20 Skyrocketing Martech Companies & Startups (2024)
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The marketing technology space is growing at a breakneck pace.
(In fact, Statista estimates that there are now over 14,100 martech products out there).
However, the vast majority of marketing technology startups are either growing slowly. Or just scraping by.
Which is why we created this list of 20 fast-growing martech startups.
1. Substack
5-year search growth: 4,900%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $90.2M (Equity Crowdfunding)
What they do: Substack is a platform for launching and managing paid email newsletters. However, this fast-growing startup in the martech space is quickly adding features to help with newsletter discovery. For example, they currently feature newsletters (organized by topic) on their homepage.
Substack also recently launched its "Substack Reader" tool for reading all of a user's Substack newsletters in one place. Additionally, the newsletter company recently hit 3 million total paid subscriptions.
2. Manychat
5-year search growth: 118%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2015
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $23.1M (Series A)
What they do: Manychat is a software company specializing in website-based chatbots. However, they also have features that support Facebook Messenger and SMS communication. Manychat reports that they currently have over 1 million customers. And that their tool has supported over 4 billion "conversations" to date.
3. Flodesk
5-year search growth: 760%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2018
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Flodesk is an email service provider with a focus on sleek design. So, instead of funnels or marketing automation, Flodesk tends to emphasize the look and feel of each email. Flodesk's target user base is made up largely of small ecommerce site owners (especially in the beauty and fashion industries).
4. Aspire
5-year search growth: -5%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $27.3M (Series A)
What they do: Aspire is a database of social media influencers. Specifically, the tool allows businesses to find influencers, connect with them, and track campaigns over time. With clients ranging from Walmart to small DTC brands, AspireHQ is one of the leaders in the influencer marketing tool space.
5. Heepsy
5-year search growth: 18%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2016
Location: Bilbao, Spain
Funding: Undisclosed (Non-Equity Assistance)
What they do: Heepsy connects brands with influencers on Instagram and YouTube. Besides a database of 11M influencers, they also have a feature for identifying the actual influence level of each account. Heepsy currently boasts over 10k customers, including big names like Ikea and Red Bull.
6. Visme
5-year search growth: 66%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: Rockville, Maryland
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Visme is software for creating visual assets, including infographics, Facebook ad creatives, and videos. The company reports that they currently have over 4 million users from 120 different countries. And that they're a completely bootstrapped startup.
7. Mangools
5-year search growth: 153%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2014
Location: Bratislava, Slovakia
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Mangools is a set of software tools for SEO and content marketing. Specifically, the startup offers tools for link building, keyword research and competitive analysis. They're known for pricing that's significantly lower than some of the more comprehensive competitors in the space (like Ahrefs and SEMrush).
8. Contentful
5-year search growth: 34%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: Berlin, Germany
Funding: $349.6M (Series F)
What they do: Contentful is a content marketing platform for planning, creating, publishing, and scaling content marketing (with a focus on enterprise organizations). In other words, Contentful is a CMS that includes features for content team collaboration. The company reports that it has over 2,000 clients.
9. Brevo (Formerly Sendinblue)
5-year search growth: 3,700%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2007
Location: Paris, France
Funding: $197.7M (Series B)
What they do: Sendinblue started out as an email marketing tool (like Mailchimp). However, they've recently expanded their offering to include a CMS, a website chat tool, and the ability to communicate with customers via SMS. The company reports that it now has over 20,000 paying customers. Sendinblue rebranded to Brevo in May 2023.
10. Rank Math
5-year search growth: 233%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2020
Location: New Delhi, India
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Rank Math is a martech startup known for its SEO WordPress plugin. In addition to the free plugin, they sell a premium version that includes keyword rank tracking, Schema features, and support. The company currently supports over 2.9 million active users.
11. Xiaohongshu
5-year search growth: 3,233%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2013
Location: Shanghai, China
Funding: $917.7M (Series E)
What they do: Often referred to as "China's Instagram," Xiaohongshu is a social media and e-commerce platform with over 450 million registered users. Users can create and share photos, videos, live streams, and detailed reviews. New updates to the platform also allow users to discover and directly purchase new products within the app.
The company also owns and operates redMALL for e-commerce fulfillment, a cross-border marketplace that lets Chinese consumers purchase international products directly from overseas brands and retailers.
12. Upfluence
5-year search growth: 137%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $3.9M (Series A)
What they do: Upfluence is an influencer marketing tool designed specifically for ecommerce. Their platform boasts 4 million total influencers along with proprietary metrics for evaluating the potential reach of a campaign with each influencer. One feature that makes Upfluence a little bit unique compared to other influencer databases is the ability to measure ROI within the tool. Upfluence reports that they currently have 1,000 customers, including Verizon and Amazon.
13. Bonjoro
5-year search growth: -40%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2017
Location: Sydney, Australia
Funding: Undisclosed (Seed)
What they do: Bonjoro is a tool for creating "personalized videos at scale". In other words, it lets customer service and sales staff create and share videos with potential clients and customers. The idea is that sending a video instead of a text-based email will add a "wow" factor to outreach messages and email replies.
What separates using Bonjoro from a video recording tool like Loom is that Bonjoro can integrate with a CMS. And supports CTAs so customers can take action right away.
14. Ahrefs
5-year search growth: 233%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2010
Location: Singapore, Singapore
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Ahrefs is a search engine optimization tool suite geared towards marketing professionals and agencies. Their web crawler indexes 8 billion pages per day. And their link database currently contains data on about 12 trillion links.
15. Artlist
5-year search growth: 270%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: Tel Aviv, Israel
Funding: $48M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Artlist runs several different platforms for royalty-free media, including audio, images and video content. Perhaps their most popular platform, Artgrid, boasts a library of thousands of HD and 4k video clips.
16. Wavve
5-year search growth: 106%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2016
Location: Charleston, South Carolina
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Wavve is web app for repurposing audio content (namely, blog posts) into video. These clips are typically shared on Twitter and YouTube in order to raise awareness of a long-form podcast episode.
17. Fourthwall
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2019
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $17M (Series Unknown)
What they do: Fourthwall is a platform for creators to create and launch homepages, online stores, and membership services. Notable Fourthwall features include a custom website builder, print-on-demand services, members-only paywalls, and more. Today, more than 50,000 creators are marketing their products and services on the platform.
18. Brandbassador
5-year search growth: -36%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2017
Location: London, UK
Funding: Undisclosed (Angel)
What they do: Brandbassador is designed to help turn customers into influencers and brand ambassadors. In other words, instead of cold outreach to Instagram influencers, businesses can use Brandbassador to find loyal customers. And encourage them to spread the word about their brand. More than 550 e-commerce brands currently use Brandbassador.
19. Designrr
5-year search growth: 270%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: Newark, Delaware
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Designrr is a web app for creating ebooks out of existing content (like a YouTube video, podcast episode transcript or blog post). In other words, the tool extracts text from a given document. And turns that content into an ebook.
20. Beehiiv
5-year search growth: 9,600%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2020
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $50.7M (Equity Crowdfunding)
What they do: Beehiiv is an all-in-one newsletter platform for online creators. The platform allows users to create, send, and track newsletters using various publishing, growth, and monetization tools. The startup also launched the Beehiiv Ad Network. This feature connects brands with creators to place ads in their newsletters for instant monetization. Currently, the startup now hosts over 20,000 active newsletters after their lastest funding round.
Conclusion
That sums up our list of martech startups to keep a close eye on in 2024.
If there's one thing that ties many of these companies together, it's content.
As you may have noticed, much of the software on this list is designed to help marketing teams scale up their content.
Another common feature is the large number of SaaS companies designed specifically for influencer marketing. With influencer marketing becoming a go-to channel for many brands (especially in DTC), it makes sense that we'd see more software designed to help brands find and collaborate with social media influencers.
