the Employee Record in Charge - Now It Wants AI to Run the Errands
The Utah software company turned a tidy employee database into a broad people platform used by more than 33,000 organizations. Its next trick is asking AI to do the administrative chasing - without losing the simplicity that made the product useful.
Asure Sold Half Its Story for $120 Million - Then Built a Payroll Machine for the Businesses Everyone Else Finds Too Small
The Austin software veteran escaped a muddled identity by selling its workspace business and betting on the least forgiving job in a company: paying people correctly. Now it is stitching software, service, tax compliance and AI into one back office for growing businesses.
Aditya Vemuganti Is Turning the Humble Invoice Into a Growth Tool
He came home from Amazon to tackle a gloriously unglamorous problem: the paperwork that keeps India’s small businesses waiting to get paid. Swipe’s answer began with a ten-second invoice and grew into a broader bet on the digital shop counter.
Agendrix Took 30 Months to Reach $10K MRR - Then a Cabin-Built Time Clock Put 235,000 Workers on Its Schedule
The Quebec SaaS company survived ignored pitches and two years of tiny salaries by solving one dull, expensive problem at a time. Its playbook is useful precisely because it begins with a spreadsheet, not a moonshot.
Webidoo Bet $25 Million That Small Businesses Don’t Need Another App - They Need One Layer
After years of building websites and campaigns for small firms, the Milan-born company reached a blunt conclusion: the problem wasn’t access to software. It was getting twenty disconnected tools to do useful work together.
The ERP Fork That Decides How Your Company Grows
Microsoft Business Central lets smaller companies buy finance software one user at a time. Workday sells a broader operating model - and the real choice is how much company you are ready to redesign.
The Saskatoon Company Quietly Selling Software to the People Who Sell Software
Vendasta doesn't sell to small businesses. It sells to the roughly 60,000 companies that already do - handing them a rebrandable marketplace, a CRM and, now, a payroll of AI employees to put their own logo on.
Priority Software Spent 40 Years Making ERP Boring - and Built an $800 Million Company
Founded in the mainframe era, the Israeli company sells one promise to roughly 75,000 businesses in 70 countries: enterprise software people can actually change themselves. In 2024, Blackstone paid about $800 million for the pitch.
ECI Built an ERP Empire From a Failed Office-Supply Bet
A dot-com office-supply seller discovered its most valuable product was the software behind the store. Twenty-seven years and 57 acquisitions later, ECI runs the digital back rooms of 25,000 small and midsize businesses.
Tidio
Scale customer service without sacrificing customer trust or authenticity. Whether you want to improve support quality or automate up to 67% of conversations Tidio keeps support fast, reliable, and human.
GoTo
Powering a world of work without limits.
RecordBook
RecordBook (also branded Rekord) is a Bengaluru-based, mobile-first no-code workspace that lets small and medium businesses replace paper registers and rigid spreadsheets with flexible tables, custom workflows, roles and team collaboration - all from a phone and in local languages. Founded in 2021 by IIT Kanpur alumnus Abhishek Choudhary and Robbin Singh, it went through Y Combinator's Winter 2022 batch and pitches itself as 'Airtable for the 400 million SMBs' in emerging markets.
Twine
Twine is an AI revenue engine for small service businesses. When a business misses a call, Twine instantly texts the caller back, figures out what they need, books the job on the calendar, and follows up - so plumbers, HVAC techs, salons and pest-control operators stop losing work to whoever picked up first. Founded in 2023 and backed by Y Combinator (S23), Twine unifies calls, texts, web forms and chat into one AI-run inbox.
Yezza
Yezza is a Malaysian SaaS company (YC W22) that helps small businesses in Southeast Asia sell and operate through WhatsApp. It started as a tool to spin up storefronts inside the messaging app and has grown into an operating system for SMBs - with online stores, WhatsApp forms, broadcasting, invoicing, and industry-specific systems for clinics, dental and other service businesses.
inyad
inyad is a Moroccan-founded fintech building mobile-first software for small and micro merchants across Africa and the Middle East. Its apps - the Konnash digital ledger and the Mahaal all-in-one point-of-sale, invoicing and payments platform - help corner shops, cafes, salons and independent traders move their bookkeeping, sales and payments off paper and onto a phone. Founded in 2018 by former McKinsey consultant Moncef Chlouchi, the company reports a user base in the millions across 10-plus countries and has raised roughly $14M from investors including Partech, Al Mada Ventures, CDG Invest and FJ Labs.
Rewaa
Rewaa is a Riyadh-based retail technology company that builds a cloud-based operating platform for small and medium retailers, unifying point-of-sale, inventory management, accounting and ZATCA-compliant e-invoicing in a single dashboard. Founded in 2018, it synchronizes physical stores and online sales channels in real time and has grown to serve more than 23,000 active merchants across Saudi Arabia and the wider region. Rewaa raised the largest Series A for a SaaS company in MENA ($27M in 2023) and followed with a $45M Series B in late 2025 to expand its AI-driven automation tools.
Keka HR
Keka HR is a cloud-based human resource, payroll and people-operations platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Founded in Hyderabad in 2014 by Vijay Yalamanchili, it bundles payroll, attendance, leave, performance, hiring and employee-engagement tools into a single self-serve system. After bootstrapping for years, Keka raised a $57 million Series A from WestBridge Capital in 2022 - reported as India's largest Series A in SaaS at the time - and now serves thousands of companies while processing payroll for more than a million employees each month.
Shipday
Shipday is a cloud-based, AI-powered delivery management platform that lets small and medium-sized businesses - restaurants, grocers, pizzerias, florists, couriers and e-commerce sellers - run their own local deliveries without paying gig-economy commissions. It combines dispatch automation, route optimization, a driver mobile app, real-time branded tracking, proof of delivery and AI agents for customer communication, and connects to third-party fleets like DoorDash and Uber for overflow. Founded in 2020 and headquartered in Menlo Park, California, Shipday serves more than 6,000 businesses across 100+ countries and has powered over 30 million deliveries.
Motion
Motion is an AI-native work management platform that started as an automatic calendar and task scheduler and has grown into an 'agentic work suite' for small and mid-sized businesses. It bundles projects, tasks, calendar, docs, notes, SOPs, sheets, reports, search and chat into one system, then layers AI 'Employees' on top that actually execute work - drafting proposals, prepping meetings, updating projects and answering clients. Founded in 2019 and backed by Y Combinator, Motion raised $60M in 2025 at a $550M valuation.
John Waldmann
John Waldmann is the founder and CEO of Homebase, the team-management app built for the people who run local businesses - restaurants, salons, retail shops and the hourly teams behind them. Started in 2014 after watching a childhood friend drown in paper schedules and his sister juggle unpredictable bartending shifts, Homebase now serves more than 150,000 businesses and 3.8 million workers, processing hundreds of millions of shifts a year with scheduling, time clocks, payroll, messaging and earned-wage access. A Stanford GSB grad who once sold tuxedos and started his first online business at 13, Waldmann is an unapologetic believer in accountability over consensus, 'operating velocity,' and the idea that AI will create more small business owners, not fewer.
Freshworks
Freshworks is a cloud-based business software company that builds easy-to-use customer service, IT service management and CRM tools for companies that found legacy enterprise software too complicated and too expensive. Founded in Chennai in 2010 as Freshdesk, it became the first India-born SaaS company to list on Nasdaq in 2021 and now serves tens of thousands of customers worldwide with an AI assistant, Freddy, woven through its products.
Rexhep Dollaku
Rexhep 'Rexhi' Dollaku is a General Partner at Base10 Partners, a San Francisco-based venture capital firm that has become the first Black-led VC to cross $1 billion in assets under management. Born in Ulcinj on the Montenegro-Albania border and raised in Pittsburgh, Dollaku studied economics, global health, and health policy at Harvard before building his career in venture. He joined Base10 as an early team member, architecting the firm's thematic research methodology that now drives 90% of its investments and growing it from a seed-stage firm to a $1.3B AUM powerhouse. His focus: backing founders who automate the 'real economy' - food, logistics, retail, fintech - solving problems for the 99% while donating half of the firm's profits to HBCU scholarships.
John Eng
John Eng is the Funding Ecosystem Partner at Right Side Capital Management, a San Francisco-based VC firm that has deployed $250M+ across 8 funds into 2,200+ early-stage B2B startups since 2012. With 25 years in B2B marketing and partnerships leadership at Microsoft, LinkedIn, and Parallels - plus CMO stints at Tradeshift, Remix, NewVoiceMedia, and Swiftly - Eng brings rare operator-investor credibility to RSCM's sprawling portfolio. He writes $50K-$200K checks into pre-seed B2B startups with real traction, helping founders navigate fundraising and growth through RSCM's operating platform.
Saar Gur
Saar Gur is a General Partner at CRV (Charles River Ventures), one of Silicon Valley's oldest venture firms, where he has backed some of the most iconic consumer and SMB software companies of the past decade. Before turning investor, he co-founded BrightRoll, the video ad network that Yahoo acquired for $640 million. Known for betting early on 'weird' ideas before the world caught up, his portfolio includes DoorDash (seed in 2013), Patreon, Ring, Dropbox, Airtable, Mercury, and Niantic. He has ranked on the Forbes Midas List (#22 in 2023), taught at Stanford's StartupGarage, and summits mountains with founders for fun.