Each year, Wing VC publishes the 2024 Enterprise Tech 30 (ET30) list, highlighting the most promising enterprise tech startups as determined by a survey of approximately 100 leading venture capitalists.
This year's list, the 6th edition, offers valuable insights into the current state of the industry and the trends shaping its future.
Survey respondents picked 10 companies by category (early, mid, late and giga), with the cut-offs determined based on funding amounts raised at the time of voting. Get the detailed methodology of how we surveyed participants and compiled the results.
In this post, I'll be sharing my analysis of the 2024 Enterprise Tech 30 list, focusing on the impact of Generative AI (GenAI), the prominence of infrastructure and the continued significance of product-led growth.
Here is the complete list of companies in the ET30:
1. GenAI is creating a sea of opportunities for startups
Of the 40 companies on the ET30, 17 were new to the list, which is a pretty large share of new companies. More strikingly, almost all of these companies are playing into GenAI in some way.
- Seven are directly building AI models or AI infrastructure.
- Three of the new companies are building data platforms and tooling, with a significant focus on supporting AI applications.
- Four of the new companies are applications that fall into one of two categories: AI-native apps that were not possible until 2 years ago, such as Harvey and Perplexity, and existing applications that have significantly enhanced their product offerings by integrating GenAI, such as Glean and Clay.
The early-stage companies in this year's cohort are remarkably young, with a median age of less than 2 years in business. This is the youngest median age since the inception of the ET30 list, underscoring the fact that many of these startups are capitalizing on the opportunities and momentum generated from the release of new GenAI tools. This again highlights that many companies are harnessing opportunities created in a “post-ChatGPT” world.
2. We’re still largely in the infrastructure and tooling build-out phase
On this year’s list, only 25% of the companies were classified as SaaS. This represents a significant shift in the composition of the list, as it ties the lowest percentage of SaaS companies since the inception of the ET30 rankings.
This emphasizes our current moment in the startup world, where many of the most promising companies are those building models, data infrastructure and other tooling to enable the builders of the next generation of products.
Almost half of the companies on this year's list were categorized as providers of either AI models and tools, or data-related tooling. This substantial representation highlights the critical role these technologies play in laying the foundation for up-and-coming applications. These companies are building the necessary precursors and enablers that will power the future of enterprise software.
At the same time, applications are adopting GenAI features at a rapid pace. Of the applications that made the list, 50% had launched significant GenAI features. Notably, 20% of these applications, namely Perplexity and Harvey, are GenAI-native and uniquely enabled by recent advancements in the field.
While questions remain over whether incumbents or startups will capture value at the application layer, I expect to see many more GenAI applications on the ET30 list in the coming years.
3. Product-led growth is still extremely important
While product-led growth (PLG) has seen a bit of a decrease in popularity recently, as some companies have plateaued or struggled to monetize their user base without layering in a sales motion, the reality is that it remains extremely important.
Of the 40 companies on the list, 30 have a significant product-led motion that supports self-serve onboarding that enables significant bottoms-up usage.
This is especially true for products that serve technical audiences, since we know developers and data scientists often don't like to be “sold to.” For the products targeting these audiences, almost all support a PLG motion, and for many of these companies, PLG is the primary strategy.
Looking at the top company in each stage makes the importance of PLG evident — Langchain, Pinecone, Figma and OpenAI all had a significant product-led growth motion.
How the ET30 List gives us a glimpse into the future of startups
From the transformative impact of GenAI to the ongoing importance of infrastructure, tooling and product-led growth, this year's ET30 list highlights the key trends shaping enterprise technology.
I'm excited to see how these developments continue to unfold and drive innovation in the coming years. For more in-depth insights and analysis on technology and business, sign up for my Substack newsletter, where I regularly share my thoughts on these topics.
