Semrush Revenue and Growth: From a $49.95 Side Project to Adobe's $1.9B Acquisition
The founders were too profitable to take Eugene Levin's investment, so he took a job instead. His 2024 stage interview opens the machine — perpetual affiliate fees, three-axis expansion, an IPO-day faceplant — and history added the Adobe ending.
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Eugene Levin spent two years trying to invest in Semrush and failed — not because the founders said no to him, but because they didn’t need anyone’s money. “They were so profitable — the margin was like 40% — they didn’t know what to do with money,” he told Nathan on stage at SaaS Open in March 2024. His workaround: “I figure out how to speed up the business, and you give me shares.” They hired him in 2014; at peak he owned about 2% of the company he couldn’t buy into. By the time he told the story, Semrush was past $300M in ARR, public, and profitable again.
The side project that ate the company
Founders Oleg Shchegolev and Dmitry Melnikov — “old tech engineers by trade” — built the original tool for themselves, to research where to buy and sell traffic in their arbitrage business. The data was good enough that outsiders kept asking for access, so they productized it at $49.95 a month, positioned as a spin-off from their micro-tools SEO Digger and SEO Quake. The early go-to-market was an affiliate program that at its 2012–13 peak drove about a third of revenue — on terms Levin now flags as the tape’s cautionary lesson.
The original terms. “It was a phenomenal deal for affiliates… but perpetual fees incentivize people to grab something and do nothing with it, because they get paid forever.”
The fix Semrush converted the program to — a bounty paid once, not a fee paid forever.
His recommendation to founders: affiliate programs work brilliantly for spreading the word — “it would never work if product was not good” — but cap the fee at two or three years.
The three-axis expansion machine
Levin’s stated pride is Semrush’s cohort chart — and the monetization redesign behind it. The model he and the COO run has three deliberate axes — and the disclosure that makes it quotable: each axis contributes roughly a third of expansion.
Movement between the core plans, driven by usage.
The “viral hooks” pulling colleagues in.
A portfolio for products that don’t belong in the core plans.
At peak the machine produced over 120% net revenue retention — “for an SMB martech business, phenomenal” — settling to 107% in the most recent quarter he could cite. Two pricing-page details carry the philosophy: prices were first raised by simple experimentation, later re-derived scientifically with Profitwell’s team; and the plans deliberately describe people (“startups and freelancers”) rather than utility metrics, because “if I tell you you can have X keywords, it doesn’t really tell you much” until you’ve used the product. (Contrast with the metric-led approach in our pricing breakdown.)
Ringing the bell, dropping 20%
Semrush IPO’d in March 2021 with 67,000 paying customers — and fell 20% on day one. Levin’s split-screen memory is the best IPO passage in our archive: CEO Oleg was “extremely upset… it’s like you bring your daughter to the ball and nobody wants to dance with her,” while Levin himself was “the happiest man in the world — we did it.” Months later the stock traded above the IPO price. His later stretch of the tape reads as the operator’s guide to being a small-cap:
- You must grow — there are no small-cap value investors. It’s why he passed on acquiring Moz, sizable but shrinking (~$100M then ~$70M): “you combine a fast-growing business with one that doesn’t grow, and the sum is less than both separately.”
- Shift the mix from options to RSUs — his answer on employee morale through a flat stock, “so people don’t get obsessed with the stock chart.”
- Reallocate paid spend to organic — where the profitability turn came from; his renting-versus-building-a-house analogy: “paid media is like renting… they kick you out and you have nothing.”
The ending the tape didn’t know
The GetLatka dataset tracks the whole climb: $64.8M (2018), $92M (2019), $125M (2020), $254M (2022), $330M at the interview — with more than 30% of the Fortune 500 as customers and 5,000+ accounts above 500 employees.
Then, in November 2025, the story got its twist: Adobe agreed to acquire Semrush for $12.00 a share in cash — about $1.9 billion, expected to close in the first half of 2026.
77%Adobe’s premium on the depressed stock
The exit reads two ways at once, like so much of this era: a landmark outcome for a bootstrapped-profitable Russian-engineered side project from 2008 — and a price below the company’s COVID-era public peak, rhyming with Gong’s valuation arc and Loom’s Atlassian ending. Levin’s stage advice to employees watching the chart — “stay patient, focus on long-term” — turned out to be a prophecy with a closing date.
Current data lives on Semrush’s GetLatka profile; the full 2024 stage conversation is here.
SourcesEugene Levin’s March 2024 SaaS Open stage interview with Nathan; GetLatka dataset rows for Semrush; Adobe’s November 2025 acquisition terms.
