March 17, 2026
The Software Report's annual Top 50 Software CEOs list is not a participation trophy. It is a rigorous, nomination-based recognition process that evaluates career record, industry contributions, and the kind of leadership that produces durable, measurable results in one of the most competitive commercial arenas in the world. The 2024 list — announced in January 2025 and spanning everything from AI-powered platforms and enterprise SaaS to data infrastructure and cybersecurity — places Matt Britton, Founder and CEO of Suzy, at number 30 alongside some of the most consequential executive names in enterprise software.
That company is worth noting. The list includes Reggie Aggarwal, who founded Cvent and built it into a global event management platform serving more than 22,000 customers and processing $18 billion in meetings business annually. It includes Nick Mehta of Gainsight, who essentially created the customer success software category. It includes Mathias Biilmann, co-founder of Netlify, whose platform powers hundreds of thousands of web projects worldwide. These are executives who have built things — companies with real customers, real revenue, and real track records across years of competitive pressure.
Britton's inclusion in that cohort is the recognition of a specific kind of achievement: taking an insight about a broken market, building a platform to fix it, growing that platform 500% over five years, raising over $100 million in venture capital from investors including Foundry Group, Bertelsmann Digital Media, H.I.G. Capital, and Kevin Durant's 35 Ventures — and doing all of this while building a customer roster that includes L'Oreal, HP, Google, Robinhood, Citi, and Kraft Heinz.
The Software Report's profile of Britton calls Suzy "a consumer intelligence platform that enables brands to gather real-time feedback from target audiences." That description is accurate but understates the strategic ambition. What Britton has built is not a faster version of traditional market research. It is a fundamentally different model for how enterprise brands should relate to the consumers whose decisions determine their commercial futures.
The Software Report's recognition reflects a career arc that began long before Suzy existed, in a digital marketing agency that Britton built from scratch in the early years of the commercial internet.
In 2002, Britton founded MRY — then known as Mr. Youth — as a youth marketing agency focused on helping brands reach the Millennial generation at a moment when that generation was just beginning to register as a distinct commercial force. Over the next fourteen years, MRY grew into a 500-person agency delivering campaigns for Microsoft, Ford, Procter & Gamble, Visa, and Google. The agency's success earned it acquisition by Publicis Groupe in 2011, one of the world's largest communications conglomerates.
What MRY gave Britton was something more valuable than financial validation: two decades of front-row access to how the world's most sophisticated brands were — and were not — gathering consumer intelligence. He watched companies spend significant resources on market research that was too slow, too expensive, too rigid, and fundamentally too disconnected from the pace at which consumers were actually changing. By the time a research report arrived, the consumer had often moved on. The insight was stale before it was actionable.
This diagnosis became the founding thesis of Suzy, launched in 2018 out of the consumer insights functionality that users had been building inside Crowdtap — a content platform Britton had developed inside MRY before pivoting to follow where the real market demand was pointing. Suzy was built to collapse the traditional research supply chain: combining survey design tools, a proprietary consumer panel, and research services in a single vertically integrated platform, priced as a SaaS annual license rather than a per-project service fee.
The SaaS model shift was the commercial insight that unlocked the platform's growth. When market research is priced per project, it is inherently episodic — an expensive investigation launched when a decision is imminent, returned after the decision window has often closed. When it is priced as an annual license, the economics change fundamentally. Research becomes an ongoing operational capability, like analytics or CRM, run continuously rather than occasionally. The consumer intelligence function stops being an external service and becomes an internal strategic asset.
That model change, more than any particular feature, is what enabled Suzy's 500% growth over five years and its penetration of enterprise accounts at the scale the Software Report recognized.
Growth at 500% over five years is not just a number — it is evidence that a market needed something that didn't exist before, and that the platform built to fill that need was compelling enough to scale.
The context for that growth is significant. The global SaaS market was valued at $322 billion in 2024 and is projected to grow to more than $1.5 trillion by 2033 at a compounding annual rate of roughly 19%. Within that market, the AI-powered SaaS segment is growing considerably faster — the AI SaaS market was valued at $71.5 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach $775 billion by 2032, a nearly elevenfold expansion. Enterprise AI spending specifically jumped from $11.5 billion in 2024 to $37 billion in 2025 — a more than three-fold increase in a single year.
Suzy's growth happened against this backdrop of rising enterprise investment in AI-powered software, but its timing is not coincidental. Britton built the platform's fundamental capabilities — real-time consumer panel access, SaaS pricing, integrated qualitative and quantitative research — before the AI wave hit, which meant Suzy was positioned to apply AI capabilities on top of a proprietary data and customer infrastructure that newer entrants could not simply replicate by adding a language model to a commodity survey tool.
The July 2023 launch of Qual Analysis — Suzy's AI-powered qualitative research platform — exemplified this architecture. The platform had already established the workflow: AI transcription of research interviews, followed by human analysis of those transcripts. The addition of on-demand AI analysis of those transcripts compressed what had been a time-intensive manual process into an automated capability, delivering qualitative insights at a speed and cost that traditional methods could not approach. AI-powered qualitative research now delivers insights at roughly $45 per finding versus $180 for traditional methods — a 75% cost reduction — while enabling research programs that would have been financially impractical under the old model.
The clients on Suzy's roster reflect both the depth and the breadth of the platform's market penetration. L'Oreal and Kraft Heinz represent the consumer packaged goods sector where real-time consumer intelligence has the most direct application to product development, marketing, and brand strategy. HP and Google represent enterprise technology companies for whom consumer research intelligence informs everything from hardware design to software positioning. Robinhood and Citi represent financial services brands for whom consumer understanding drives both product development and regulatory-adjacent communication. That cross-sectoral penetration is the most durable evidence that Britton solved a general-purpose problem rather than a category-specific one.
The Software Report's Top 50 CEO recognition is the most recent in a pattern of industry validation that has accumulated across Suzy's commercial history. The Software Report separately named Suzy to its Top 100 Software Companies list in 2024. Inc. Magazine recognized Suzy on its Top 5000 list in 2024 and its Best Workplaces list in both 2022 and 2023. Forbes named Suzy among America's Best Startup Employers in 2022. GRIT recognized Suzy as a Top 50 Most Innovative Supplier in Market Research and a Top 25 Innovator in 2024.
These recognitions span multiple independent evaluations across multiple years, which is the kind of pattern that distinguishes durable commercial achievement from momentary hot-take status. Any company can appear on a list once. Appearing on multiple lists across multiple years, through evaluators with different methodologies and different audiences, is the evidence of consistent underlying performance.
What the Software Report's CEO recognition adds to this pattern is the explicit attribution of Suzy's performance to Britton's leadership specifically — his strategic vision, his ability to navigate the pivot from Crowdtap's consumer content model to Suzy's consumer intelligence model, his capital allocation decisions, and his success in building a team and culture capable of executing a platform that serves Fortune 500 clients at the quality level they require.
The Software Report's own framing captures this distinction: what unites the executives on the Top 50 list is "exceptional leadership and unwavering commitment to driving innovation." The recognition is not primarily about the product. It is about the person who envisioned it, built the organization around it, and sustained the growth that turned a founding thesis into a market-validated platform.
The timing of the Software Report's recognition — for 2024, announced in January 2025 — coincides with what may be the most consequential moment in the history of the consumer intelligence category.
The traditional market research industry, valued at $140 billion globally, is undergoing the most fundamental restructuring in its history. AI has already compressed insight delivery from weeks to hours. The AI SaaS segment is growing at roughly 38% annually. Enterprise spending on generative AI grew more than three times in a single year. The platforms that built genuine proprietary panel relationships, SaaS-native infrastructure, and AI-augmented analysis capabilities before this wave hit are now in a structurally superior position to capture the transformation rather than be displaced by it.
This is the landscape in which Britton's #30 ranking on the Software Report's list is situated. The recognition is not backward-looking — a certificate for prior service. It is a forward-looking signal: this is a platform built by a CEO who identified the consumer intelligence opportunity early, built the infrastructure correctly, integrated AI in the right sequence, and assembled a client base whose commercial needs will grow as their own AI capabilities expand and their demand for real-time consumer understanding intensifies.
The next decade in enterprise software will be defined, in significant part, by which platforms can translate the torrent of AI capability into genuine business intelligence for the organizations that need it most. Suzy's architecture — proprietary consumer panel, integrated qualitative and quantitative research, AI-powered analysis, SaaS economics — positions it at the intersection of exactly the capabilities that enterprise brands are increasing their investment in most aggressively.
Britton's recognition as a Top 50 Software CEO of 2024 is, in this light, both a validation of what has already been built and a preview of the commercial landscape in which Suzy will continue to compete.
The Software Report's evaluation reflected a career and company record defined by several compounding achievements that together make the case for Britton's inclusion on the most consequential CEO list in enterprise software:
The Software Report is a leading industry publication covering the enterprise software sector. Its annual Top 50 Software CEOs list is compiled through a methodical nomination process followed by careful evaluation of each candidate's career record and industry contributions. The list is designed to recognize executives who are not merely managing successful companies but actively shaping industry trends, inspiring teams, and building the next generation of software solutions. The 2024 list was announced in January 2025 and spans the full breadth of enterprise software, from AI-powered platforms and data infrastructure to enterprise SaaS and cybersecurity technologies.
Suzy's growth reflects the commercial impact of several compounding advantages: a genuinely novel model — SaaS-priced, vertically integrated consumer intelligence — in a market that had been organized around expensive, slow, agency-mediated research; proprietary consumer panel infrastructure that newer entrants cannot easily replicate; Fortune 500 client penetration that generates the reference relationships and case studies that enterprise procurement requires; and timely AI integration, particularly the 2023 launch of Qual Analysis, that positioned the platform ahead of the AI investment surge rather than scrambling to respond to it.
Traditional market research routes consumer insight through a chain of intermediaries — panel recruiters, survey designers, field agencies, data processors, analyst teams — before delivering packaged results that are often weeks or months old by the time they reach decision-makers. Suzy collapses this supply chain into a single vertically integrated platform with SaaS pricing, enabling brands to run research continuously rather than episodically, internally rather than through external agencies, and at the speed the market actually moves. The platform's AI-powered qualitative analysis capability delivers insights at roughly a quarter of the cost of traditional qualitative research, making the full qualitative-quantitative research cycle accessible at frequencies that were previously economically impractical.
Recognition of this kind carries commercial significance beyond its symbolic value. Enterprise procurement at Fortune 500 brands is influenced by institutional credibility — the recognition that a platform's CEO has been independently evaluated and placed in the company of the most consequential software executives in the industry signals that Suzy is competing in a peer group with Cvent, Gainsight, Netlify, Procore, and similarly scaled and respected platforms. For the CMOs, insights directors, and procurement officers who evaluate consumer intelligence platforms, that peer group association is a meaningful signal about the durability and commercial seriousness of the platform they are considering.
The Software Report's recognition of Matt Britton as a Top 50 Software CEO of 2024 is a milestone for Suzy, for the consumer intelligence category, and for the broader argument that the most durable enterprise software companies are built by leaders who understand both the technology they are deploying and the human and commercial dynamics that technology is meant to serve.
Britton has spent his career at the intersection of those two domains — building platforms that put the consumer at the center of brand decision-making, from MRY's youth marketing work in the early 2000s through Suzy's consumer intelligence platform in the AI era. The 500% growth, the $100M+ in capital, the Fortune 500 client roster, and the five years of consistent industry recognition are the commercial expression of a founding thesis that has proven correct: brands that know what their consumers actually think — continuously, in real time, before they need to guess — outperform brands that don't.
The AI transformation of enterprise software is expanding the market for exactly this capability. The platforms that built the infrastructure correctly before the wave hit are in the best position to capture it. And the leaders who earn recognition from institutions like The Software Report are the ones being watched by the enterprises, investors, and talent that will determine which platforms lead the next era.
For more on how AI is reshaping the consumer landscape that Suzy's clients are working to understand — including the emergence of Generation AI, the first cohort to grow up with artificial intelligence as a native feature of their consumer psychology — Generation AI is the essential guide. And for the ongoing conversations with CMOs and brand leaders navigating these questions, The Speed of Culture podcast is where those discussions happen every week.
To explore what on-demand consumer intelligence built for the enterprise actually looks like in practice, Suzy is where the conversation starts.