Author: Eduard Danalache

As we kick off the 2024 annual planning season, we’re sharing an early view of what we’re seeing in early-stage startups to give  sense of what’s to come next year. We hope these “whisper numbers” can help you calibrate your…

At the beginning of 2023, we saw CEOs and founders across the board herald the beginning of the year of efficiency. Now, 11 months later, we’ve seen that born out in the data. Both private and public tech companies have…

Scale’s quarterly Scale Studio Flash Updates use our proprietary data platform, Scale Studio, to analyze a representative sample of enterprise software startups and provide a real-time look into industry growth rates and the health of the SaaS market. Today, we explore…

We can clearly see above that public tech companies are seeing similar drop-offs in NDR to private SaaS startups. The median public SaaS NDR has fallen 10% from 121% in Q221 to 111% in Q123. While it’s a bit bumpy, the median NDR for SaaS startups has fallen a similar amount - down 8% from 112% in Q221 to 104% in Q123.

Q123 data indicates that the growth slowdown is continuing - and most companies failed to meet even the conservative plans they set earlier this year. This was the fourth consecutive quarter of decrease in both top-decile and median year-over-year ARR growth, with only 22% of companies achieving their Q123 plans.

No one can tell exactly what 2023 will bring, but one thing is for certain: there is a sprint to efficiency with improving burn multiples and slowing revenue growth across the board. Comparing 2022 performance with 2023 plans shows the stark reality. The slowdown in ARR Growth we saw in 2022 will result in a slowdown in GAAP Revenue Growth in 2023. At the same time, startups have tightened their belts to become more efficient.