Startup finance benchmarks

The venture-scale reference is T2D3: from about €1M ARR, triple it twice, then double it three times, reaching €100M around year five (Neeraj Agrawal, 2015).

Under 1x exceptional · 1 to 1.5x great · 1.5 to 2x good · 2 to 3x suspect · above 3x trouble past seed.

Under 12 months is generally considered healthy for SaaS.

SMB SaaS commonly runs 3 to 5 percent monthly. Products sold to larger companies target under 1 percent.

Software businesses typically run 70 to 85 percent. Services and hardware run considerably lower.

3:1 is the widely used target. Below 1:1 every customer loses money. Above 5:1 often means underspending on growth.

Paul Graham's yardstick for YC-stage startups: 5 to 7 percent growth a week is good, 10 percent is exceptional. Most companies at that stage measure it on MRR.

Above 100 percent means the existing base grows without new customers. Best-in-class B2B SaaS reaches 120 percent or more.

Above 30 percent from one customer is commonly treated as a material risk in diligence.

40 is the accepted pass line. Brad Feld, who published the rule in 2015, framed it as applying from roughly $1M of ARR upward; below that scale, growth rates swing too wildly for the sum to mean much.

Most investors expect 18 to 24 months after a round. Below 6 months you are raising from a weak position.

Lars Leckie, who coined the metric, drew the lines that are still used: above 0.75, keep investing in the go-to-market; below 0.5, fix the model before spending more; in between, look deeper before deciding.

Mamoon Hamid, who introduced the metric in 2015, set 4 as the bar for a healthy early-stage SaaS company. Below 2, growth is a treadmill: most of what sales wins, churn takes back.