Topline Growth & Operational Efficiency

Drawing on data from 100+ software companies, this series equips leaders with financial and operating benchmarks on scaling efficiently, navigating macroeconomic conditions, and understanding market trends to make data-driven decisions.

Topline Growth & Operational Efficiency

Drawing on data from 100+ software companies, this series can equip leaders with financial and operating benchmarks on scaling efficiently, navigating macroeconomic conditions, and understanding market trends to make data-driven decisions.

State of Software 2025: Rethinking the Playbook

This year’s analysis spotlights the metrics, benchmarks, and strategies that we believe separate top-performing companies from the rest, covering ARR growth, retention, and efficiency.

In 2025, the data shows the market recalibrating. Growth is stabilizing, efficiency is rising, and AI is transforming both product and operating models.

AI-native companies are scaling faster, converting more efficiently, and operating with leaner teams, while incumbents that embed AI into core workflows are reigniting growth.

Across all models, the fundamentals remain the same: sustainable growth, strong retention, and scalable efficiency, but the bar for performance has been raised.

Explore the report

Valuation multiples for software companies remain below historical peaks, but early signs point to renewed investor appetite for high-growth companies
Year-over-year ARR growth has declined over the last 3 years; however, ARR growth is now stabilizing across the software sector, with green shoots in mid-stage companies ($50-$100M ARR)
Net dollar retention is settling into the ~110-120% range, and is particularly strong for early-stage companies in 2025
In the AI-native era, we believe defensibility hinges on learning loops, embedded intelligence, and rapid iteration – not just distribution or scale
AI-native companies are generally compressing time to scale by 2-3x vs traditional SaaS benchmarks

Reference reports

Expand your knowledge with these additional modules.

The Software Fundamentals Glossary

A practical glossary of key software metrics to help leaders define, track, and measure performance

ICONIQ Enterprise Five

Key performance indicators of software companies in 2025

Continue Reading

Accelerating the Pace of Innovation: Driving Growth & Efficiency in 2025

Lessons from the last few years and implications on 2025 plans

Scaling SaaS from $1 to $20M

Building strong foundations in the early stages

The 2024 ICONIQ Growth Resiliency Rubric

Key trends and benchmarks across resiliency metrics in 2024

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Al Insights

From pioneering new AI models to enhancing enterprise applications, ICONIQ partners with visionary founders shaping the future. Through our expert advisory boards, events, and uncommon community, we embrace AI's transformative impact on enterprises and daily lives. Join us on this journey as we dive into the present and promise of AI.

Product & Engineering

R&D is increasingly becoming a bigger line item in total spend and a key differentiator for companies, yet it is often the function that organizations have the least visibility into. Unlike finance or sales and marketing, it is also challenging for engineering leaders to find relevant or publicly available data and insights to benchmark their engineering team performance. We use organizational data and industry perspectives to provide detailed answers to the key R&D questions we receive from SaaS leaders. Although engineering and product development are closely tied, this series will be focused primarily on engineering-specific metrics and challenges. We will examine topics spanning the state of modern-day engineering orgs, developer productivity, compensation, org structure, and engineering operations, in order to share best practices and proprietary benchmarks to help you scale your engineering organization. Additional chapters in this series related to organization structure, compensation, and engineering reporting best practices will be added to this page over the coming months.

Go-To-Market

A holistic and well-executed go-to-market strategy is one of the key pillars that drives sustainable, long-term growth for software companies. Regardless of your organization’s growth motion, effective go-to-market teams represent the voice of the customer and serve as critical feedback loops for product and engineering. In this series, we examine a myriad topics across GTM compensation, incentives, org structure, roles, and responsibilities, forecasting, and enablement, in order to share best practices and proprietary benchmarks to help you scale your go-to-market organization.

The ICONIQ Venture and Growth website does not present information relating to ICONIQ, its investment funds, or its advisory business and should not be consulted for any advisory purposes. The ICONIQ Venture and Growth content is intended for the use of company founders and executives.