Mediaboss Marketing

Workers and employers alike are always searching for new and better ways to work and collaborate faster and more efficiently.

The success of video conferencing service Zoom after its blockbuster 2019 IPO has only underscored this trend, even as workplace chat app Slack continues to see growth even under the spectre of direct competition from Microsoft itself.

Against this backdrop, investors are only too willing to invest millions in promising young productivity software startups, particularly those working in the cloud computing and automation markets, where it seems that there's still a lot of potential to be explored.

"We're in the early innings of productivity software. That's why they're growing faster than ever," Jason Lemkin, an active startup investor and the founder of SaaStr, a company that helps founders build cloud software businesses, told Business Insider.

Those companies are benefiting from a larger trend, where the rise of the cloud means that workers, rather than the IT department, can pick and choose which tools to use. It means that upstarts can compete with major vendors by offering specific, useful tools that are better than the legacy options after all, that's how Zoom and Slack established themselves in the first place.

"De-bundling and this sort of best of breed approach is what's happenedwe've all been sort of spoiled by the amazing software experience we get on our iPhone and all the apps that we use in our personal life and we expect that now in enterprise," Rama Sekhar, a partner at Norwest Venture Partners, told Business Insider.

Workers are also increasingly looking to automate routine tasks and processes to free up their time to work on the more creative parts of their jobs.

All this means there's many different ways to tackle productivity by creating new tools to get work done, by measuring how useful those tools are, and by making sure all those tools can connect so you can automate away repetitive tasks.

Business Insider spoke to investors and industry leaders to compile the following list of the top productivity startups to watch in 2020 (valuations are taken from PitchBook unless otherwise noted):

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13 productivity software startups to watch in 2020, according to VCs - Business Insider Nordic