AI-NATIVE VS TRADITIONAL SAAS GROWTH

The data is clear: AI-native companies are breaking traditional SaaS benchmarks.

• Lovable reached $100M ARR in just 8 months, with a team of about 45 people.

• Cursor hit the same milestone in one year, with fewer than 20 employees.

• ElevenLabs, focused on AI-driven audio, took around 2 years, with about 150 people.

• Glean, an AI-powered workplace platform, achieved it in 3 years — but with a much larger team of roughly 1,000 employees.

By comparison, top-performing traditional SaaS companies typically take 5–6 years to reach $100M ARR — meaning AI-native players are scaling up to 3x faster.

This radical compression of growth cycles has direct implications for M&A and fundraising dynamics:

• Early liquidity: founders may become acquisition targets before reaching late-stage rounds.

• Valuation pressure: ARR now reflects not just traction, but also the speed of market capture.

• Sustainability risk: hypergrowth can mask weaknesses in churn and unit economics, demanding deeper due diligence.

For founders, the opportunity is clear: it’s never been faster to turn product into revenue.For investors and strategic buyers, however, the critical question remains:Which models are truly scalable and defensible — and which are just running on hype?

AI-NATIVE VS TRADITIONAL SAAS GROWTH

By DealMaker Insights | DealMaker