For SaaS companies valued at over $1billion, the median amount of financing raised is $206million

Statistic Info

The WSJ published a recent chart of the 49 startups with billion dollar valuations. According to their research, there have never been as many privately held companies with such high valuations ever. The absolute number of these massively valuable companies alone is amazing. Ten years ago, most of them would have gone public by now. But what other insights can we tease from the data about these very special businesses?

First, the Billion Dollar Club (BDC) is nearly evenly split between Consumer and Enterprise companies, as the table below shows. I’ve noted the median dollars raised, the median valuation and the valuation efficiency in the table. The valuation efficiency is the valuation divided by the capital raised. This metric tries to answer the question, how much capital did the startup need to raise to achieve that valuation? This is a somewhat flawed metric[1] but I’m going to use it to compare the relative attractiveness of sectors[2].

More Tech Services Stats

Growth rate accelerates in the expansion stage ($2.5M – $10M ARR)

The median monthly revenue churn for large SaaS companies is 0.75%, translating into an annual revenue churn rate of 10%

Our experiences with SaaS startups indicate that they usually start with a couple of lead generation programs such as Pay Per Click Google Ad-words, radio ads, etc

The fastest growing SaaS companies scale their organizations rapidly, growing their teams by an average of 56% each year

The median Customer Acquisition Cost (CAC) for upsells is just $0.28 per $1, less than a quarter of the $1.18 spent to acquire $1 of revenue from a new customer

It’s 4x cheaper to upsell existing customers than acquire new customers: costing just $0.28 to acquire an additional dollar of revenue

56% treat “Existing Customer Renewals” as high priority

Gross dollar churn among companies with an internet go-to-market strategy saw a meaningful increase, up from 8% in 2015

As with unit churn, companies with longer contracts (2+ years) tend to report lower annual dollar churn

The average company booking professional services revenue on new deals is equivalent to 16% of the first year subscription value. Professional services margins are approximately 22%

More Growth Strategy Stats

80% of venture capital investments take place in the enterprise

Google only has a 30 percent female workforce

Women in western countries use the internet 17 percent more than their male counterparts

When venture capitalists participate in seed rounds, the average round size is 3x larger

The median cost for a SaaS company to acquire a dollar of new customer revenue is $1.18

Internet Sales strategies have a significantly lower CAC of just $0.42

Increases in revenue growth rates drive twice as much market-capitalisation gain as margin improvements for companies with less than $4 billion in revenues

Non-renewal rates are higher than gross dollar churn rates and higher for shorter duration contracts. Source: ForEntrepreneurs

In 2020, China is expected to generate 55 billion U.S. dollars in the global medical technology market.

SaaS companies in the $7.5MM-$15MM range are among the fastest growers