What’s the right pace for raising capital?

Shin KimContributorShare on TwitterShin Kim is working on a new SaaS startup and is also chief of staff to entrepreneur Elad Gil . Previously, Shin was at Oak Hill Capital and J.P. Morgan and earned a Master's in EECS (data science) from UC Berkeley.More posts by this contributor

• What's the right pace for raising capital?

A common question in the minds of many SaaS founders is the pace of raising capital. How much is too much too early? What amount of capital raise is typical for comparable peers? How capital-efficient are the best-in-class companies?

In the last 30 months (2017 2H onwards), a total of 21 SaaS U.S.-based, VC-backed companies have gone public, including Zoom, Slack, Datadog and others¹. To answer the above questions, I analyzed all 21 companies to understand their fundraising and revenue-generating trajectories.

The charts below show each company's annual run-rate revenue (ARR)² and cumulative equity funding³ over time. Read endnotes for details on data source⁴ and methodology⁵. The backup for the full analysis can be accessed here.

I divided the companies into four patterns: