All types of investment have grown, year-on-year, with the biggest growth during the seed stage of financing

Tomasz Tonguz
Growth Strategy🕑 Reading Time: 0 Minutes

In other words, the typical round size for SaaS companies hasn’t changed materially over the past 16 years but the number of rounds has doubled, which has doubled the amount of capital a startup raises in aggregate before IPO. At least on the surface, the data indicates SaaS companies aren’t more efficient.

That pattern may be driven by an increasingly friendly financing environment or because of increased capital needs of the business or many other reasons. So the next question to answer is capital efficiency. In a future analysis, I’ll calculate the ratio of revenue dollars to VC dollars invested to get a sense of the reality of cloud capital efficiency per revenue dollar.