The 10 Hottest SaaS Startup Companies Of 2025 (So Far)

Anthropic, MaintainX and Persona are among the companies to make the list.

The creator of one of the most widely used artificial intelligence tools on the market. An AI-powered asset management platform provider. And the vendor of an identity verification platform built for the AI age.

Anthropic, MaintainX and Persona are just some of the startups to make CRN’s list of the 10 hottest Software-as-a-Service startup companies of 2025 so far, selected for offering users cutting-edge technology under a familiar subscription-based, updated-online SaaS model.

2025 SaaS Startups

In November, Gartner predicted that public cloud end-user spending on SaaS would grow 19 percent year over year in 2025, reaching about $300 billion.

For this list, CRN considered companies founded within the last seven years. So while OpenAI raised $40 billion back in March, its 2015 founding date means the organization doesn’t appear here.

CRN reporters are publishing other lists highlighting advancement from this year, including the 10 hottest cybersecurity tools and products of 2025 (so far) and Amazon Web Services’ 10 coolest new products and tools of 2025 (so far).

Read on for some of the hottest SaaS startups of 2025 so far.

Anthropic

CEO: Dario Amodei

Headquarters: San Francisco

CRN is calling Anthropic—one of the largest AI startups in the world with a current valuation of over $61 billion—a SaaS company for this list in part because of the subscription plan it offers for its flagship Claude large language model, with paid plans that start at $17 per month, $200 billed up front.

The startup unicorn’s Claude brings together documents, tools, data and web knowledge to tackle complex questions and build code.

The AI startup raised $3.5 billion in a single Series E funding round in March with plans to use the money to advance its development of AI systems, expand its compute capacity, deepen its research in mechanistic interpretability and alignment, and accelerate its international expansion.

In May, Anthropic introduced Claude Opus 4 and Claude Sonnet 4 with the ability to use tools in parallel, follow instructions more precisely, and sustain performance over long-running tasks with thousands of steps and hours of continual work, according to the company.

CEO Amodei founded the company in 2021, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously worked at AI innovation rival OpenAI for about five years, leaving with the title of vice president of research. He also worked at Google for about a year as a senior research scientist.

Anysphere

CEO: Michael Truell

Headquarters: San Francisco

Like Anthropic, Anysphere has its flagship AI offer Cursor under a subscription model starting at $20 per month with some usage limits.

The startup’s Cursor aims to automate coding through predicting changes and surfacing answers from existing codebases, documents and files, according to Anysphere. Programmers can edit in natural language plus update classes and functions with a single prompt.

In June, Anysphere said it raised a $900 million round of funding and exceeded $500 million in annual recurring revenue.

Recent product innovation by the company includes enabling Cursor agents to work on web and mobile and releasing its Fusion model for the Tab code edit prediction and suggestion tool. Fusion promises nearly instant, higher-quality suggestions.

Truell co-founded Anysphere in 2022, according to his LinkedIn account. His resume includes internships with Google, Octant and Two Sigma, plus time as a researcher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Cast AI

CEO: Yuri Frayman

Headquarters: Miami

Lowered cloud costs, improved application performance and more developer operations efficiency are some of the benefits Cast AI touts for users of its automation platform.

The startup automatically right-sizes Kubernetes workloads, scales clusters and redistributes workloads to maximize node use and prevent overprovisioning, according to Cast AI. Users can track cost allocation to CPUs, memory, storage and other resources as well as automate AI model selection.

In May, Cast revealed that it closed a $108 million Series C round of funding that included SoftBank Vision Fund 2. It doubled its customer base between 2023 and 2024 to more than 2,100 organizations.

As a SaaS offer, Cast has free plans for its Kubernetes optimization and database optimization products. But paid plans for the Kubernetes offer start at $200 per month plus $5 per CPU for autoscaling up to 500 CPUs, optimizing up to four clusters, intelligent up and down scaling, rebalancing and more.

Paid plans for the database optimization product start at $250 per month, per instance for unlimited DB instances analysis and optimization, automated query optimization and fingerprinting and intelligent invalidation.

Innovations by the startup this year include fully integrating in-place pod resizing into its autonomous workload optimization engine and launching a database optimizer to improve caching.

Frayman co-founded Cast AI in 2020, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded Cujo AI in 2015. Comcast bought the company in 2020.

Cast AI is part of CRN’s 2025 Partner Program Guide.

ClickHouse

CEO: Aaron Katz

Headquarters: Berkeley, Calif.

An analytical database for generative AI, business intelligence, fraud, cybersecurity and other use cases is the promise of ClickHouse, which targets customers who seek a bring-your-own-cloud deployment model to bring SaaS to life even with strict data residency and compliance requirements.

The company aims to provide users with a fast, cost-effective, resource-efficient real-time data warehouse and open-source database, according to ClickHouse.

ClickHouse unveiled a $350 million Series C round of funding plus a $100 million credit facility led by Stifel and Goldman Sachs in May. ClickHouse has grown fourfold over the past year and exceeded 2,000 customers, including Anthropic and Tesla.

Katz co-founded the startup in 2021, according to his LinkedIn account. His resume includes about six years with Elastic as CRO. He also worked at Salesforce for about 12 years, leaving in 2014 as senior vice president of enterprise sales.

The basic ClickHouse plan is for $25.30 per 1 TB, per month for storage and about 22 cents per unit, per hour for compute. Data transfer for public internet egress starts at about 12 cents per GB, with inter-region egress starting at about 3 cents per GB.

Glean

CEO: Arvind Jain

Headquarters: Palo Alto, Calif.

Funds from Glean’s $150 million Series F round announced in June will go in part to growing the AI-powered work platform’s partner ecosystem, which already includes CRN Solution Provider 500 members Converge Technology Solutions, Ahead, Trace3 and SHI.

The startup wants to enable more integrations and new go-to-market partnerships as part of its channel push, according to Glean. It also expects to spend the money on AI security, enterprise search and agentic AI capabilities within its offers. The vendor passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in its latest fiscal year.

Glean’s product advancements this year include the introduction of Glean Agents, a horizontal agent environment for organizations to deploy AI agents at scale. The platform now powers more than 100 million agent actions annually, with plans to reach 1 billion by the end of 2025.

The vendor has also achieved deeper partnerships with Palo Alto Networks, Dell Technologies and Snowflake, according to the vendor.

Jain founded the company in 2019, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded Rubrik in 2014 and served as vice president of engineering. He also worked as a distinguished engineer at Google, leaving in 2014 after working on Google Fiber, MapMaker, YouTube and other offers.

MaintainX

CEO: Chris Turlica

Headquarters: San Francisco

MaintainX has set itself up for a summer of growth with a $150 million Series D round of funding to help boost its AI-powered asset management and maintenance technology while expanding its partner ecosystem.

The startup plans to use the funds toward expanding artificial intelligence and machine health monitoring capabilities, enterprise asset management capabilities and advanced predictive maintenance, according to MaintainX. The company counts former HashiCorp CEO Dave McJannet among its investors.

MaintainX’s partner program includes systems integrators, technology partners and other channel business models, according to the vendor. The vendor plans to lean on its ecosystem to help with real-time operational data through a sensor-agnostic approach that works with any industrial sensor or control system.

Recent product updates announced by MaintainX include enabling its AI CoPilot to recommend actions based on technician photos of an asset, automatic work order summaries from technician voice notes and the ability to link multiple assets to a single work order and apply shared procedures at once.

Turlica founded the company in 2018, according to his LinkedIn account. His resume includes founding Voo in 2014 and leading the chat platform technologies company as CEO until its sale to Townsquared in 2017. He served as director of product at Townsquared until 2018.

As a SaaS product, MaintainX’s paid plans start at $16 per user, per month billed annually for unlimited work orders with attached images, unlimited repeating orders and three months of access to advanced analytics.

Persona

CEO: Rick Song

Headquarters: San Francisco

Persona aims to build an identity verification platform for the AI age, taking into account how well AI can impersonate identities and beat traditional authentication tools.

The startup allows users to dynamically collect passive, active and behavioral signals without sacrificing end-user experience, according to Persona.

In April, Persona said it raised a $200 million Series D round of funding. It processed more than 300 million verifications in 2024 and doubled revenue and customer count year over year.

Product innovation this year has included more Know Your Business services to combat fraud and a partnership with Yardstik for background checks. The company’s paid plans start at $250 a month with a minimum contract term of 12 months.

Song co-founded Persona in 2018, according to his LinkedIn account. His resume includes about five years as an engineer at Square.

Persona offers a partner program for resellers, channel partners and other business models, according to the vendor.

Render

CEO: Anurag Goel

Headquarters: San Francisco

Render started 2025 with two major reveals: The startup surpassed 2 million developers on its platform and finished an $80 million Series C round of financing.

The startup bills itself as an improvement over legacy, simplistic cloud platforms that can’t scale and support users’ technical choices and an improvement over complex, costly public clouds.

The Render platform is language- and framework-agnostic, according to the vendor. It deploys in seconds, updates automatically, runs in a variety of managed environments and communicates across services that use any protocol.

After the funding round announcement in January, Render unrolled product improvements including workspaces compliant with federal health care regulations and single sign on integration with Okta, Microsoft and other identity tool vendors.

Goel co-founded Render in 2018, according to his LinkedIn account. He previously co-founded Crestle in 2016, which sold to Doc.ai about one year later. He also worked at Stripe for about five years, leaving as head of risk.

Under Render’s SaaS business model, paid plans start at $19 per user, per month plus compute costs with 500 GB of bandwidth included, room for collaboration with 10 team members, unlimited projects and environments and more.

SkillCycle

CEO: Kristy McCann Flynn

Headquarters: New York

A SaaS unified human performance and development platform that analyzes progress year-round, analyzes and addresses skills gaps and provides on-demand coaching is the promise of SkillCycle.

The startup has entered the artificial intelligence era with AI-powered analytics and personalized coaching.

A February regulatory filing by SkillCycle revealed that it had raised $2.55 million as part of a $4.75 million round of funding.

McCann Flynn co-founded SkillCycle in 2019, according to her LinkedIn account. She previously worked at consulting firm RGP for about three years.

Paid plans start at $5 per employee, per month.

StackHawk

CEO: Joni Klippert

Headquarters: Denver

StackHawk bills its platform as a premiere application security provider with API discovery, automated testing workloads and actionable remediation guidance.

In May, the startup revealed that it raised $12 million in additional funding to accelerate product innovation. Major updates to StackHawk this year include sensitive data identification during API discovery and an integration with GitLab, according to the company.

Klippert founded the company in 2019, according to her LinkedIn account. Her resume includes working at VictorOps for about five years as vice president of product. Splunk bought the incident management software provider in 2018, and Klippert continued as head of the VictorOps product until 2019.

As a SaaS company, StackHawk offers paid subscription plans starting at $49 per code contributor, per month with a 20-contributor minimum billed annually.