SaaStr Annual 2019: Meet Our Sponsors

If you’ve ever wondered what it looks like when the SaaS universe gathers in one place, SaaStr Annual 2019 was basically that three packed days (February 5–7) in San Jose where founders, execs, operators, and investors showed up with notebooks, business cards, and the kind of optimism that can only be fueled by cold brew and ARR graphs.

But here’s the secret sauce: the sponsors. Not in a “thanks for the lanyards!” way (though… thank you for the lanyards), but in a “this is where you actually discover tools, partners, and shortcuts you’ll still be using a year later” kind of way. SaaStr Annual’s expo floor is intentionally designed to be the hubwhere mentoring, food, meetups, and hallway serendipity collide. Translation: you’re not wandering into a lonely vendor basement. You’re stepping into the center of the action.

Why Sponsors Matter at SaaStr Annual

Think of sponsors as the “operating system” behind the event experience. They help make the big stages possible, yesbut more importantly, they bring the practical stuff: live demos, real-world playbooks, and people who have seen your exact problem before. The sponsor hall is where a pricing debate turns into a billing architecture fix, a “our onboarding is messy” confession becomes a product tour makeover, and a casual chat about churn turns into a customer success strategy you can take home and use on Monday.

Sponsors also keep SaaStr grounded in reality. Keynotes are inspiring. Workshops are energizing. But eventually someone asks, “Cool… how do I actually implement this?” The sponsor floor is where “how” becomes a checklist.

How Sponsorship Tiers Work (And Why You Should Care)

SaaStr Annual 2019 grouped sponsors into tiersDiamond, Platinum, Gold, and Bronze. That mostly reflects sponsorship scope and visibility: the bigger the tier, the more surface area at the event (bigger booth presence, stronger brand visibility, sometimes deeper participation in programming and attendee experiences). For attendees, tiers are a quick navigation hack: Diamond sponsors tend to be category leaders; Platinum and Gold mix leaders with high-growth specialists; Bronze is where you often find scrappy innovators and “we’re about to be everywhere” up-and-comers.

Meet the Sponsors: The 2019 Lineup, By Category

There were 100+ sponsors at SaaStr Annual 2019. Listing every single one would turn this article into a phone book with better branding. So instead, let’s meet a smart cross-sectionorganized by what you, a sane human with limited time and unlimited Slack notifications, actually need them for.

1) Customer Success & Retention

Gainsight (Diamond) is one of the best-known names in customer successa natural magnet on the expo floor if you’re trying to reduce churn, improve expansion, or stop customer health scoring from becoming “vibes-based analytics.”

ChurnZero (Gold) showed up with a clear promise: help subscription businesses fight churn with a customer success platform built for retention and growth. If your NRR is wobbling or your CS team is drowning in spreadsheets, this is the kind of booth you circle twice.

ClientSuccess (Gold) also played in the CS lanegreat for teams that want a structured way to manage accounts, track outcomes, and keep renewals from becoming a last-minute panic sprint.

UserIQ (Gold) sat at the intersection of product and customer success, focusing on understanding user behavior and using that insight to drive adoption. If you’ve ever said, “Customers churn because they never used Feature X,” you know why this matters.

2) Product Experience, Onboarding & Analytics

Pendo (Diamond) is all about product experienceanalytics, in-app guidance, feedback loops, and the ability to answer hard questions like “Which features actually drive retention?” without starting a small internal war between Product and Data.

Appcues (Gold) leaned into user onboarding and in-app experienceshelpful if your product tour is currently “Step 1: Good luck. Step 2: Please don’t churn.”

Chartio (Gold) brought business intelligence and dashboards to the tablegreat for teams trying to make data accessible beyond the “only-two-people-know-SQL” phase. (And yes, Chartio was one of the sponsors SaaStr highlighted directlyalways a good sign that they’re active in the community.)

Looker (Gold) rounded out the analytics category for teams who want a robust BI layer and deeper data governance. If your reporting has “seven versions of the truth,” BI vendors become oddly therapeutic to talk to.

3) Marketing Automation & Growth

ActiveCampaign (Platinum) is a marketing automation and sales automation platform that started way back in 2003. SaaStr’s own sponsor spotlight called out the company’s evolution from simple contact outreach to a broader automation toolkit. If your growth motion includes email, lifecycle messaging, and CRM-adjacent workflows, this booth was basically a practical masterclass.

Mailchimp (Gold) needs little introduction. Even if you’re “too B2B” for newsletters, the truth is email still prints money when it’s targeted, timed, and not written like a robot trying to sell vitamins.

Single Grain (Gold) represented the performance marketing and growth agency worlduseful when you want to move faster than your internal hiring pipeline allows.

4) Sales, Revenue Ops & Pipeline Efficiency

SalesLoft (Gold) is a go-to name in sales engagement. If your outbound is inconsistent or your reps are reinventing the wheel every Monday, sales engagement platforms can help standardize the parts that should be standardizedso humans can focus on the parts that require actual human judgment.

Chorus.ai (Gold) lived in the conversation intelligence spacehelping teams learn from calls, improve coaching, and stop great deals from dying because someone missed a key objection.

LeanData (Gold) spoke directly to the RevOps crowd: routing, attribution, speed-to-lead, and the behind-the-scenes plumbing that makes “alignment” something you can measure instead of just chant in meetings.

Go Nimbly (Gold)another sponsor SaaStr spotlightedpositioned itself as revenue operations specialists with a roster of well-known SaaS customers. If your handoffs are messy, your systems are duct-taped, or your CRM has become a haunted house, RevOps pros are worth their weight in clean data.

5) Billing, Payments & Subscription Finance

This category was stacked, which makes sense: if SaaS is the business model, billing is the heartbeat.

Stripe (Gold) is financial infrastructure for businessespayments, money movement, and scalable revenue plumbing. If you’re building a modern SaaS billing experience, Stripe is often part of the conversationeither directly or as the thing powering whatever you’re using.

Chargebee (Platinum) focused on subscription billing and lifecycle management. If you’re dealing with upgrades, downgrades, prorations, invoices, dunning, and that one customer who insists on paying by carrier pigeon, a subscription billing platform can save serious time and revenue leakage.

Zuora (Gold) represented subscription management at enterprise scaleespecially relevant for complex pricing models and large, global billing needs.

ProfitWell (Platinum) was a familiar name for subscription metrics and pricing insightsideal for teams working on retention, monetization, and “how do we raise prices without a customer revolt?”

Recurly (Gold) rounded out the recurring billing crowd, while Brex (Platinum) brought modern finance tools and corporate spend into the mix.

And for the payments infrastructure heavyweights, First Data (Diamond) appeared on the Diamond sponsor list (later combining with Fiserv in 2019). If your company sells globally or deals with complex payment flows, these conversations get realfast.

6) Customer Support & Customer Communication

Intercom (Diamond) is synonymous with modern customer communication and support. The pitch is simple: help teams deliver better customer service at scale through a connected system of human support and automation. If your support queue is growing faster than your headcount, it’s hard not to stop here.

Zendesk (Gold) was another anchor in the support worldespecially for teams that need structured ticketing, omnichannel workflows, and mature reporting.

On the communications side, Zoom (Diamond) is the name everybody knows, while Dialpad (Diamond) leaned into a cloud communications platform increasingly shaped by AI. If your sales and support teams live on calls, this category directly affects revenue and customer experience.

And if you build communications into your product, Twilio (Gold) is the classic “developer-friendly” stopSMS, voice, authentication, and messaging workflows that power real product experiences.

7) Software Discovery & Buying Signals

G2 (Platinum) represented the software marketplace and peer review worlduseful whether you’re buying software or selling it. For vendors, it’s about trust and demand capture. For buyers, it’s about avoiding “surprise regret” six months into a contract.

And if you’re in the “how do we get found?” phase, sponsor conversations here often turn into concrete advice on reviews, category positioning, and how buyers actually make decisions when they’re three tabs deep and one Slack message away from changing tools.

How to Work the Sponsor Hall Like a Pro (Without Becoming That Person)

Set one goal per lap

Don’t treat the expo floor like a scavenger hunt for stress balls. Choose a theme: retention, billing, RevOps, onboarding, support. You’ll have better conversations and leave with fewer random trinkets you’ll find in a drawer in 2027.

Ask questions that force specificity

• For CS tools: “How do you measure time-to-value and automate intervention?”
• For billing tools: “How do you handle upgrades, prorations, and failed payments without manual cleanup?”
• For onboarding: “Can we target guidance by persona and behavior, not just role?”
• For RevOps: “How do you prevent routing rules from becoming spaghetti?”

Collect playbooks, not brochures

The best sponsor conversations end with something you can use: a checklist, a benchmark, a teardown, a “here’s how teams your size do it.” If the booth only offers a postcard and vibes, keep walking.

What Sponsors Get (And Why It Makes the Event Better)

Sponsorship at SaaStr Annual isn’t just logo placementit’s proximity to the highest concentration of SaaS decision makers in one venue. Sponsors show up because this audience is building, buying, scaling, hiring, and re-platforming in real time. And because the expo is placed at the center of the event experience, sponsors get meaningful foot trafficnot the “we saw 12 people and a lost intern” kind.

For attendees, that means the sponsor floor is unusually high-signal. You’re not just seeing tools. You’re seeing the ecosystem: how modern SaaS teams stitch together customer success, billing, analytics, support, and growth. It’s like walking through a real-life architecture diagramexcept it comes with coffee.

The Bottom Line

“Meet Our Sponsors” isn’t a formalityit’s a practical guide to what SaaS teams were using (and betting on) in 2019. Whether you were hunting for a customer success platform, tightening up billing, modernizing your support motion, or cleaning up RevOps, the sponsor lineup at SaaStr Annual 2019 covered the full stack of “how to scale” problems.

So the next time someone says, “I’m going to SaaStr for the content,” you can nod politelyand then whisper: “Sure. And I’m going for the sponsor hall… where the content turns into action.”

Experiences From the Sponsor Floor ( of Real-World Flavor)

Picture this: it’s early morning, you’ve got a badge that makes you feel strangely official, and the expo hall is already buzzing. The first thing you notice is the flowpeople aren’t treating the sponsor floor like a side quest. They’re camped out in conversations, bouncing between booths, and grabbing impromptu meetings like they’re collecting rare Pokémon.

Your first “accidental win” happens at a customer success booth. You didn’t plan to stop, but you overhear someone asking, “How do you actually define customer health?” and suddenly you’re three minutes into a conversation about leading indicators, onboarding milestones, and how to avoid the classic trap of measuring everything that’s easy and nothing that matters. Someone sketches a rough framework, someone else recommends a simple pilot, and you realize you got more practical value in seven minutes than you did from the last three internal meetings about churn.

Next, you wander into billing and payments territorybecause you’ve been meaning to “clean up” pricing for months, and somehow it never happens. A demo turns into a mini therapy session: upgrades, downgrades, prorations, annual prepay, mid-contract expansions, failed cards, and that one enterprise customer who insists on a purchase order workflow from 2009. The best part isn’t the product screensit’s the operator stories. “Here’s what broke when we changed packaging.” “Here’s the one metric we watched daily during migration.” “Here’s how we reduced involuntary churn.” You start taking notes like your notebook is a life raft.

By lunchtime, the sponsor floor feels like a living map of the SaaS ecosystem. Product analytics booths are packed with PMs debating adoption. Support platforms are demoing workflows that make your current inbox-based process look like a campfire with smoke signals. RevOps conversations sound like plumbing but with consequences: routing, attribution, automation, and how to stop your CRM from turning into a museum of outdated fields.

Then comes the most underrated experience: the “hallway handoff.” You meet someone at one booth who says, “Oh, if that’s your problem, you should talk to the team over there.” That sentence is gold. It’s how you jump past generic discovery and land in a conversation that’s instantly relevant. The sponsor hall becomes less like browsing and more like matchmakingtools to problems, people to people.

As the day wraps, you realize you’re leaving with fewer brochures and more clarity: what to fix first, what to measure, what tools might help, and what questions to ask your team back home. That’s the real sponsor-floor magic. It’s not the swag. It’s the moment you go from “We should improve this someday” to “We know exactly what to do next.”