For builders and investors of AI app companies, there are two frequently posed and equally defeating questions that the industry cannot seem to shake: Won’t the model providers build this? And, is this a ChatGPT wrapper? Two and a half years into founders building on LLMs, an obvious third question has emerged: Who cares? To…| Scale Venture Partners
As we’ve written before, we’re particularly interested in software that supports the work of insurance brokers. Brokers provide a service that we know is resilient in the current market. Customers care about having an agent that is experienced, knowledgeable, and well-connected. Fragmented work flows, rising prices, and increasing global risk are making it more difficult…| Scale Venture Partners
[vc_row remove_bottom_col_margin=”true” el_class=”u-header-offset”][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”c-gtm-resource__row–featured u-padding-top–0″][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”u-padding-bottom–0-if-sm”][vc_column width=”1/3″][/vc_column][vc_column width=”2/3″ el_class=”c-gtm-resources__controls”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row el_class=”u-padding-top–0-if-sm”][vc_column][/vc_column][/vc_row]| Scale Venture Partners
If you’re wondering why AI hasn’t radically transformed financial services yet, you’re not alone. At a recent dinner with leaders from top banks and cutting-edge fintechs, enthusiasm and investment in AI are sky-high, but the gap between promise and real-world progress remains wide. Financial services is one of the most data rich, process-heavy industries, with… The post Where’s my AI banker? Why financial services is lagging on AI adoption appeared first on Scale Venture Partners.| Scale Venture Partners
To date, much of the chatter about AI in GTM has focused on changes to how we sell: how we can now use AI SDRs, AI autodialers, AI content generation platforms, etc. And while these discussions are critical to keeping pace in a fast-changing landscape, folks often fail to pay similar attention to the changes…| Scale Venture Partners
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.| Scale Venture Partners
This post walks through the data and methodology behind our growth and burn multiple benchmarks, summarizing some of the key decisions we made in calculating them and providing some benchmark tables that might be useful for venture-backed software startups.| Scale Venture Partners
Analysis, forecasting, and thoughts on all things venture| Scale Venture Partners
The infrastructure and models we wish we had: Building for the next generation of venture| Scale Venture Partners
Tools, templates, and been-to-market learnings| Scale Venture Partners
Should you tip your AI agent? How software pricing is changing in a world of AI services| Scale Venture Partners
The infrastructure and models we wish we had: Building for the next generation of venture| Scale Venture Partners
Venture firms love to talk about what they’ve built. New dashboards, sourcing models, founder portals. Ask any LP and they’ll tell you about the sea of sameness coming out of any VC annual meeting. But when I look at the infrastructure supporting our own investing work, what stands out the most to me isn’t what… The post The infrastructure and models we wish we had: Building for the next generation of venture appeared first on Scale Venture Partners.| Scale Venture Partners
Every company eventually reaches a point where spreadsheets no longer cut it. They start missing budgets. The board asks more complex questions. Department leaders need real-time metrics. This occurs as the underlying business complexity increases significantly with the scaling of the number of customers, products, or pricing models. The finance team is buried, stitching together… The post Announcing our investment in Abacum appeared first on Scale Venture Partners.| Scale Venture Partners
Over the past year, agentic AI has been loosely defined to mean anything from RAG to function calling and computer use. But what is an agent exactly? We now have an answer: agent = LLM + MCP. Primer For LLMs, MCP serves the same goal that web browsers accomplished for humans 30 years ago: it… The post MCP is the new WWW appeared first on Scale Venture Partners.| Scale Venture Partners
We believe in the future Thread AI is building—and we’re proud to be part of their Series A. Over the past year, AI agents have demonstrated their potential to automate domain-specific workflows in areas like medicine, law, and software development. However, most businesses also rely on bespoke processes that require customization beyond what is available… The post Announcing our investment in Thread appeared first on Scale Venture Partners.| Scale Venture Partners
As it turns out, asset management is a really good business. There are tens of trillions of dollars in assets being managed in the US across hedge funds, alternatives, mutual funds, and traditional financial advisors. With management fees generally ranging from a fraction of a percent to 2%, this means hundreds of billions of dollars… The post AI+Wealth management: Helping the rich get richer appeared first on Scale Venture Partners.| Scale Venture Partners
There’s been a transformation brewing in how startups operate. Startups are accelerating again, with topline momentum returning in late 2023 and forecasts for 2025 looking increasingly optimistic. What’s striking is that this resurgence in growth is happening while companies are maintaining—and in many cases improving—their operating efficiency. Stabilized opex is a strong signal that the…| Scale Venture Partners
Venture capital has always been a mix of art and science. And training more apprenticeship than algorithmic. It seems most investors trust their network, their read on the founder, their estimates on the market. In other words—pure gut. And for good reason. That judgement has historically been hard to teach and even harder to quantify… The post Is AI coming for VC jobs? We hope so appeared first on Scale Venture Partners.| Scale Venture Partners
It feels rough out there, at least from the headlines. But despite broader market volatility (liberation day anyone?), early indicators from software startups show signs of resilience. Startups are going for it, and willing to take some hits on efficiency for gains in revenue. What happened this quarter: Companies are back on offense. Both ARR…| Scale Venture Partners
At our GTM Summit, Scale CPO Craig Rosenberg sat down with Databricks CMO Rich Schultz to talk category creation, keeping a narrow audience focus, and how to adapt to AI.| Scale Venture Partners
Taxes are mostly thought to be about numbers (dollars and cents), but foundationally, it’s about the literature. There are over 80K pages of statutory laws passed by Congress, over 180K pages of rules from federal agencies, and at least 100K pages published by the IRS alone. When you add state and local law and code,…| Scale Venture Partners
The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is plagued by two major problems: project delays and cost overruns. Of major projects, only 8.5% finish on time and on budget. Whether building a bridge or renovating a bathroom, talk to anyone and they have first-hand experience with these problems. It is so commonplace that it is…| Scale Venture Partners
Capturing part of the value generated for customers has always been a north star in pricing. If customers don’t benefit from using your product, they shouldn’t pay you for it. On the flip side, if they’re getting tons of value from it, you should be getting paid accordingly. It’s about aligning incentives, and different pricing…| Scale Venture Partners
Q1 flash update: Startups are back on offense| Scale Venture Partners
Over the past year, AI phone calling has leapt from Hayes Valley hackathon project to remarkable market traction. Today, most of this revenue is concentrated in upmarket customer service organizations. This concentration is reflective of the historic implementation demands of AI calling and also of the product approaches that venture dollars have flowed towards to…| Scale Venture Partners
Preliminary Q1 results show median Q1 Plan attainment of 80% but wide dispersion of outcomes.| Scale Venture Partners
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 the results of Q2, 2023. What you need to know right now In last quarter’s Flash…| Scale Venture Partners
In recurring-revenue companies, next year's growth rate is likely to be 85% of this year's growth rate.| Scale Venture Partners
Scale is excited to announce our investment in Freed’s Series A. Freed frees clinicians from their #1 source of burnout: clinical documentation. Historically, doctors (and nurses, and physician assistants, and therapists, and…) spent their pajama time after a long day’s work finishing up notes and burning 5+ hours a week on documentation requirements. Freed’s AI…| Scale Venture Partners
Sales development is undergoing a revolution, inspired, in part, by the waning efficacy of traditional strategies: indiscriminately blasting prospects with non-personalized messaging just isn’t cutting it anymore. At the same time, advancements in AI co-pilots are starting to pave the way for increasingly targeted, personalized, and cost-effective outreach. In the face of these rapid changes,…| Scale Venture Partners
We now have full year data and can say for sure: growth is back. After the low of 2023, 2024 showed real acceleration and 2025 looks even better. After a tough and unsteady few quarters, startups are finding themselves in a uniquely advantageous position. The adaptability and lessons learned from the post-hypergrowth era have equipped…| Scale Venture Partners
Sales compensation is more of an art than a science, with a system that balances risk and reward. I sat down with Ryan Azus, former CRO at Zoom and sales leader at RingCentral and Cisco WebEx, and a small group of founders in the vertical AI space to discuss what a well-run sales comp program…| Scale Venture Partners
Jump to the tools: Compensation guidebook and spreadsheets This is not a complete guide to compensation for venture-backed companies. That would be beyond my zone of competence. Instead, this is a guide to help a venture-backed company efficiently and effectively discuss the key elements of compensation (base salaries, variable compensation, and equity grants) with its…| Scale Venture Partners
Scale is thrilled to announce our lead investment in Unwrap’s Series A. Historically, product owners have relied heavily on quantitative insights to inform their roadmaps, but their ability to derive metrics from unstructured data sources has been limited. As a result, many decisions had to be made based on anecdotal evidence. With Unwrap, companies can…| Scale Venture Partners
For the last two decades, vertical software has sat in the shadow of horizontal software. Despite some fantastic success stories like Veeva, Procore, and Toast, the SaaS and cloud evolution has been written by leaders in marketing, HR, and finance. Vertical software has been largely dismissed by the venture community as a difficult play due…| Scale Venture Partners
Over the past couple of weeks, a number of founders and startup teams have reached out to us to help them think through how they should be setting their 2025 growth and spend targets. As part of this early annual planning work, we collected “whisper numbers” for 2025 where we asked our companies for very…| Scale Venture Partners
Here's the data we're sharing with our portfolio companies as they develop 2023 annual plans.| Scale Venture Partners
Whisper numbers for 2025 signal a new chapter for startups: growth is reaccelerating, but this time with a sharp focus on maintaining—and in many cases improving—operating efficiency. Just two years ago in 2023, growth rates hit a period of rapid slowdown, with signs of recovery only beginning in Q423. Since then, the momentum has shifted.…| Scale Venture Partners
Let’s be honest: the remit of the “marketing” function, at least as it exists in B2B tech companies, is exceptionally broad. The marketing leader has to support everything from brand to corp comms, from demand gen to messaging; as compared to peers in sales and other organizations, a marketing leader’s responsibilities are substantially wider and…| Scale Venture Partners
From hand-drawn sketches and scrapped prototypes to powerful AI-driven simulations at lightning speed, hardware product development has come a long way. As former hardware engineers ourselves, we know firsthand the grueling processes that have historically stymied innovation. Today, we’re betting on a future where AI and cloud computing are game-changers for hardware engineers. Before the…| Scale Venture Partners
This quarter’s flash report shows more of the same from last quarter, and the forecast indicates a steady finish for the year. This is good news! The return to growth paired with ongoing gains in operating efficiency is holding, showing that the “year of efficiency” has given way to an era of sustainable growth. This…| Scale Venture Partners
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.| Scale Venture Partners
Our flash reports use real data from a representative sample of enterprise software startups and public companies to help founders contextualize their own numbers with their peers and within the larger economic climate. Check out our Q1 update and our Scale Studio tools to benchmark your most important operating metrics. The good news: growth is…| Scale Venture Partners
We are excited to announce that Scale is leading the $36M Series B of QA Wolf. When it comes to testing software, there are two immemorial truths: Testing is absolutely crucial. No one wants to do it. Tests can be the difference between catching a bug during CI/CD and shipping a bug that takes down…| Scale Venture Partners
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 significantly cut their burn. Private startups cut burn rates nearly in half since 2021, and…| Scale Venture Partners
Is your SaaS startup growing fast enough?| Scale Venture Partners
When considering the Mendoza Line for growth| Scale Venture Partners
For any SaaS company to be more than 10x larger five years from now, it must be growing revenue at a CAGR higher than 80%.| Scale Venture Partners
“IPO.” The elusive dream of many a startup founder. Today, it’s an even more elusive dream than ever, as more and more startups are lining up at the window to go public as soon as it opens (which will hopefully be soon). But what does it take to IPO? How does an early-stage founder at…| Scale Venture Partners
Over the past 2 years, AI has seen ideas move from research to industry implementation at a record breaking pace. This phenomenon continues to motivate our ongoing event series, New Ideas in AI, which brings together today’s most relevant AI authors, founders, and practitioners. This month, we had the honor of featuring Archit Sharma…| Scale Venture Partners
We’re excited to announce our participation in Sixfold’s Series A. Sixfold automates and augments pieces of the underwriting process to enable carriers to underwrite higher priority, higher volume submissions in a fraction of the time. The platform delivers a step-function improvement in the automated underwriting experience by becoming an underwriter’s copilot solution. Sixfold has demonstrated…| Scale Venture Partners
Scale invested in BILL in 2013 just as the company was crossing $10M of ARR. A decade later, BILL is a leading public company and as of the end of fiscal year 2023 transacted payment volume of approximately 1% of the US GDP. We were early believers in CEO and founder René Lacerte and have…| Scale Venture Partners
Three decades into SaaS, we still don’t have a way of easily managing who gets access to what. It’s even harder to know who’s actually using what they were provisioned. In addition to making the IT team’s work a lot harder, the mismanagement of permissioning comes with security threats, delays in access, and bloated license…| Scale Venture Partners
Now in its eleventh year, our survey and report examine the evolving threats and solutions, funding and buying patterns, and how the industry is responding to various micro and macro trends. This year’s report consolidates perspectives from senior-level decision-makers including CISOs, CIOs, VPs, directors, and IT managers at enterprises with 500+ employees. For our 2024…| Scale Venture Partners
Growth remained depressed in Q124, but companies are still optimistic about the rest of the year.| Scale Venture Partners
It’s taken over a decade for us to get here, but the time has finally come for cloud security to take pole position in the CISO priority list. With increased cloud adoption, data accumulation, and the steady passage of time, enterprises have gone through a discovery process to understand which tools are most needed at…| Scale Venture Partners
Two years ago it was unclear if AI security and reliability was anyone’s problem. Now, it’s starting to look like everyone’s problem. After all, it turns out that owning a product that might spew heinous slurs and leak all your proprietary data when it’s feeling cheeky might be a bad thing. It would appear that…| Scale Venture Partners
Using technology to improve the insurance experience for brokers, agents, and their clients is complex and challenging. These hurdles are precisely what make innovation so important and impactful. Vertical-specific GTM requires specific market knowledge and expertise. Selling to brokers is a skill set that is often underestimated by outsiders. While the market is ripe for…| Scale Venture Partners
The difference between being good at sales and being great at sales is storytelling. People buy with emotion and justify through logic. They connect with stories, and will remember how the stories made them feel far more than facts about features and capabilities. Stories are a great way to build trust, providing social proof that…| Scale Venture Partners
Sanjeev Kriplani is a Scale executive-in-residence and fintech product and marketing leader. Previously, he led teams at Intuit, PayPal, and Bill (formerly Bill.com). In making the jump from nascent company to market leader, fintech startups face unique hurdles. Money is high stakes, so there’s a lot you have to get right early that startups in…| Scale Venture Partners
Scale is thrilled to announce our Series A investment in Tavus. The company is a leader in productizing the latest research in AI video generation – and applying this to enable customers to speak directly to each and every end-user at scale. In its focus on video generation, Tavus is, of course, in good company,…| Scale Venture Partners
The theme of 2024 is cautious optimism. With improved ARR growth rates across the board and two consecutive quarters of median GAAP revenue growth improvement, it looks like the worst is over. So, where do we go from here? We’re seeing startups aiming for a more sustainable way of operating, focusing on customer retention and…| Scale Venture Partners
The last few years have seen the Application Security (AppSec) industry undergo some dramatic changes, with new types of attacks materializing and new types of security companies forming in response. The classic security industry game of whack-a-mole is now in full swing, with enterprises, security vendors, and AppSec teams alike collectively figuring out what it…| Scale Venture Partners
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 software market. Today, we explore the results of Q4 2023. What you need to know right now It appears…| Scale Venture Partners
We’re pleased to share Scale’s annual Cybersecurity Perspectives Survey findings. Every year, we survey hundreds of U.S.-based security leaders who are responsible for buying decisions, the success of security deployments, or the overall security of the company. The respondents in our survey include CISOs, VPs, and director-level professionals at enterprises with 500+ employees. Now in its tenth…| Scale Venture Partners
[vc_section full_width=”stretch_row” el_class=”vc-hero vc-hero–portfolio-index”][vc_row typography_style=”white” el_class=”vc-hero__row vc-hero–row-divider”][vc_column el_class=”vc-hero__content” offset=”vc_col-md-offset-0 vc_col-md-12″][vc_column_text el_class=”vc-hero__text”] In a data-driven world, it’s critical to set measurable goals. Scale Studio distills data from over 1,000 private companies and 10,000 quarters to benchmark the growth and operating me...| Scale Venture Partners
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 2024 plan and give you a relative sense of what direction startups are headed in…| Scale Venture Partners
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 the results of Q3, 2023. What you need to know right now Last quarter…| Scale Venture Partners
Large language models are poised to have an immediate effect on how businesses use software. While the exact scale and impact of AI is not a topic we aim to wrestle with here, the intuitive applicability of this technology across markets seems to have almost single-handedly pulled the broader startup community out of the post-2021…| Scale Venture Partners
