The Latka Index: How We Track the Fastest-Growing Private B2B SaaS Companies
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.
If you want to rank public software companies by growth, you read their filings. If you want to rank private B2B SaaS companies, you have a problem: they disclose nothing, to anyone, unless someone asks them on the record and they answer. The Latka Index is what a decade of asking looks like — a growth ranking of private B2B SaaS companies built from revenue, customer, funding and team figures founders have stated themselves, on tape, across thousands of interviews.
How the ranking works
The method is deliberately unfancy. Every interview captures the same core facts — current revenue or run rate, the prior year’s figure, customer count, average contract value, funding, headcount — and each figure carries its date and its source: the founder’s own words. Growth rate falls out of the pairs of dated revenue points; the index orders private companies by it, weighted toward businesses past $1M ARR so that tripling a tiny base doesn’t outrank compounding a real one. Estimates and third-party guesses live in a separate lane from founder-stated figures — when you browse the dataset, the distinction is marked, because a ranking is only as honest as its worst input.
Self-reported numbers invite an obvious objection: founders exaggerate. The countermeasure is the format itself. Numbers get cross-examined on air — ARPU times customers has to roughly equal claimed revenue, this year’s figure has to sit sensibly against last year’s tape, and a founder who fudges knows the next interview will open with the receipt. The archive is full of on-air arithmetic doing exactly that job: customers times price checked against claimed run rate, growth claims tested against the prior appearance’s numbers.
What a decade of index data shows
Reading the fastest-grower cohorts across eras, three patterns hold up:
The top of the index is a snapshot of what capital believes. In 2018 the leaders were sales-tech and no-code — Webflow doubling at $14M, Outreach and Salesloft racing each other past $50M. In 2022 it was crypto infrastructure — Magic Eden doubling every two months. In 2026 it’s AI go-to-market — 1Mind at 600%. The index leaders change; the pattern of a hot category minting them doesn’t.
Durable beats explosive. The companies that stayed on the index for years — rather than topping it once — grew 70–100% annually with retention doing half the work: Showpad’s 130% NRR, Algolia’s 120–125%, Outreach’s 140s. Every long-tenured index company we’ve tracked had net revenue retention above 100%; the churn math is the qualifying exam.
Growth rate alone predicts nothing about outcomes. Index alumni went public (Expensify, UserTesting, Semrush), sold to private equity (Salesloft at $2.3B), sold to strategics (Loom to Atlassian at $975M), and cratered when their market did. The index measures velocity, not destiny — which is exactly why we publish the underlying numbers rather than just the ranking.
Using it without fooling yourself
Founders use the index to benchmark: find your revenue band, read what the companies growing fastest in it actually disclosed about CAC, contract value and retention, and steal mechanics rather than aspirations. Investors use it as a sourcing list of companies that talk. Buyers use the funding-to-revenue ratios to spot efficiency — the Webflows ($2.9M raised at $15M ARR) reading very differently from the companies that raised three dollars for every dollar of ARR. All three uses depend on the same property: every number traces to a named founder saying it out loud, on a date, in public.
The live data behind the index — revenue, growth, funding, teams for thousands of private SaaS companies — is at getlatka.com/saas-companies.
