SecurityScorecard's $130M Revenue Is an Estimate — the Last Recorded Figure Was $106M

On a conference stage in September 2024, Nathan Latka handed Aleksandr Yampolskiy the growth question as if the arithmetic were already settled: “Growing from $70,000,000 to a $130,000,000 of revenue, did it come from adding new customers, or was it expanding current accounts more?”

“Both,” the SecurityScorecard co-founder and CEO said — and then spent the next minute making it obvious which half he actually cares about.

So a simple math is that if we help 10% of our customer base better operationalize a product and really adopt it to manage their third party’s report to the board, we’re going to double our revenue without acquiring a single customer.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy, co-founder and CEO, SecurityScorecard

Neither number in Latka’s question came off a filing. Both are GetLatka figures being read back to the founder from GetLatka’s own record of his company — and at the moment the $130 million was read out, it described a year that still had three months left to run.

The $130M is a projection the database froze

GetLatka’s SecurityScorecard record carries $130 million, recorded January 2024 and flagged an estimate. The last revenue figure in that record not flagged an estimate is $106 million, recorded October 2023. Everything above that line is guidance.

Yampolskiy’s own version of it, given from the stage, was that with about 500 employees and 70% of the Fortune 100 as paying customers, SecurityScorecard was “gonna probably finish this year between one thirty to one forty million ARR.” A moment later, unprompted, he added the qualifier he clearly wanted in the room: “And cash flow positive, by the way.”

Note which metric that is. He said ARR; the database files it under revenue. For a company selling annual subscriptions paid up front the two track closely, but they are not interchangeable, and the $130 million inherits the founder’s ARR framing rather than an audited revenue line.

The full ladder in the record runs $2.5 million recorded February 2015, $6 million April 2016, $10 million August 2017, $30 million June 2019, $49.2 million January 2020, $71 million October 2021, $106 million October 2023, and the estimated $130 million January 2024. One more row matters for what follows: $70 million, recorded January 2022.

The video title carries someone else’s numbers

That September 2024 talk went out under a title advertising $70M ARR, 1,700 customers and $200M in cash. Those three figures belong to a different conversation entirely — the October 2021 interview, three years earlier, where Yampolskiy gave all three. Put the two tapes side by side and they do not share one of those three figures.

• Different customer counts — 1,700 paying customers in 2021 against “over 2,800 customers worldwide” in 2024.
• Different revenue — a $70–73 million finish then, $130–140 million now.
• The magazine as an artifact — on the 2024 stage Latka holds up the Latka Magazine feature built out of the earlier sit-down and reads its cover back in the past tense: “$71,000,000, a billion valuation, and you told me I had 200,000,000 cash in the bank.”
• A dated reference — Yampolskiy discusses Paul Graham’s founder-mode essay as something that had just come out, which pins the room to September 2024.

Latka calls the earlier sit-down “back in 2022” from the stage; GetLatka’s record dates it October 2021, and the tape itself is anchored to 2021 by the $180 million round at a roughly $1 billion post-money valuation that both men place in the spring of that year. Titles get recycled when a conversation is re-cut. The figures inside them do not travel.

The contract got cheaper while the customer count grew

Line the four appearances up on price and a real trend falls out. In 2018, with “over 450 customers and rapidly growing,” Yampolskiy priced a single company’s scorecard at about $2,000 a year and put the average total contract in the $80,000 to $100,000 range, paid up front. By October 2021 the average contract was “about, you know, 40,000 bucks a year paid up front.” By September 2024, “the average deal size is about 30 to 40 Ks.”

Latka did the multiplication live on the 2021 tape, and it closed almost exactly.

1,700 customers × $40,000 average contract = $68MLatka’s on-tape arithmetic, October 2021. Yampolskiy confirmed a $70–73 million finish for that year.

Run the same multiplication on the 2024 inputs and it stops closing: 2,800 customers at $30–40K lands between $84 million and $112 million, well under the $130–140 million he guided to. Both inputs are soft — the customer count is an estimate in the record, the deal size is a range given from memory, and Yampolskiy has said since 2018 that some accounts pay millions a year while others test at $20K. Treat the average contract value as a shape, not a divisor. The shape is clear enough: the base widened faster than the price held.

The engine is the installed base, not the funnel

SecurityScorecard’s best-known piece of marketing was not a marketing decision. A developer built a widget on a weekend that let anyone type in a URL and get a scorecard emailed back — Yampolskiy dates it to 2016 in one telling and 2015 in another, and in both says nobody asked for it. It became the top lead source for years.

80,000+companies that downloaded the free report a developer shipped on a weekend

The counterexample ran the other way. A concentration-risk feature for insurers took a 10-person team four months and, in his words, cost millions of dollars. He never trained the sales team on it and never marketed it. It added no revenue.

most companies overvalue great ideas. Cheap, quick experimentation always beats great ideas, and that’s the culture you wanna build.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy, co-founder and CEO, SecurityScorecard

The framework he runs on it, borrowed from adviser Michael Schrage, is a budget rather than a process: “Take five people, five days, $5,000.” If a team says a feature needs two months, the question is what the five-day version looks like — a mock-up sent to 10 people is enough to prove or kill the hypothesis.

Retention is what turns that base into revenue. In 2018 he put gross logo churn under 10% a year and net revenue retention at 115%. By October 2021 net retention was running 115–120%, with a stated target of 125–130%. The free tier feeds the same machine from the other end: 25,000 freemium accounts in 2021 against 1,700 paying ones, a 6.8% conversion by Latka’s arithmetic on the tape, and a deliberate choice not to optimise it — every paying customer can invite any company in for free to see and improve its own score.

What he raised, and what he refused to trade for it

• 2014 · Seed $2.2M at a $6.2M post-money valuation.
• Feb 2015 · Series A $13.7M at $45M.
• Apr 2016 · Series B $20M at $100M.
• Aug 2017 · Series C $27.5M at $174.5M.
• Jun 2019 · Series D $50M at $340M.
• Mar 2021 · Series E $180M at $980M.

The rounds corroborate the tapes cleanly. In 2018 Yampolskiy said “to date we raised a little bit over 60 million dollars” and that the Series C was $27.5 million; the first four rounds in the record total $63.4 million. Asked whether the company had passed a $250 million valuation, he said only that “we are flirting with that valuation.” Three years later the Series E closed at a $980 million post.

Three quantities get flattened into one in headlines about this company, and they are not the same thing. Revenue is the $71 million recorded October 2021 and the estimated $130 million recorded January 2024. Capital raised is $293.4 million across six rounds. Cash is the roughly $200 million sitting unspent on the balance sheet in October 2021 — “we’re still sitting on almost 200 million in cash that we can use opportunistically,” as he put it — money already raised, not revenue and not a new round. It also underwrote the only competitive claim of that conversation: Latka put rival BitSight at roughly $400 million raised against SecurityScorecard’s $290 million, to reach the approximately $100 million in ARR Yampolskiy estimated for it — a capital-efficiency comparison, not a revenue one.

What he says he protected instead of valuation was structure.

the valuation matters a lot less than all the other things you negotiate. The 1x liquidation preference, the control and the structure of the board, very, very important.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy, co-founder and CEO, SecurityScorecard

He started at an 80/20 split with his co-founder rather than 50/50, called a 50/50 split “a huge mistake” because someone has to be in charge, and re-upped the option pool at every round. On stage he confirmed Latka’s conservative model of his current stake — around 10% — was too low. “we never really took a crazy valuation,” he said. “We always made sure that we have good composition and control of the board to this day.”

The forecast ledger

Put the four appearances against the record and you can grade the guidance.

• 2018 · $25–30 million ARR “this year” Promised for the year, off 450 customers and just over $60 million raised. The record’s next revenue figure is $30 million, recorded June 2019.
• Oct 2021 · “we’re gonna break a hundred next year” A $70–73 million finish for 2021, then $100 million-plus in 2022. The record has $71 million recorded October 2021 and $70 million recorded January 2022.
• Early 2023 · “we exceeded 100 million run rate last year” Said from a stage, alongside “we’re gonna probably grow by at least 50 this year” and a headcount of about 600. The record carries $70 million for 2022, $106 million at October 2023, and 528 employees that September.
• Sept 2024 · $130–140 million And, for the year after, “we’re gonna grow organically at 25, 30%, and we’re gonna look actively at tuck ins as well.”

The 2023 line is the one that will not reconcile. GetLatka’s record does not carry a 2022 figure above $70 million, and its next reading not flagged an estimate is $106 million, a year and a half later. The tape does not settle which is right. What it does settle is that the company’s own account of 2022 ran roughly $30 million ahead of the number in the database, and that the 50%-plus growth rate Yampolskiy had been quoting since 2021 had become 25–30% by the time he was asked again.

The IPO moved on the same curve. In October 2021 he said SecurityScorecard would be “strongly considering” a listing within 18 to 24 months. By September 2024 there had been no filing, and his explanation was that the threshold itself had risen to three or four hundred million in revenue — so the plan is tuck-in acquisitions and organic growth instead.

Asked on that same stage what a chief executive is actually for, he gave the answer that explains the forecasts as much as the company:

the job, I think, of a CEO is to be the main provocateur. Like, you don’t want to go solve the problem for all the people, which is your superpower as a founder, but you want to make sure people are curious. If they’re not curious, they’re probably wrong people.

Aleksandr Yampolskiy, co-founder and CEO, SecurityScorecard

Sources Aleksandr Yampolskiy in conversation with Nathan Latka, 2018, October 2021 and September 2024, plus his “Customer Empathy” stage talk from early 2023; and the GetLatka company record for SecurityScorecard, including its six funding rounds and its dated revenue, team and customer figures. The 2024 revenue, customer and headcount figures are flagged estimates in that record.