Upcoming: the Main Insight Events 2025
Read more about the Main Insight Events in the Nordics, North America, Benelux and DACH.
Read more about the Main Insight Events in the Nordics, North America, Benelux and DACH.
The Hague, February 19, 2025 – Main Capital Partners released its first ever Main Software 50 Benchmark Report today. Based on data from hundreds of software companies in Northwestern Europe, the report shows key trends, challenges and opportunities within the sector. This offers entrepreneurs, management teams and experts a reliable and objective way to measure their business against peers in the Benelux, DACH and Nordics regions.
The Main Software 50 Benchmark report outlines findings around three key topics: the different opportunities and challenges faced by small versus mid-sized and larger software companies, the advantages of being a SaaS leader, and the unexpected side-effects of R&D spend.
To enable founders and management teams to accurately benchmark their company, the report categorizes most findings based on company revenue. This ranges from less than 1M EUR for the smallest companies and start-ups, to over 10M EUR for the largest companies and international scale-ups.
While the benchmark shows that attracting and retaining talent is a common challenge, larger companies face this struggle much more frequently. Over half of companies with more than 10M EUR in revenue say they are running into this issue, limiting their ability to scale and expand their operations internationally. Meanwhile only 1 in 3 companies with less than 1M EUR in revenue see the same challenge.
We also see that Software as a Service (SaaS) revenue in the software market is on the rise. In the Benelux for example, from 2020 to 2024, its share in companies’ overall revenue rose from half to just shy of three quarters. And while the Nordics see a similar prominence for SaaS revenue, the DACH region is lagging behind. Just 38% of their revenue comes from this model.
Why is this so important? Read the full report to discover the link between SaaS revenue and higher Research and Development (R&D) spend. In turn, more R&D leads to more easily attracting and retaining talent.
The benchmark report is built on data from the Main Software 50 ranking. Companies submit this data, including financial metrics such as revenue growth, SaaS revenue share and international revenue, to contend for the Main Software 50 Awards. By considering more than just revenue growth, Main has developed a comprehensive ranking method to ensure a well-rounded assessment of each company’s performance.
Main Capital believes that software companies are the engines of the digital economy, and the Main Software 50 Awards give deserved recognition to outstanding companies in the software industry. After starting in 2012 in the Benelux, the DACH and Nordics events have been hosted since 2022 and 2024 respectively. The data used for the ranking are verified by independent research organizations: Dialogic for the Main 50 Benelux, Fraunhofer for the DACH region and Menon for the Nordics. No jury is involved in creating the final top 50 ranking.
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