Our Bread & Butter Enterprise SaaS Thesis

Here in Minnesota, we are lucky to be in the land of 10,000 lakes. We are also a land of many headquarters. Minnesota is home to the highest number of Fortune 500 companies per capita in the nation with 16 companies based here. We’re also home to 50+ companies that do north of $1B in annual revenue.

It is against this backdrop that our team at Bread & Butter Ventures continues to focus on Enterprise SaaS as one of our three core pillars of investment alongside our healthtech and foodtech practices. SaaS refers to “software as a service,” meaning that companies offer cloud-based products that are accessible across devices and sold under annual or recurring revenue contracts. This software is sold B2B and can be used by large enterprises or smaller businesses alike.

The global SaaS market was estimated at $165.9B in 2021 and is projected to reach $344B by 2028 with a compounded annual growth rate of 11%. With these tailwinds in place, we’re diving deep into a few core themes over the coming year.

Future of Work & Workforce Development

The ways in which we work are transforming faster than ever before, across industries and across the globe. The ways in which people work — in globally distributed teams, in hybrid or remote-first environments — has fundamentally changed. Automation and tech-enablement are shifting the labor markets in ways that have both near-term and long-term effects. The fundamental desire workers have to be connected continues to grow. Some version of remote work has become relatively ubiquitous within enterprises.

We are actively looking at a number of themes within the future of work and workforce development:

• Sourcing & hiring: leveraging AI and tech-enablement to streamline and drive down cost in recruiting the right talent; helping candidates optimize in the interview and hiring process
• Employee retention & advancement: democratization of access to leadership development & training
• Software that empowers people to thrive in the workplace/connected communities
• Software that powers alternative education pathways/workforce development
• Tech that helps enterprises understand their customers, analytics, and how they engage
• Unique benefit platforms/HR tech that enables companies to be hypercompetitive in their offerings

Future of Supply Chain

The messy middle is in a pressure cooker. Any company that ships, leverages warehouses, has a logistics infrastructure or manufactures something is working on what the future of their supply chain looks like. Talk to any enterprise about current initiatives and you are likely to hear some form of “the digitization of our supply chain.” Delays, shortages and inflationary pressures have all recently impacted an already imperfect supply chain. While these may be cyclical they certainly have shone a hot light on the space. Perhaps the biggest challenge to our messy middle is labor shortages. A Deloitte report predicts that by 2028 there will be over 2.4 million unfilled manufacturing jobs in the US. In 2021 there were already 33,000 unfilled trucker positions. Just two examples that help exemplify what anyone already dealing with labor shortages is feeling today. Blue collar labor shortages have the potential to cripple enterprises. Supply chain technology isn’t sexy but it does represent a tremendous opportunity.

A few areas of interest:

• Automation: Anything that takes the pressure off of labor shortages, including robotics.
• Efficiency Tools: How do we make our existing labor force more effective and efficient?
• Fintech: Financing the future of the supply chain and embedded financial opportunities.
• Circular Supply Chain: Innovation driving a more sustainable supply chain.
• We leverage our “Minnesota homefield advantage” to partner with titans of industry. Through our Bread & Butter Innovation Circle we work with 3M, Allianz, Bremer Bank, Ecolab, C.H. Robinson, CHS, General Mills, Hormel, Mayo Clinic, Schwan’s Company, Securian Financial, Stella, U.S. Bank, Xcel Energy and more. Our goal is to build connective tissue between these industry leaders and the emerging tech startups in these verticals as an opportunity for commercial partnerships, supplier relationships, co-investment and M&A opportunities, and more.

If you’re a startup building in the future of supply chain or the future of work, we’d love to hear from you. Sign up for open office hours with our team or drop us a note via our website!