In this SaaS District video, Akeel Jabbar, General Partner and Investment Director at Horizon Capital, outlines three high‑growth SaaS sectors he would bet his net worth on for the next three to four years. He first highlights cybersecurity, noting the low security maturity of many firms, the $19 billion European security budget, and the fact that consultants—not software—currently control that spend, creating a clear opening for SaaS solutions. Second, he points to data semantics and analytics, emphasizing the massive, unstructured data stores in legacy companies, the lack of dedicated data‑science teams, and the manual, engineer‑driven data wrangling that could be automated with intelligent SaaS platforms. Third, he discusses job‑specific or service‑specific SaaS and APIs that automate repetitive, low‑value tasks, citing UiPath as a prime example of successful automation. Throughout, he urges founders and investors to look beyond comfort zones, build products that replace manual consulting or engineering work, and capture the cost‑saving potential for businesses. The video concludes with a call for audience engagement on their own investment interests.
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It's been a crazy year for everybody, as you can imagine. If you're looking to get into the SaaS space and looking for a hot industry to focus on, you're looking to get outside your comfort zone, maybe this is your first product, or maybe you failed on your first SaaS business and are looking to build a next business, I'm gonna give you guys 3 industries where I would focus on, where I would go all in on and bet all my net worth, which I'm extremely bullish on for the next 3 to 4 years. Hey guys, welcome back to another video of SaaS District. My name is Akeel Jabbar. I am the general partner and investment director at Horizon Capital, where we work with SaaS companies in the early or mid-level stage who are taking to— looking to take their business to the next level. Now I get this question all the time of people asking, what industries are you guys focusing on? What would you invest in? What would you build if you were starting all over today? And I want to talk about 3 industries which I'm extremely bullish on, and I see huge opportunity to monetize and build a product around. So number one, the first industry that I'm super bullish on is cybersecurity. With more people moving to work remotely and companies just not set up for having the right systems to protect their data, to protect their IP, to protect their business, there's huge opportunity as this market continues to grow to take this market by storm. In general, the level of security with traditional companies is actually extremely, extremely low. You'd be surprised on how low it is. Now I want you guys to think of a super interesting stat on why I love this industry. The overall budget is $19 billion for security in Europe. And do you know who's entirely trusted with that budget? It's consultants. Okay? It's not software, it's not automation, it's not the tools and the encryption. It's consultants who are given that budget to manage and try to figure out how to make their business more secure. Knowing that fact, you could look at implementing and solving a lot of these solutions by— that are being done manually by building a clear product to help them do it with a SaaS product that you built for these markets. So that's number 1, cybersecurity. Number 2, data semantics or data analytics. Now there's literally terabytes of data being stored and created across all these older companies. A lot of companies are massive. They have all this data. There is no orchestration. There's no data science team there to make it smart. There's nobody there to analyze it, to be able to build predictions, to build models off. They're all currently being done manually by engineers who are trying to gather the data, whatever small data pieces they have. They try to analyze it and they try to make sense of it all. But there is literally way too much data for a few engineers to look at. So that adds to my first point is there's these opportunities where, you know, engineers, Consultants are now doing all this work manually, and there's an opportunity to build a software that's able to gather all of it, analyze it, look at it, and provide a solution that a human being cannot do on its own. Which goes into my third point, my third industry that I love, which is job-specific or service-specific SaaS. And that could be a SaaS, or this can be an API specifically. And what I mean is, what are these one tasks that are being repeated on a daily basis, one, there's no clear value in the work and there's no clear improvement on the performance of the company or the person you're paying. There's room to automate a lot of those tasks or services. So you can see all, there's a trend here across all these industries is you're looking to automate tasks or services that are currently being done manually or by human beings that a simple system can take repeated and that can be built into a nice product or SaaS. And sold to the market that'll save tons of money for businesses. So one example of a SaaS company that I think is doing this really, really well that I suggest you guys check out for inspiration is UiPath. So uipath.com, check them out and you'll see exactly what I'm talking about. So that's it guys. Those are the 3: cybersecurity, 2, data semantics, and 3, job-specific services or APIs that replace tasks or services. So that's it guys. Hope you guys enjoyed this video. If you guys liked it, comment below. Let me know what are industries that you're currently investing on, building in, and what are some that you see opportunities that you would invest your own capital in as well. All right, thanks guys, and see you on the next video.
