Founding Story · 2021
In the spring of 2021, Mira Okafor left a senior analyst seat at Gartner. The reason she gave in her resignation letter was simple: she had watched the analyst industry drift, year over year, toward a model where the loudest vendors got the brightest placement — and the buyers who relied on that placement were the ones paying the price in tooling mistakes, integration debt, and shelf-ware.
Devon Reyes had spent the previous four years at Product Hunt and saw the same disease from the buyer side. He had personally run more than two hundred SaaS evaluations inside growth-stage startups and knew that the difference between a good comparison and a bad one was almost never the product — it was the incentive structure behind the ranking. If the platform took money from vendors to surface them, the ranking was already compromised before the first reviewer logged in.
The two met through a mutual friend in Austin, sketched the architecture of ProductSifter on a single sheet of butcher paper, and incorporated the company that summer. The first product was a single comparison page for project management tools. The founding promise — written into the operating agreement, not just the marketing copy — was that ProductSifter would never sell placement. Vendors could pay only on qualified lead delivery, after a buyer had already expressed interest. That promise was codified in November 2024 as a publicly published Transparency Charter, updated quarterly.
Five years later, the platform covers 4,217 SaaS products across 84 categories and is used by 47 of the Fortune 500 procurement departments. The original butcher-paper sketch still hangs, framed, above the reception desk at 2401 East 6th Street.
Leadership & Team
Co-founder · Chief Executive Officer
Six years as a senior analyst at Gartner covering enterprise collaboration and workflow software before founding ProductSifter. She leads the research and methodology committees and writes the quarterly Transparency Charter update.
Former Senior Analyst, Gartner Research
Co-founder · Chief Operating Officer
Four years leading community and launch operations at Product Hunt, where he ran more than 200 SaaS buyer evaluations for growth-stage startups. He owns the vendor relationships, integrations catalog, and the qualified-lead delivery model.
Former Lead, Product Hunt
11 analysts
Former researchers from Gartner, Forrester, and G2 who run the category coverage, vendor vetting, and the Stack-Fit Score™ methodology.
14 engineers
The team behind the API-first data layer, audit-trailed exports, and the integrations catalog covering 4,200+ verified connections across the SaaS ecosystem.
Headquarters
ProductSifter is operated from a single third-floor suite in a renovated East Austin warehouse, a six-minute drive from the Texas State Capitol. The team is deliberately co-located: the research bench sits one floor up from the engineering team, and the vendor relations desk is deliberately placed next to the buyer-success desk so that no one can forget which side of the marketplace the company is on.
The office is open Monday through Thursday. On Fridays the entire team works remotely — a policy written into the employee handbook on day one, and one of the reasons the team has retained every founding engineer through Series A.
Funding & Scale
Procurement teams ask for receipts. Here are ours. Every figure below is dated and sourced; the underlying documentation is available on request to verified enterprise buyers.
Series A
$14M
Closed November 2023, led by Bessemer Venture Partners with participation from First Round and six operator angels.
Comparison Sessions
1.9M
Processed across 2.4M unique visitors during calendar year 2024.
SaaS Products Indexed
4,217
Across 84 categories as of Q1 2026. The database is not the largest in the category; it is the most rigorously vetted.
Verified Reviewers
12,400+
Every reviewer is LinkedIn-authenticated and tied to a paying employer, eliminating the 38% anonymous-review rate seen on competing platforms.
Third-Party Recognition
Transparency Charter
ProductSifter is free for buyers. Vendors do not pay for placement, for category sponsorship, for "verified" badges, or for review-gating. The only revenue line on the vendor side is a per-qualified-lead fee, charged only after a buyer has affirmatively requested a demo, a quote, or a procurement-grade data export.
This single design decision is the reason the rankings move. A vendor has no financial incentive to surface a tool that isn't a genuine fit for the buyer's stack — doing so would generate zero revenue and waste sales time. A vendor has every incentive to ensure the buyers who do arrive are a high-fit match, because that is what determines revenue.
The same model is what produces the vendor-side NPS of 71 measured in 2024, meaningfully higher than the 42 industry average for SaaS marketplaces: the relationship with vendors is collaborative rather than transactional.
The Transparency Charter is a quarterly-published document that codifies the no-pay-to-play policy, the methodology for verified-reviewer authentication, the Stack-Fit Score™ weighting formula, and the data-retention policy for buyer-session information. It also discloses the current quarter's vendor-lead delivery totals in aggregate, so that buyers can verify the volume of activity behind the rankings.
The current Charter version is v9.0, published 14 January 2026. The next revision is scheduled for 14 April 2026 and will be signed jointly by the CEO, the COO, and the chair of the Research Methodology Committee.
For procurement teams that require the full audit trail, every comparison, every score, and every review is exportable via the API with a per-record audit hash. The Charter itself is available on request to verified enterprise buyers.
Request the Current Charter