Latka Blog
19 articles from the Latka blog in Data & Analytics, newest first: Gong Revenue and Funding: From $6M to $500M, and a $7.25B Valuation That Came Back to Earth.
Gong is the cleanest single-company record of the entire 2018–2026 SaaS cycle: revenue compounding 80x while the valuation soared to $7.25B, halved — and the business underneath just kept growing into it.
There's no SEC filing for a private SaaS company — the only way to rank the fastest growers is to get founders to say their numbers out loud. That's the entire method behind the Latka Index, and a decade of it has patterns worth reading.
Russ Hawkins spent thirteen years turning servers-in-every-store into $35 million of retail analytics. Then a family office with a short fund life forced the sale.
Brandwatch’s data backend is both its moat and its ceiling: 80 million sites crawled, roughly a thousand servers, and contracts that have to be worth $30,000 a year. Giles Palmer bought BuzzSumo to reach the customers that architecture locked out.
Astronomer ended 2016 at a $600K annual run rate without a finished product — it billed $6K–$10K a month for access to its own engineers, then grew the accounts. Here is the arithmetic behind that first revenue year.
A private equity firm called Vivek Bhaskaran to sell him a company doing $3.5 million. He offered $800,000 from his iPhone and closed in thirty days, all cash.
Felix Van de Maele told Nathan Latka in March 2017 that Collibra was just under $50M ARR — 200 enterprise customers paying $200K–$250K a year, with 3–4% churn. An earlier version of this post called the company bootstrapped and dated everything a year late. Here is what the tape and the funding record actually say.
Billy Bosworth joined DataStax as CEO in 2011 when the founder handed him the title. Seven years and $190M later, his answer to every funding question is that he doesn't need to.
The $50M figure attached to Duetto traces to one May 2017 interview — and on the tape, CEO Patrick Bosworth says the company wasn't there yet. Here is what he actually claimed, what GetLatka's database recorded, and what happened to Duetto since.
In July 2018, Redis Labs CEO Ofer Bengal told Latka his company was growing 60% a year and running its cloud service with five DevOps engineers. Here's what the tape supports, where the old numbers were garbled, and how the company reached $300M ARR without the IPO Bengal planned.
This list ranks private software companies based in SF based on their most recent revenue. Public companies like Salesforce were excluded. Latka…
2012-2018: Added $20 million in revenue 2018-2022: Added $60 million in revenue Annual Growth Rate (2018-2022): 50% How Typeform Hit $100M Revenue…
Annual recurring revenue is the annualized value of the subscriptions you have under contract — not services, not one-time fees, not your best month times twelve. The strict math, and how to read a founder-quoted ARR.
Suzy burned $25 million net in a year with R&D running at 65% of revenue. Its CEO explains why that was the safe kind of burn, and what cutting the other kind would have cost.
The exit was negotiated until the buyers walked at the last minute. A year of liquidation later, the founder of a $40M grocery-delivery business picked a category with no couriers, no stores and no headcount that scales with volume.
Making sure that you’re spending the right amount of money on customer acquisition is critical for any SaaS business. If you spend…
Without a doubt, the burn rate metric is one of the most essential metrics for businesses and especially so for startups that…
A run rate is basically a way of “annualizing” information about a company like sales or profits. You’ve seen and used run…
Founded in 2012, AirDNA is a bootstrapped start-up that provides short term rental insights on AirBNB and VRBO properties. The company is…
