20 Emerging Project Management Companies & Startups
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The demand for project management startups is expected to grow substantially over the coming years.
According to a report from Mordor Intelligence, the market will hit $10.86B by the year 2029, an increase of $4.3B from 2024.
While large, established companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and SAP hold significant weight in the project management space, there are also many smaller, younger startups that focus on delivering project management functionality in a new way.
(Or for a specific vertical.)
In this article, we’ll profile 20 project management startups with strong search growth over the last five years.
1. Taskade
5-year search growth: 1,011%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: New York, New York
Funding: $5.2M (Seed)
What they do: Taskade is a project management and collaboration platform built for remote companies. The company was started by John Xie, Dionis Loire, and Stan Chang to offer businesses a complete workplace management tool rather than many disparate solutions. Taskade has amassed high-profile investors, including Hiten Shah, founder of KISSMetrics, Chris Golda, former Twitter Ad Center product lead and Coinbase investor, and more.
2. ClickUp
5-year search growth: 533%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Diego, California
Funding: $537.5M (Series C)
What they do: ClickUp’s productivity platform touts high levels of flexibility for different types of companies and projects. The company’s software offers features like documents, goals, different levels of views, and traditional task management abilities. Within a period of 6 months, ClickUp brought in over $100M in funding from investors, including Craft Ventures and Georgian, and is now valued at $1B.
3. Notion
5-year search growth: 2,100%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $343.2M (Series C)
What they do: Notion is a productivity and project management tool designed to provide workplace solutions for Engineering, HR, Marketing, Product, and other departments. The San Francisco-based startup recently brought in $50M as they re-evaluated their opinion on venture capital due in part to the coronavirus pandemic. Valued now at $2B, Notion has received financial backing from investors such as former Twitter VP Elad Gil, AngelList Founder Naval Ravikant, and Shana Fisher, whose other investments include Stripe and Pinterest.
4. Hubstaff
5-year search growth: 138%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2012
Location: Fishers, Indiana
Funding: Undisclosed (Private Equity)
What they do: Hubstaff is a time-tracking software that can be used with remote companies or teams that are distributed in the field. While not for lack of investor interest, Hubstaff’s leadership has opted to remain bootstrapped since their founding in 2012. Their reasons included no need or plan for additional funds and a desire to retain control of the company.
5. Funnelytics
5-year search growth: 50%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2017
Location: Toronto, Canada
Funding: $2.5M (Seed)
What they do: Funnelytics is a visual campaign management tool used to map and analyze marketing funnels. The software uses a canvas that combines data and strategy in a digital whiteboard, which helps to identify funnel-related bottlenecks. The startup has over 100,000 free users and more than 10,000 paying customers. In total Funnelytics has generated $3M in revenue ever since its founding in June 2018. Funnelytics has raised $2.5M in funding to date.
6. Akiflow
5-year search growth: 9,300%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2018
Location: Padova, Italy
Funding: $1.9M (Seed Round)
What they do: Akiflow is a project management tool that allows users to monitor tasks in their digital calendar. Primarily, Akiflow is used to streamline and automate personal task management. The platform integrates with other tools like ClickUp, Asana, and Google Calendar to offer more advanced team collaboration features. The startup has thousands of users and processed over 3 million tasks in 2023.
7. Filestage
5-year search growth: 200%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2014
Location: Stuttgart, Germany
Funding: $3M (Series A)
What they do: Filestage is a company that helps businesses manage the review processes for content. The German startup touts faster reviews, fewer emails, and hours saved as benefits of using their tool. Filestage completed a Series A funding round early this year that brought in €2.8M from Newion, Seed+Speed Ventures, and HTGF.
8. Fibery
5-year search growth: 108%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2020
Location: Nicosia, Cyprus
Funding: $8.3M (Series A)
What they do: Fibery is a no-code team collaboration platform. The product is designed to help organize a wide range of processes, including “product portfolios, roadmapping, ideation, and wikis”. Along with a dedicated feature set for user research. Fibery reached $11.5K (from 280 accounts) in MRR in March 2021, a 1.92x increase since November 2021. The startup has raised $8.3M in Series A funding.
9. Teamflow
5-year search growth: 0%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2020
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $49.9M (Series B)
What they do: Teamflow is a video-based workplace collaboration software designed to simulate the office environment virtually. Each team member has their own “video bubble” on a virtual office floor plan. And can “move around” to hear what others are saying around that bubble. Besides a Zoom-like video communication tool, Teamflow also has team collaboration features, like screen-sharing, scratchpads, and timers. They’ve registered over 50,000 hours of user testing during the private beta with over 1,000 users on their waitlist.
10. Gitea
5-year search growth: 223%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2016
Location: United States
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Gitea is a software project management platform that provides collaborative features for developers like source code storage, bug tracking, code review, kanban boards, and a team collaboration hub. Similar to GitHub, Gitea is a cloud-based service but also offers self-hosted capabilities to give users increased control over their repositories and data. Users can also integrate Gitea with other tools like Slack, Discord, MS Teams, and Lark to add more project management features.
11. Boardable
5-year search growth: 111%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2016
Location: Indianapolis, Indiana
Funding: $15.4M (Series A)
What they do: Boardable is a project management startup that provides an online platform for nonprofits and other organizations to manage meetings, tasks, and communication. With features such as meeting scheduling, document sharing, and task assignment, Boardable aims to simplify collaboration and increase productivity for teams of all sizes. Its user-friendly interface and affordability make it a popular choice for nonprofit organizations looking to streamline their operations.
12. Miro
5-year search growth: 99x+
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2011
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $476.3M (Series C)
What they do: Miro, which, until 2019 was named RealtimeBoard, offers project collaboration functionality for businesses through a digital whiteboard interface. The company, which boasts 5M+ global users, raked in $50M investment in 2021 from lead investor ICONIQ and others, including Google’s Vice President of Product and Google’s former Global Head of UX.
13. Clockify
5-year search growth: 600%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: Palo Alto, California
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Clockify is a project management platform that provides a free time tracking software to help businesses improve their productivity and track billable hours. With a simple and user-friendly interface, Clockify allows users to track time spent on tasks and projects, generate reports, and manage team timesheets. Its free plan, as well as its affordable pricing for advanced features, make it a popular choice for businesses of all sizes.
14. OneDesk
5-year search growth: 42%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2008
Location: Montreal, Canada
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: OneDesk offers a project management tool and helpdesk software married together in one platform. Key features include chat functionality, a customer support ticket portal, and integrations with Google, Slack, Salesforce, and more. OneDesk’s online media trail is sparse, but they did announce the acquisition of product management company Ryma Technology Solutions in 2012.
15. Airtable
5-year search growth: 128%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $1.4B (Secondary Market)
What they do: Airtable offers a reimagined spreadsheet and database platform that helps companies build business applications with no code. Howie Liu, a founder of Airtable, previously masterminded the email contact CRM company Etacts, which was backed in part by actor Ashton Kutcher and acquired early on by Salesforce.
16. Roam Research
5-year search growth: 1,800%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2017
Location: San Francisco, California
Funding: $9M (Seed)
What they do: Roam Research is a project management tool that provides a note-taking and knowledge management tool for individuals and teams. With a unique approach to note-taking that focuses on building a network of interconnected ideas and concepts, Roam Research allows users to organize their thoughts, collaborate with others, and track their progress on projects. Its powerful search and tagging capabilities, as well as its integrations with other productivity tools, make it a popular choice for knowledge workers, researchers, and creative professionals.
17. Hygger
5-year search growth: 325%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2017
Location: Newark, New Jersey
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Hygger provides a project management platform that empowers software development teams to build new features and products more efficiently. Hygger was founded in 2017 by Alexander Sergeev, who previously co-founded UX research company HumanoIT Group, trucker information app Cargolink, and Rocketapps, a maker of Apple apps and games.
18. Bluescape
5-year search growth: 2,100%
Search growth status: Peaked
Year founded: 2012
Location: San Carlos, California
Funding: Undisclosed
What they do: Bluescape is a collaboration platform that helps teams work together on projects in a visual, digital interface. The company, launched through a partnership between Obscura Digital and Haworth, aims to help cut wasted project time and improve teamwork for businesses including Mazda, Netflix, and Walmart. Bluescape was founded by Demian Entrekin, current CTO and previous founder of Innotas and Convoy Corp.
19. Scoro
5-year search growth: 2%
Search growth status: Regular
Year founded: 2013
Location: London, England
Funding: $23.5M (Series B)
What they do: Scoro is a workplace management company that gives businesses a way to manage projects, billing, and more in one platform. The company, founded in Estonia and based in London, has been recognized in Deloitte and Inc. and recently wrapped up a Series B funding round that amounted to $16.4M.
20. Cascade Strategy
5-year search growth: 103%
Search growth status: Exploding
Year founded: 2014
Location: Portland, Oregon
Funding: $40M (Series A)
What they do: Cascade Strategy is a platform that helps companies align their teams on common goals and carry out strategies. The software centralizes goals and KPIs, enables companies to execute their strategies, provides metrics with context, and more. Cascade was founded in 2013 by Tom Wright and Eric Perriard to help companies mobilize and enable their workforce.
Conclusion
As the work world embraces a more remote environment, forward-thinking businesses need to be both digitally savvy and flexible to succeed—and they need project management tools like the ones in this list to support them in those pursuits.
While each of these companies takes its own approach to project management, they all share the goal of helping companies use technology to simplify work and get more done.
