Vendr Counted the Competition: Mature Categories Are Adding Vendors at 25% a Year
Vendr can count how many products its customers buy in a category. In mature ones the number grows 25 to 30 per cent a year — which is the evidence behind Ariel Diaz's argument about speed.
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Vendr sits in an unusual position to answer the question “is your category getting more crowded?” It processes a slice of the world’s software spending on behalf of the companies doing the buying, which means it can count vendors rather than guess at them.
Ariel Diaz, Vendr’s co-founder and chief strategy officer, brought that count on stage as evidence for a claim about startups generally.
The number is not revenue and not users. It is how many distinct products Vendr’s customers were buying in a mature category, and it grew by a quarter to a third in twelve months. “That’s a lot of products out there,” he said. “These are products that increasingly are harder to differentiate, but you’re still getting new entrants coming into the space.”
Why that makes velocity the only advantage left
Diaz’s thesis runs in three steps, and the middle one is what the vendor count is for.
- Opportunity and resources are abundant. Capital flooded in, and more of the stack you need is plug-and-play — “you can spin up a few npm installs, your favourite stuff, spin a bunch of great technology up.”
- So the barrier to entry collapses and competition intensifies. This is where the category counts land: even mature categories are adding entrants at 25 to 30 per cent a year.
- So speed is the only durable edge. Not the idea, not the head start.
The step most founders will resist is the third, because it discards the thing they were told to build: a category. Diaz says the head start is real and says it is nearly worthless now.
Category creation used to be maybe a multi-year head start. Now it’s a few months.
Ariel Diaz, co-founder and chief strategy officer, Vendr
He had a live demonstration to hand. “We have three competitors here,” he told the room, gesturing at the booths outside. “We’ve got multiple people in the security and SOC 2 automation space here.”
Velocity is a vector, and he means it literally
The word choice is doing real work. Speed is a scalar; velocity is speed plus direction, and Diaz insists on the second half because it changes what you do when you are unsure.
“In some cases you might want to go slower speed, but find the right direction and then accelerate.” At Vendr this splits the company’s own objectives into two modes. Where the goal is known, the work is operational efficiency and shipping fast. Where it is not, the mode is what he calls wayfinding: one of the company’s objectives that year was to find product-market fit in a new initiative — at a business that was already well past finding it once.
A mature sales team of about 100 and a product organisation of similar size, working an aggressive roadmap. “Pretty clear waypoints, and we’re just moving fast, increasing speed towards a known direction.”
A new initiative still hunting for fit. “We’re moving slowly, we’re finding product-market fit, we’re kind of heat-seeking. And then as we get more signals, we can start increasing the speed.”
The company made velocity one of four company values — helped, he admits, by the alliteration: “Vendr is the name of the company, so we call it V is for velocity.”
How you measure it, and where you shouldn’t try
Asked how velocity is tracked, Diaz gave a different answer per function and warned against forcing a number where one does not belong.
For product, the unit is customer value, and he is precise about what it is not. “Not how quickly are we writing code, not how quickly are we shipping features, but how quickly are we delivering customer value.” Measuring that stays “a little squishy” — product-board signals, customer satisfaction, feedback through customer success — and he thinks there is “a lot of potentially bad effort” in trying to make it more specific than that.
For go-to-market the units are ordinary: pipeline generation for marketing, revenue or ARR for sales, sliceable into first-year total contract value. The decision-making rubric he cites is Amazon’s one-way and two-way doors — reversible decisions get made fast, irreversible ones get deliberation.
company velocity = Σ individual vectorsDiaz’s framing: raise each person’s magnitude, and align their directions.
The vector model gives him two dials rather than one. “You need to increase the magnitude of all the individuals in the company, and you need to make sure they’re aligned pretty well.” A fast team pulling apart sums to very little.
What Vendr’s own numbers show
Diaz was three-time founder and CEO before this, most recently of Blissfully, a SaaS management platform that merged with Vendr about a year before he spoke. He describes Vendr at that point as post-product-market-fit and having raised $200 million.
The GetLatka profile bears that out. Vendr raised a $60 million Series A in April 2021 at a $600 million valuation, then a $150 million Series B in June 2022 that made it a unicorn — co-led by Craft Ventures and SoftBank — for $216 million in total.
- Feb 2020 · Revenue $6.2M.
- Apr 2021 · Revenue $18M, with 68 people.
- Nov 2022 · Revenue $29.2M.
- Nov 2024 · Revenue $94.8M.
The headcount line is the one that complicates the story. Vendr recorded 400 people in January 2023, 296 in October 2024 and 225 in November 2025 — so revenue more than tripled from 2022 to 2024 while the company got materially smaller. Whatever else that is, it is a company that changed direction and did it quickly, which is the thing Diaz was arguing for.
He closed with a proverb, delivered as a correction to his own bear joke.
Every day a lion wakes up, and if he doesn’t outrun the slowest gazelle, he goes hungry. And every day a gazelle wakes up saying, if I don’t outrun the fastest lion, I’m not gonna see the next morning. So either way, whether you’re a lion or gazelle, you’re running. Every day, you’re running.
Sources — Ariel Diaz, co-founder and chief strategy officer of Vendr, speaking on stage; recording captured 17 March 2023. Revenue, headcount and funding figures from the Vendr profile on GetLatka, with dates as recorded; the Series B amount, date and valuation are from Vendr’s own June 2022 announcement and contemporaneous reporting.
