As the world follows every whisper & rumor from AI, what has happened to public SaaS?
The answer is not much! All the fun is in the private markets.
Multiples haven’t moved outside of a narrow band since the post-Covid crash in 2022.
Even here, AI is the story, with AI SaaS companies seeing different valuation correlates : revenue growth. Meanwhile, non-AI SaaS companies are valued more broadly with efficiency metrics included.
The scarcity of hyper-growth companies in 2025 tells its own story. Public SaaS companies have matured. The median company in our dataset grows at 13.7% annually, with a median multiple of 5.5x.
Most companies cluster near the median, with a few outliers driving exceptional growth rates. The distribution shows a steep drop-off from the top performers & a cluster of shrinking businesses.
The private market contains tens of unicorns with growth rates multiple times higher in both AI & classic SaaS. At some point soon, the largest AI companies’ capital requirements will push them to IPO.
At that point, the data will look very different!