This Week in SaaS: Sep 22-29, 2025

🚀 Deal of the Month

• Anthropic (AI) — On Sep 2 Anthropic raised $13B in a Series F at a ~$183B post-money valuation. ICONIQ led, with Fidelity and Lightspeed co-leading.
  
  • Funding history:
    • 2021 – Series A: $124M at $1B
    • 2022 – Series B: $580M at $4B
    • 2023 – Series C: $450M at $5B
    • 2024 - Series D: $750M at $13B
    • Mar ‘25 – Series E: $3.5B at $61B
    • Sept ‘25 – Series F: $13B at $183B
  • Revenue
    • ARR grew from $1B in Jan ‘25 to $5B+ in Sep ‘25
    • Claude Code alone is tracking $500M ARR after 10x usage growth this summer powered by Claude Opus 4.1 and Sonnet 4.5
      

💰 SaaS Fundraises & Rounds

• Invisible Technologies (automation / “human + software” SaaS / ops automation) closed a growth funding round of $100M (Sep 22)
  
• Alvys (logistics SaaS) — $40M Series B for AI-powered TMS and marketplace capabilities in freight. (Sep 29)
  
• Spiral (data infrastructure / AI / SaaS adjacent) - Data infrastructure company for AI, raised $22M in a round (Sep 22)
  
• Polars (open source dataframes tooling) — $21M round led by Accel to further its data ecosystem impact. (Sep 29)
  
• Paid (agent billing infra) — $21M seed round to build the financial rails for the emerging “AI agent economy.” (Sep 29)
  
• Synthesized (synthetic data) — $20M Series A to support privacy-safe data pipelines for ML/SaaS stacks and expand software testing tools. (Sep 25)
  
• Anything (AI vibe coding app builder) — Raised $11M at ~$100M valuation to let nontechnical teams spin up apps fast (Sep 29)
  
• Petpooja (restaurant ops SaaS, India) — $15.4M raise (mix of primary + secondary) to expand restaurant coverage. (Sep 29)
  
• Rocket.new (dev tools / low-code SaaS) — $15M seed (led by Salesforce Ventures) for developer productivity tooling. (Sep 29)

📊 Recent SaaS M&A Deals

• Alchemer (KKR Portfolio) acquires Chatmeter — Combining feedback, reviews, and reputation into a unified “customer intelligence” stack. (Sep 24)
  
• Valsoft to acquire Quorum (vertical auto-dealer software) in an all-cash transaction valuing Quorum at ~$60M (Sep 22)
  
• PROS to be acquired by Thoma Bravo — ~$1.4 B deal, $23.25/share; takes PROS private, AI-powered SaaS pricing and selling solutions (Sep 22)

🏛️ Recent SaaS IPOs & S1 Filings

• Netskope (cybersecurity / SASE provider) - IPO Sep 17
  
  • IPO closed: 47.8M Class A shares at $19/share (top end of range)
  • Amount raised: $908.2M at $7.26B valuation
  • Financials & trends:
    • H1 2025 revenue: $328M (31% YoY growth)
  • Market reaction:
    • Debuted strongly: ~18% pop on first day
    • Extended gains post-IPO (~7% further)
  • Significance:
    • Reinforces that cybersecurity / SASE is a “hot sector”
    • Sends a signal about public market appetite for well-positioned, high-growth security/SaaS hybrid plays
      
• Navan (travel & expense SaaS) - S1 Filed Sep 19
  
  • Filed S-1 Sept 19 to list on Nasdaq later this year
  • FY25 revenue guidance: ~$537M, +33% YoY.
  • Net loss: –$181M (improving ~45% YoY)

✍️ Founder / Operator Takeaways

• AI is still commanding the narrative - Anthropic’s massive raise underscores that AI & LLM/agent infrastructure remain the gravitational center for SaaS R&D and product narratives. Every startup that can credibly “augment with AI” is advantaged.
  
• The security / “SASE + SSE + Zero Trust” vertical is re-rated - Netskope’s strong debut and PROS / Olo M&A moves both underscore that buyers and public markets believe security + networking SaaS stacks will rearchitect around hybrid, cloud, and AI threat surfaces.
  
• “Agent economy” tooling is the next frontier - Fundraises like Paid (billing rails for autonomous agents) reveal a layer beneath the apps — plumbing, orchestration, accounting, governance — that’s just beginning to emerge.
  
• Vertical SaaS still attracts PE / roll-ups - The Olo take-private, PROS deal, Alchemer’s acquisition: PE sees value in domain expertise + strong retention + enterprise contracts. For founders, this means M&A paths remain viable even outside the public exits, especially if Rule of 40 is > 40.
  
• IPO market is coming back, cautiously - Netskope’s strong debut + Navan’s filing suggest IPO windows are open, especially for SaaS / security plays with credible growth and improving margins. But execution, growth, retention, and profitability matter a lot.
  

📈 SaaS Multiples & Benchmarks

Public SaaS firm Medians (BVP Emerging Cloud Index)

• 6.1x TTM Revenue multiple
• 5.5x Forward Revenue multiple
• Gross Margin: 75%
• Annual Revenue Growth: 19%
• Net Profit/FCF: 19%
  

Private SaaS M&A Deal Medians (Aventis Private Company Data)

• 4.7x TTM Revenue / 22.4x TTM EBITDA

⭐ SaasRise Community Updates

The next Done-With-You B2B SaaS Growth Program starts Oct 16

• Train your marketing team how to scale up customer acquisition through ABM marketing, AI-personalized outbound, content marketing, and digital ad scaling.
• Designed for B2B SaaS scale ups with $1M to $100M in ARR
• Apply here to the program by Sep 30

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See you next Monday with the next edition of This Week in SaaS.

-Ryan Allis, CEO of SaasRise