SaaS & devtools startups in San Francisco

Matthew Prince, Michelle Zatlyn & Lee Holloway

Founded 2009; global CDN, edge network, DDoS/security and developer platform (Workers). Public since 2019; a foundational internet-infrastructure and security company and a major hub for edge-compute develop...

Jay Kreps, Jun Rao & Neha Narkhede 🇮🇳

Founded 2014 to commercialize Apache Kafka (built by the founders at LinkedIn); the data-streaming platform. IPO'd 2021; IBM announced an ~$11B acquisition in Dec 2025 (completed Mar 2026). Co-founder Neha N...

Dylan Field & Evan Wallace

Founded 2012; browser-based collaborative design and product-development platform. After Adobe's $20B acquisition was abandoned (2023), Figma IPO'd on the NYSE on 31 Jul 2025 (priced $33, opened $85, +250% f...

Girish Mathrubootham & Shan Krishnasamy 🇮🇳

Founded 2010 in Chennai (as Freshdesk); customer-service, IT and CRM SaaS suite with strong AI (Freddy) adoption. HQ moved to San Mateo in 2018; NASDAQ IPO 2021. Founder Girish Mathrubootham — a defining fig...

Mitchell Hashimoto & Armon Dadgar

Founded 2012; creators of Terraform, Vault, Consul and Nomad — the open-source stack for cloud infrastructure provisioning and secrets management. IPO'd 2021; acquired by IBM for $6.4B (completed Feb 2025). ...

Dheeraj Pandey, Mohit Aron & Ajeet Singh 🇮🇳

Founded 2009; pioneer of hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) and now a hybrid multicloud platform, positioned as a key VMware alternative after the Broadcom acquisition. Public since 2016. Largely Indian-ori...

Todd McKinnon & Frederic Kerrest

Founded 2009; the leading independent identity and access management (IAM/IdP) platform, public since 2017. Acquired Auth0 (2021) to own developer identity as well. Core infrastructure for enterprise SSO and...

Bipul Sinha, Arvind Jain, Soham Mazumdar & Arvind Nithrakashyap 🇮🇳

Founded 2014; cloud data-management and cyber-resilience / data-security platform (backup, recovery, ransomware protection). IPO'd on the NYSE in Apr 2024 at ~$5.6B, raising $752M. Predominantly Indian-origi...

Marc Benioff & Parker Harris

Founded 1999; the company that defined cloud CRM and 'no software' SaaS. Anchor of the SF enterprise-software ecosystem and its largest employer; ~$38B annual revenue, aggressively repositioned around the Ag...

Benoit Dageville, Thierry Cruanes & Marcin Zukowski

Founded 2012; the cloud data-warehouse pioneer, one of the largest software IPOs ever (2020). Became a 'distributed' company with an executive office in Bozeman MT in 2021 but relocated its HQ back to Califo...

Jeff Lawson, Evan Cooke & John Wolthuis

Founded 2008; the programmable communications API company (SMS, voice, email via SendGrid, and customer-data/Segment). Public since 2016; the canonical API-first / developer-first infrastructure business and...

Jay Chaudhry 🇮🇳

Founded 2007; the zero-trust cloud-security / SASE leader (Zero Trust Exchange) that pioneered securing users directly to apps rather than via the network perimeter. Public since 2018. Founder-CEO Jay Chaudh...

Howie Liu, Andrew Ofstad & Emmett Nicholas

Founded 2012; no-code/low-code database-spreadsheet hybrid for building custom business apps. Peaked at an $11B valuation; repositioned in 2024–2026 as an AI-native app-building platform (Airtable AI / Omni)...

Michael Truell, Sualeh Asif, Arvid Lunnemark & Aman Sanger

Founded 2022; maker of Cursor, the AI-native code editor that became the fastest-growing developer tool ever — from $100M ARR (Jan 2025) to ~$4B ARR (Jun 2026). Series D (Nov 2025) valued it at $29.3B with N...

Mohit Aron 🇮🇳

Founded 2013; AI-powered data security and management (backup, recovery, threat detection). Merged with Veritas' data-protection business in Dec 2024, creating a ~$7B, 12,000+ customer leader in data protect...

Ali Ghodsi, Matei Zaharia, Ion Stoica, Reynold Xin & Berkeley AMPLab co-founders

Founded 2013 out of UC Berkeley (creators of Apache Spark); the leading data + AI 'lakehouse' platform. Closed a >$4B Series L in Dec 2025 at a $134B valuation and surpassed a $5.4B revenue run-rate (up 65% ...

Jaspreet Singh & Milind Borate 🇮🇳

Founded 2008 in Pune, later HQ'd in Santa Clara; the leading SaaS platform for data resiliency / cloud backup and cyber recovery, delivered fully as-a-service on AWS. A unicorn (~$2B); one of the earliest In...

Lin Qiao & Dmytro Dzhulgakov

Founded 2022 by ex-Meta PyTorch engineers; a fast, cost-optimized generative-AI inference platform for enterprises. Raised $250M Series C in Oct 2025 at a $4B valuation and was in talks in 2026 at a reported...

Jyoti Bansal & Rishikesh Tirumala 🇮🇳

Founded 2017; AI-native software-delivery / DevOps platform (CI/CD, feature flags, cloud-cost, and 'everything after code'). Raised a $240M Series E in Dec 2025 (Goldman-led) at a $5.5B valuation with $250M+...

Abhinav Asthana, Ankit Sobti & Abhijit Kane 🇮🇳

Founded 2012 in Bangalore as a side project; the de-facto API development and collaboration platform, used by 30M+ developers. Moved HQ to SF in 2017 and opened a new SF HQ in 2025; last valued at $5.6B (202...

David Hsu

Founded 2017 (YC); low-code platform for building internal business tools and apps fast, now extending into AI agents. Valued ~$3.2B with ~$138M+ revenue; a leader in the internal-tooling / developer-product...

Alexandr Wang & Lucy Guo

Founded 2016; data-labeling and data-engine platform for training AI/ML models and a major government/defense AI contractor. In Jun 2025 Meta took a ~49% stake for ~$14.3B, valuing Scale at ~$29B, and co-fou...

David Cramer & Chris Jennings

Founded 2012 as an open-source project; the widely-adopted application error-monitoring and performance/observability platform for developers. Valued ~$3B; a flagship open-source-first devtools business with...

Rob Woollen & Jason Frantz

Founded 2014; cloud-native BI and analytics that lets business users explore live warehouse data with a spreadsheet-like interface (deeply tied to Snowflake/Databricks). Raised a $200M Series D in 2024 at a ...

Patrick & John Collison

Founded 2010; developer-first payments infrastructure, the most valuable private fintech/infra company in the US (~$90B+ tuck-in tender valuations 2024–2025). A defining API-infrastructure company: 'seven li...

Paul Copplestone & Ant Wilson

Founded 2020; the open-source Firebase alternative — a Postgres-based backend-as-a-service (auth, storage, edge functions, realtime, vector search). A breakout among AI-app and indie developers; raised a lar...

Vipul Ved Prakash, Ce Zhang, Chris Ré & Percy Liang 🇮🇳

Founded 2022; a GPU/AI-cloud ('neocloud') for training and serving open-source models at scale. Raised $305M Series B (Feb 2025, $3.3B) then $800M Series C (Jul 2026) leaping to an $8.3B valuation. Co-founde...

Guillermo Rauch

Founded 2015 (as ZEIT); the frontend cloud behind open-source Next.js and, increasingly, an 'AI cloud' with the v0 generative-UI tool. Closed a $300M Series F in Sep/Oct 2025 at a $9.3B valuation. A central ...

Ion Stoica, Robert Nishihara & Philipp Moritz

Founded 2019 out of UC Berkeley RISELab; the company behind open-source Ray, the distributed-compute framework widely used to train and serve large AI models. A key AI-infrastructure/compute-orchestration pl...

Solomon Hykes (founder); Scott Johnston (CEO)

Founded 2013 (from dotCloud); popularized software containers and remains the default developer local-container toolchain (Docker Desktop, Hub, Build Cloud). Refocused on developer tooling after selling its ...

Kannan Muthukkaruppan, Karthik Ranganathan & Mikhail Bautin 🇮🇳

Founded 2016 by ex-Facebook/Nutanix engineers; open-source distributed SQL database (Postgres-compatible) for cloud-native, globally-scaled apps. A leading distributed-database challenger to CockroachDB and ...

AI model inference infrastructure

Founded 2019. Infrastructure for deploying and serving AI/ML models in production at scale (used by AI-native companies incl. Lovable). Raised a $150M Series D at a $2.2B valuation ($280M+ total) from Greylo...

AI go-to-market / sales data automation

Founded by Kareem Amin and Nicolae Rusan. AI-powered GTM platform that aggregates 100+ data sources and automates prospecting, enrichment and outbound. Raised a $100M Series C in August 2025 at a $3.1B valua...

AI customer support agents

Founded 2023 by Jesse Zhang and Ashwin Sreenivas (ex-Palantir, Citadel). Enterprise conversational-AI agents for customer support. Raised a $131M Series C (June 2025, $1.5B) co-led by Accel and a16z, then a ...

global HR, payroll & EOR platform

Founded 2019 in San Francisco by Alex Bouaziz and Shuo Wang. Global payroll, contractor management and employer-of-record platform serving 100+ countries. Raised ~$979M total; valued at $12B (Feb 2025). Nota...

enterprise AI search & work assistant

Founded 2019 by Arvind Jain (ex-Google, ex-Rubrik co-founder) and team. Enterprise AI search and agent platform that indexes a company's apps to answer work questions and run agents. One of the Bay Area's fa...

payroll, benefits & HR for SMBs

Founded 2011 in San Francisco by Josh Reeves, Tomer London and Edward Kim. Payroll, benefits and HR platform for small and mid-sized businesses. Raised ~$746M total; last valued around $9.5B, with steady exp...

AI agent engineering platform

Founded 2022 by Harrison Chase. Widely used open-source framework plus LangSmith/LangGraph tooling for building, observing and deploying LLM agents. Raised a $125M Series B at a ~$1.3B valuation (~$160M tota...

AI hiring & expert data-labeling marketplace

Founded 2023 by Thiel Fellows Brendan Foody, Surya Midha and Adarsh Hiremath (Bay Area high-school debate teammates). Started as AI-driven recruiting; pivoted to sourcing specialized human experts to train f...

usage-based billing infrastructure

Founded 2019 in San Francisco by Scott Woody and Kevin Liu. Real-time usage-based billing and metering infrastructure powering AI and SaaS companies (OpenAI, Anthropic among reported users). A key Bay Area f...

identity verification infrastructure

Founded 2018 in San Francisco. Configurable identity-verification and fraud/KYC infrastructure now positioning as the 'verified identity layer' for an agentic-AI world. Raised a $200M Series D in 2025 (led b...

workforce management (HR + IT + finance)

Founded 2016 in San Francisco by Parker Conrad and Prasanna Sankar. Unifies HR, IT and finance (payroll, devices, apps, spend) on one employee-data platform. Raised a $450M Series G in May 2025 at a $16.8B v...

enterprise AI customer-service agents

Founded 2023 by Bret Taylor (ex-Salesforce co-CEO, OpenAI chair) and Clay Bavor (ex-Google). Builds branded AI agents that resolve customer-service interactions, billed per successful outcome. Raised a ~$950...

automated security & compliance

Founded 2018 by Christina Cacioppo (also a notable woman founder). Automates security compliance (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, GDPR) and trust management for thousands of companies. Raised large 2024–2025 rounds...