Coupa is a $16B SaaS success story anyone selling mid-market and enterprise should know more about
They dominated their Web 1.0 predecessor (SAP Ariba) and grew the TAM of their space, Spend Management, 20x
5 Interesting Learnings: ⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️⬇️
#1. Network effects are real in many spaces in SaaS, like Spend Management
Coupa now manages $2.5T in spend management over 7 million suppliers. Could you switch to another vendor? Yes. Would you want to? No. Imagine how many vendor relationships that would be to switch over
#2. 80% of implementations led by partners, with 5,000 trained partner consultants
The really big deals & even smaller ones are deployed by partners. 80% of deals. The “biggies” are Accenture, KPMG, and Deloitte. But Coupa has implementation partners across all segments
3. Even at $700m in ARR, Coupa has only closed 2,000 of 100,000 target customers. 2%.
There’s just so much room to run in SaaS now. Even at $700m ARR, they’ve just scratched surface. Cloud is huge. This is why all the SaaS leaders seem to have almost unlimited room for growth
4. Serves both mid-market >and< enterprise at the same time. ARR per deal has gone up every quarter.
Coupa shows you can do both even in a complex offering, and has driven up ACVs in the mid-market in particular. You don't have to only go enterprise with a rich solution.
5. Slowly becoming a fintech.
Coupa isn’t as much a fintech as SMB players like Bill.com, but it’s getting there with Coupa Pay. Coupa plans the majority of its customers to be running payments through their platform in 10 years. Today, about 12% do.
A deeper dive here on Coupa at $700m ARR, growing a stunning 40% (!), here:
👉Why This Matters: The window for going public with lower growth rates is wide open.
Public markets are rewarding ANY profitable growth right now. Companies that hesitate and wait for “perfect metrics” will miss the easiest IPO environment in years.
✅Action Items: If you’re profitable and growing, don’t wait.
If you’re unprofitable, get to breakeven fast or raise enough capital to survive the next wave. There’s no middle ground anymore.
#2: Growth Gets 13x Revenue Multiples vs 5x for Slow Growth – The Great Separation
The Math That Explains Everything
The valuation gap between fast and slow growers has never been wider:
🚀>25% Growth Companies: 13x revenue multiples (based on just 8 companies – that’s how rare they are)
🐌<25% Growth Companies: 4-5x revenue multiples (based on 163 companies)
🥇The Scarcity Factor: Only 5% of public software companies are growing >25% today, down from 26% in 2021
👉Historical Context:
We’ve gone from 17% median revenue growth (2021) to just 9% today. High-growth companies aren’t just getting premium valuations – they’re becoming unicorns in public markets.
🏃♀️The Brutal Reality:
Growth isn’t just valuable – it’s becoming extinct. If you’re growing fast, you’re literally in the top 5% of all software companies. Public markets are treating you like the rare asset you are.
✅Action Items:
If you’re growing >25%, leverage this scarcity for maximum valuation. If you’re growing <25%, understand you’re competing with 95% of the market for scraps.
▶️Global adoption: 90% of ChatGPT users are outside North America by Year 3 (vs. Internet’s 23 years to reach this level)
👉Why This Matters for B2B: Unlike previous tech waves that started in Silicon Valley and slowly diffused globally, AI hit the world simultaneously.
This means your global TAM expanded overnight, but so did your competition. Every B2B and SaaS company now competes in a global, AI-enabled market from Day 1.
The Kicker: ChatGPT’s daily usage increased 202% over 21 months, with users spending more time per session (47% longer) and having more sessions per day (106% more). This isn’t just adoption – it’s addiction-level engagement.
2. The Infrastructure Math Is Unprecedented
The Capital Intensity Is Off The Charts:
▶️Big Six tech CapEx: $212B annually (63% YoY growth)
▶️Microsoft AI business: $13B run-rate (175% YoY growth)
▶️NVIDIA data center revenue: $39B quarterly (78% YoY growth)
▶️Amazon AWS CapEx as % of revenue: 49% (vs. 4% during initial cloud buildout)
💡What’s Really Happening: This isn’t just “cloud 2.0” – it’s the biggest infrastructure buildout in tech history. Companies are spending more on AI infrastructure than entire countries’ GDP. xAI built a 200,000 GPU data center in 122 days (faster than building a single house).
👉For B2B and SaaS Leaders: The infrastructure layer is being rebuilt from scratch. If you’re not thinking about how to leverage this massive compute capacity, you’re missing the biggest infrastructure opportunity since the cloud transition. The companies building on this new stack will have 10x advantages over those still running traditional architectures.
🤷♀️The Scary Part: Energy consumption is exploding. Data centers now consume 1.5% of global electricity, growing 12% annually (4x faster than total electricity consumption). This infrastructure boom has real physical limits.
Salesforce has crossed a stunning $40 Billion in ARR
It's passed SAP and now only MSFT + Oracle are bigger in the enterprise
And it's gone all-in on AI, with 5,000 AI AgentForce deals in just 1 quarter!
But ... AI hasn't led to more growth ... yet
5 Interesting Learnings:
#1. Only 21% of Salesforce’s Revenue Today is from … Sales
This has been true for many years, but it often comes as a surprise to those that don’t know the company as well as they know its CRM.
#2. The Big Acquisitions Are Doing Well. Mulesoft, Slack and Tableau Still Growing Faster Than The Average
Salesforce’s big ecomm and marketing bets on ExactTarget ($2.5B) and Demandware ($2.8B) may have seen growth slow to 9%, but its huge bet on Slack ($27B), seemingly crazy expensive bet on Tableau ($17B) and sizeable bet on Mulesoft ($6B) all seem to still be paying off. Kudos!
At an $11.2 Billion run rate, it’s growing at a stunning 31%. And it’s accelerating.
In fact, it’s growing the fastest it has in 3 years.
It’s just stunning to see this sort of growth at this scale.
5 Interesting Learnings:
#1. Offline Revenue Up +33%, B2B Growth up 140%
While many think of Shopify as mainly an SMB online solution, its biggest growth now is in its largest customers (who run far more payments through Shopify), in its offline/ in-store business, and in B2B commerce. Relatively speaking, SMB online is softer.
#2. Just 23% of Revenue From SaaS / Software, Down From 26%
This isn’t new, but always helpful to see this over time. Shopify is effectively an ecommerce fintech that is powered by a SaaS solution.
So there's one S-tier vertical SaaS leader almost everyone should know more about:
🏘️Procore
$1.2B ARR, SaaS for Construction Management
19% Growth
12% FCF
It almost died during GFC
But today dominates in U.S.
5 Interesting Learnings:
#1. All Growth Today in $100k+ Customers
Procore serves stakeholders of all sizes — but the net new revenue growth is in $100k+ customers. $100k+ customers are growing 18% overall.
#2. 84% of Revenue From U.S.
Going global can take longer and can be harder in vertical SaaS. It's a big push today, and a different motion. They are still a newer brand outside North America. Even 23+ years in!
So Freshworks hasn't been immune to macro issues, but its bigger customers continue to grow and scale at an impressive rate
It's at ~$600,000,00 ARR today, growing 20%. But the bigger customers are growing much faster.
5 Interesting Learnings:
#1. Bigger Customers Keep Growing, But SMBs Have Slowed
A common theme across tech today. Freshworks has 51,700 customers at around $2k ARR, with a quick sales cycle of just 25 days. But in contrast to their bigger customers, the macro environment — or perhaps market saturation — has led to slowing growth in their SMB segment in 2023.
#2. Leveling Up PLG to Accelerate SMB Customers, Including More Attention to Onboarding
It can seem hard to invest heavily in small customers, but if you don’t especially invest in their onboarding, that’s a big shame. Because there are few things worse than closing a customer that never actually uses your product. So much wasted energy getting them there.