The new shape of software growth curves
TechCrunch pulled together the startups reporting a pattern most operators have never seen: revenue milestones arriving in ever-shorter intervals. The poster child is Mercor, the firm that hires domain experts to train and refine AI models. Its CEO announced the company crossed US$2 billion in gross annualised revenue as of June - four months after reaching $1 billion, which itself came only months after a $500 million run rate last September. Mercor is less than three years old. The report notes Anthropic's revenue has been climbing at a velocity that has transfixed the sector, and the acceleration is not confined to AI-natives: Gusto, the 14-year-old HR platform last valued at $9.3 billion in 2022, has now accelerated for five consecutive quarters and passed $1 billion in actual trailing-twelve-month revenue, while 18-year-old legal-software maker Clio - which embedded AI into its product in 2023 - went from $200 million ARR in mid-2024 to about $500 million now, doubling in roughly a year.
Read the metrics before you envy them
The piece is refreshingly honest about measurement: the companies use the same three letters to mean different things - annualised recurring revenue, annualised run-rate extrapolated from the latest month, or committed-but-not-yet-onboarded contracts - while Gusto's figure is real trailing revenue. Acceleration is genuine across the list, but the units are not interchangeable.
What this means for your growth assumptions
- If you sell software, your board's benchmark just moved: buyers and investors are recalibrating what "good" growth looks like against AI-era curves, and flat-but-healthy SaaS growth now reads as stagnation in comparison. Have a narrative ready for how AI changes your own slope - Gusto and Clio prove incumbents can bend the curve, not just startups.
- The Mercor signal matters beyond envy: paying human experts to generate training data is a multi-billion-dollar market growing explosively, which tells you frontier labs still bottleneck on high-quality human judgment. If your firm holds rare domain expertise, that expertise is now a sellable input, not just an internal asset.
- For diligence work, copy the article's discipline: whenever a vendor or acquisition target quotes "ARR," ask which ARR - contracted, extrapolated, or committed - before you build a model on it. The gap between definitions is frequently the gap between a good deal and a write-down.