Features September 01, 2025

The Present and Future of SaaS: Sprout Solutions’ Growth from Startup to Industry Innovator

From bootstrapping to pioneering AI agents, Sprout Solutions’ co-founders share insights on building, scaling, and leading with purpose.

With the rise of AI, many tech startups have found themselves at a crossroads: adapt or die. For Sprout Solutions, one of the country’s most celebrated Software as a Service (SaaS) companies, it’s not a crossroads at all. Instead, AI is both a wish come true for its founders and a launchpad for growth. The Business Manual spoke to Sprout’s founders, Alex and Patrick Gentry, on how Sprout grew to become the company it is today and the duo’s plans for reinventing SaaS for the future.

Sprout’s founders have reason to be optimistic. With 1,700 clients, or over 300,000 active employees on Sprout’s HR Solutions platform, the company is growing rapidly. By annual recurring revenue, it is the largest homegrown B2B SaaS company in the Philippines.

“SaaS is not dead,” Patrick Gentry says, with a look that knows how loaded that statement is. “Just SaaS as we know it is dead. I think there will be many evolutions of SaaS from ‘Software as a Service’ to ‘Service as a Software’ to ‘Service as a Service.’ But [SaaS] will be around. It will just change in form.”

Read on to learn more about Sprout’s journey from startup to industry innovator through these five lessons for entrepreneurs from Alex and Patrick Gentry.

1. Start Small, Solve a Real Problem

“Just start,” Patrick Gentry advises aspiring entrepreneurs who want to be startup founders.

Today, the company he co-founded provides software solutions to help companies with their HR operations. But it all began as a side project.

“We have a platform that helps companies find, hire, retain, pay, manage government compliance,” Patrick explains further, “the whole employee lifecycle management for the Philippines.”

In 2023, Sprout Solutions’ breakthrough work was recognized by the Asia CEO Awards, the International HR Institute, and the KMC Startup Awards. But what’s remarkable is that Alex and Patrick Gentry didn’t start in HR at all. Alex Gentry came from an eight-year long career in media, while Patrick Gentry came from “Silicon Valley tech.” And it wasn’t their first startup.

*Alex Gentry, Co-Founder of Sprout Solutions*

“We were in love with building solutions,” Alex says.

“Problem solvers,” Patrick adds.

In 2008, Patrick was working on a number of startups, notably with the co-founders of KMC Solutions. One of the startups was a digital-first real estate company that grew quickly. With its sudden scale, the company soon found itself struggling with HR and payroll.

Unable to find any HR solutions online, Patrick decided to build the solution instead, as a side project.

Patrick recalls their approach to building a startup, saying, “I really treated it as a project… I’ve had many projects over the years, and most have failed, or not taken off. This is just one that grew to a point where we needed to hire people.”

Recognizing how their project could help other companies in the Philippines, Alex and Patrick built Sprout from a genuine need—making HR easy and accessible for businesses of any size. Alex adds, “What will take off are the ideas that are really solving a problem… If it really is solving a problem, it will catch momentum and grow.”

Patrick continues by explaining how identifying the problem should come before creating a solution or product. He says, “[Founders] say, this is going to be a startup, and I’m the founder and CEO, and I’m going to do all this stuff. And most of the time, those are solutions looking for problems, meaning they’ve built something and it’s a great solution, but the problem isn’t really a big problem. It’s not a huge pain point.”

*Patrick Gentry, CEO and Co-Founder of Sprout Solutions*

2. Seek the Right Mentorship

Sprout was bootstrapped for its first two years with support from KMC, its sister company. But soon, the founders realized that they would need more support for Sprout Solutions to take root and grow. While they developed their expertise in HR practices in the Philippines, they felt a particular need for mentoring in SaaS solutions. With few available mentors in the Philippines, they applied to a startup accelerator in San Francisco.

Alex says, “If we can’t find mentors here in the Philippines, why don’t we just go to where SaaS was born and really learn from the best of the best?” That decision helped them adopt best-in-class practices while tailoring their strategy to the local market.

3. SaaS Is Dead—Long Live SaaS

Like many tech startups, Sprout Solutions faces a fundamental shift in their business model because of artificial intelligence.

Patrick Gentry advises that tech startups embrace AI while strategically studying what it can do for their business. “[For] everybody thinking about starting a SaaS business,” he says, “you need to think differently about it. Because the whole industry is changing in the next few years.”

SaaS companies in particular are vulnerable to AI disruption. In essence, they sell a constantly improving software product for other companies or individuals to do a task (such as paying your taxes or automating your payroll). With recent advances in AI, these companies now find themselves in competition with agentic AI—AI bots or “agents” that can now do the entire task on their own.

How is Sprout responding to these changes?

“It’s a big question,” Patrick admits. “We’re attacking it from a number of angles. So one is just making Sprout better all around for our clients… from support to legal to finance to marketing. Every department is really working to use AI to deliver more to our customers and higher quality.”

Beyond AI adoption in Sprout Solutions’ internal operations, the company is also leading innovation in agentic AI. Sprout is among the first in the world to launch an agentic payroll agent capable of running payroll end-to-end.

For the founders of Sprout Solutions, AI is expanding what the company can do for their clients.

Patrick explains that SaaS has to evolve. “One of the ways it’s changing,” he says, “is Software as a Service is really going to become ‘Service as a Software.’”

“It used to be that companies would pay you to use your software to get something done. And now they’re paying you for your software to do that thing for them. So fundamentally, it’s a new level of automation that AI is enabling SaaS companies to deliver.”

Before, SaaS companies may have been focused on software features. Now they can deliver more value to their clients.

Alex explains, “It’s really about outcomes, not features anymore, which is, to a certain extent, a sigh of relief for people who have been building features and features and features. The idea is that now you’re paying a bot to be able to run your payroll for you, to be able to do all of these things [when] you used to be the one clicking through software to get done.”

Patrick summarizes how even non-tech companies can benefit from AI and this evolution of SaaS: “For non-tech companies that are thinking of ways on how to integrate AI, or whether they should even integrate AI into their processes, my message is, do it right now. And do it very programmatically, because it really takes a mindset shift within the leaders, but also within the employees.”

4. Lead with Mission

Sprout is a typically hyper-focused tech startup. And throughout the interview, its founders, Alex and Patrick, often launch into the minutiae of HR solutions. But the company’s North Star—an entrepreneurial term for a startup’s larger goals—goes beyond solving HR headaches. Alex shares Sprout’s broader mission: “To impact the life of every Filipino by improving business in the Philippines.” She adds, “It really has become a mission-based company.”

Patrick believes this vision attracts ambitious people who want to make an impact. He says, “If we can elevate what people are able to deliver, we can be a powerful force for good.”

This larger mission coupled with the founders’ problem-solving ethic has undeniably led Sprout to startup success. Patrick continues, “I think that we really solidified our place in the Philippine ecosystem when we found our North Star.”

5. Find the Right Partner

With so much said about startups, SaaS and AI, it’s important to note another crucial part of Sprout’s success: its leadership, the husband-and-wife co-founders.

Often asked how they make it work, Patrick gives advice that can apply to any partnership. He says: “Work with them first… Settle into it without any expectations, without any labels… [When] you start a project, get somebody in to help you, who you think, ‘This could be my co-founder.’”

For Alex their leadership dynamic is both simple and complicated. She says, “We found early on that we really enjoyed working together.” But at the same time, she admits that “the co-founder relationship is very complex.”

Final Advice for Entrepreneurs

Alex and Patrick Gentry are leading change in HR Solutions and among SaaS companies. Surrounding themselves in AI-led transformation, they are visibly excited by the opportunities that are now possible.

Patrick says, “[AI] will really change the way humanity will operate, right? And so we take this very seriously because we’re in tech, and we are in a business where everything is around your team or your employees. I think that so many things will change.”

To entrepreneurs who want to build their own tech startup, Alex’s message reflects how courage is an essential part of the entrepreneurial skillset. “Start,” she says. “Do it afraid.”