There have been four very high profile SaaS IPO’s lately: Figma, ServiceTitan, Klaviyo, and Rubrik. We read through their prospectus’ and below are the key learnings from all four companies.
Go to Market
One of the clearest patterns is the power of starting with a simple, product-led go-to-market strategy and layering in complexity only as the business matures. Freemium and self-service motion played a critical early role for Figma and Klaviyo, helping them grow virally and build traction without heavy sales investment. Over time, as ACVs grew and enterprise adoption picked up, outbound sales and admin-driven license controls became necessary. In each case, onboarding became more than just a support function; it was a revenue and retention lever, especially for ServiceTitan.
Pricing
Pricing strategies initially focused on simplicity, with just one or two plans tailored to a core value metrics like seats (Figma), contact/message volume (Klaviyo), or data managed (Rubrik). As these companies scaled, pricing grew more sophisticated to reflect the complexity and demands of larger customers. Notably, bundling support into pricing (as Rubrik did) proved critical for managing churn, while unbundled or optional support often led to higher risk. As product suites expanded, cross-sell became a growth engine: Figma launched Dev Mode and Slides, Klaviyo added SMS, and ServiceTitan grew into FinTech and payments — all tied directly to usage and customer pain.
Retention and International Expansion
High net revenue retention was arguably the biggest predictor of IPO strength. With NRRs ranging from 119% (Klaviyo) to 133% (Rubrik), these businesses were able to grow significantly even without acquiring net-new customers. Product-led expansion, especially when it unlocked new personas within the same customer base (like Figma moving from designers to developers), proved to be one of the most durable and scalable growth models. Similarly, international growth became important as these companies approached IPO scale: Figma generated over 50% of its revenue outside the U.S., and Klaviyo was close behind at 30%.
Burning Cash
Financially, while not all were profitable early, the trajectory mattered more than the starting point. Klaviyo and Figma reached profitability pre-IPO, while Rubrik and ServiceTitan were still posting net losses, but with strong retention, significant pre-paid contracts, and improving efficiency metrics. Investors rewarded the signal of operational discipline and future cash leverage, not just raw profit numbers. Even where capital efficiency was subpar (Klaviyo generated only $0.19 in revenue per $1 invested), the improving trend line was enough to support a successful offering.
Leadership
Lastly, culture and leadership consistency showed up across the board. Each company remained founder-led at the time of IPO. Employee equity participation was a theme, especially at Figma and Klaviyo, aligning teams with outcomes.
Thank you for reading. If you’re curious, below is the raw information from Figma, ServiceTitan, Klaviyo, and Rubrik, should you want to put AI on this.
Figma
8 years after launch, a new product caught fire. “Then, in 2023, building on years of bringing design and code closer together, we launched Dev Mode, a product tailored for developers, who, during the three months ended March 31, 2025, made up approximately 30% of our monthly active users. In 2024, we introduced Figma Slides to give teams a new tool to drive strategy and alignment along the way.”
They pump out product. “In 2024 alone, we shipped 180 new features and updates. Our customers recognize the benefits of the interconnectivity across our platform, with 76% of our customers using two or more products during the three months ended March 31, 2025.”
Pricing was simple, initially. “In Figma’s early days, our customers could choose from one of two plans: Starter (our free plan) and Professional (our paid plan).”
But they evolved to adapt to customers using the product more deeply. “As teams grew with Figma, companies started to standardize their systems and processes on our platform. This was necessary because many of these companies were managing multiple brands and teams across time zones. Many customers began viewing Figma as their system of record for design and product development, and needed more features and functionality to support not only their work, but also to adhere to security and compliance standards. Based on feedback from our customers, in 2018, we introduced our Organization plan. Our Organization plan allows for unlimited teams, shared libraries, and centralized admin tools. While these features were sufficient for many of our customers, others needed more. As a result, in 2022, we launched our Enterprise plan, with features like custom team workspaces, advanced security, and private APIs to meet the needs of our largest customers. While approximately 70% of our revenue for each of the year ended December 31, 2024 and the three months ended March 31, 2025, came from customers on Organization and Enterprise plans, we continue to build features and products designed to create value for all of our customers.”
International presence. “The vast majority of our users have always been outside the United States, and today we have users in over 150 countries. Customers working in Figma on University Avenue in Palo Alto use the same product as those building the next big thing in a Bangalore coffee shop. During the three months ended March 31, 2025, approximately 85% of our monthly active users were based outside of the United States, and 53% of our revenue came from non-U.S. markets during the same period”
They just achieved profitability. “Our revenue was $749.0 million for the year ended December 31, 2024, representing 48% year-over-year growth as compared to the year ended December 31, 2023. For the years ended December 31, 2023 and 2024, we had net income of $737.8 million and net loss of $732.1 million, respectively, and for the three months ended March 31, 2024 and 2025, we had net income of $13.5 million and $44.9 million.” Note that the 2024 loss was largely due to stock option grants.
They didn’t charge for the first 2 years. “When we first launched Figma in 2015, early adopters realized the benefit of using a highly performant, browser-based design tool that was also easy-to-use. Adoption grew organically as designers advocated for Figma within their organizations and others saw the natural benefits of bringing teams together into the design process. Users started inviting their collaborators to join them in Figma, and as we began charging for Figma in 2017, this drove conversions from free to paid plans”
First sales rep came only when the GTM became more enterprise. “We hired our first sales rep in 2018, the same year we launched our Organization plan. As we have introduced tailored plans designed to meet the needs of larger companies. As of March 31, 2025, we had more than 40 Paid Customers with more than $1 million of ARR”
They changed pricing in response only to user use. “As adoption continued to spread quickly within companies, customers told us that managing licenses, account details, and other administrative functions became increasingly time-consuming and complex. we made our first-ever changes to our pricing and packaging of our plans in March 2025. Instead of buying individual products, customers can now buy multi-product seats tailored to the needs of different users”
Seat upgrades are proactively approved. “We have also made additional modifications to how we sell, price, and package our products. First, we moved away from user-driven upgrades. Prior to March 2025, seat upgrades were driven by users by default. Administrators reviewed these new seats retroactively to provision the seats. In the new model, any seat upgrade needs to be approved by an administrator before the license is provisioned.”
They have a freemium-ish strategy. “Converting new and existing users into paying customers is a key driver of our growth strategy. We have a range of different plans for all types of users, including a free Starter plan. We also have a free offering for students and educators. We have rapidly grown our user base and during the three months ended March 31, 2025, we had over 13 million monthly active users5, comprised of both free users and paying users. Our Starter plan makes it easy for anyone to quickly get started with Figma and experience the benefits of our platform. More advanced functionality is available on our paid plans, which are designed to meet the specific and sometimes complex needs of teams.”
Retention is excellent. “Our Net Dollar Retention Rate of 132% as of March 31, 2025 underscores the natural expansion of our platform as well as adoption of new products with our customers. The chart below illustrates the ARR of each cohort over the periods presented, with each cohort representing Paid Customers who made their first purchase from us in a given fiscal year. For example, the 2020 cohort represents all Paid Customers that purchased their first subscription from us during 2020. The compound annual growth rate of ARR for our 2020 cohort, 2021 cohort, and 2022 cohort from the fiscal year of the cohort through March 31, 2025 is 46%, 31%, and 22%, respectively. As of March 31, 2025, our Gross Retention Rate was 96%”
Adobe almost bought them. “On December 17, 2023, we mutually agreed with Adobe to terminate the Merger Agreement based on the joint assessment that there was no clear path to obtain the required regulatory approvals for the transaction to close (the “Abandoned Merger with Adobe”). On December 20, 2023, we received a $1.0 billion termination fee per the terms of the Merger Agreement from Adobe which was recorded within other income”
The CEO is the Founder. His name is Dylan Field, he’s only 33, and he owned 12% of the business prior to IPO.
ServiceTitan
Customers are SMB and enterprise. “As of January 31, 2023 and 2024, we had approximately 6,800 Active Customers and approximately 8,000 Active Customers, respectively, representing over 95% and over 96% of our annualized billings, respectively. During fiscal 2024, our customers performed jobs in zip codes representing approximately 98.5% of the U.S. population, based on U.S. census data as of 2022. In fiscal 2024, approximately 109 million jobs were completed by our customers through our platform. As a testament to our platform’s ability to scale with our customers, as of January 31, 2024, we had over 1,000 customers with annualized billings exceeding $100,000 on our platform, a number which has roughly doubled since January 31, 2022. Customers with annualized billings exceeding $100,000 on our platform represented over 50% of annualized billings as of January 31, 2024”
The go to market starts with a basic plan. “We go to market with our platform in three ways: Core, Pro and FinTech products. We land with our Core product, which offers a base-level functionality across all key workflows, including call tracking, scheduling, dispatching, end-customer communications, marketing automation, estimating, job costing, sales, inventory and payroll integration. To supplement our Core product and provide an even higher level of functionality, we offer our Pro products, which provide value-additive capabilities such as Marketing Pro, Pricebook Pro, Dispatch Pro and Scheduling Pro, as well as our FinTech products, which include payment processing and third-party financing solutions. Together, we refer to our Pro and FinTech products as “add-on products.””
Nice growth, but heavy net losses. “our revenue was $467.7 million and $614.3 million for fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, respectively, representing a year-over-year increase of 31%. During fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, we incurred losses from operations of $221.9 million and $182.9 million, respectively”
Two-pronged revenue model. “The substantial majority of our revenue is platform revenue, which we generate through (a) subscription revenue generated from access to and use of our platform, including subscriptions to our Core and certain Pro products, and (b) usage-based revenue generated from the transactions using our FinTech solutions, usage of certain Pro products and other usage-based services. Our customer contracts are generally based on the number of users, mix of products, number of end customers and the amount of GTV. Platform revenue is generated through the following:”
The marketing strategy. “We employ several strategies to efficiently go-to-market. These include digital marketing, which draws inbound leads to our website, and outbound direct marketing, such as targeted phone outreach. We also benefit from significant word-of-mouth and often generate new business through referrals from current customers and industry partners that are trusted across the trades, including industry associations, original equipment manufacturers, or OEMs, and distributors. We extend our reach further through industry conferences, including our annual customer conferences, Ignite and Pantheon, which were most recently held in the summer and fall 2024 with collectively over 3,500 customers and over 100 sponsors, including OEMs, technology partners and trade associations, in attendance.”
Onboarding is key. “Our customers’ journey begins with onboarding and training, which we see as essential to our customers’ success. During onboarding, our teams heavily invest in our customers’ success by ensuring an effective implementation experience. We train technicians, customer service representatives and other office employees and integrate their data flows and systems with our platform to maximize the value we can deliver. We accordingly price our onboarding services competitively as acquisition, retention and sales velocity tools.”
Upselling may also happen during onboarding. “We typically introduce FinTech products at the time of customer onboarding to take advantage of the value such add-on products provide given the importance of being able to process payments and offer financing for a seamless customer experience.”
If your customers are consolidating, focus on ACV growth. “The trades industry is also experiencing an influx of professional operators, including private equity owners, who are investing in and consolidating the trades, in many cases on our platform. Because of these dynamics, we focus on increasing the GTV on our platform, rather than new customer count.”
Klaviyo
Text messaging still very much matters. “We have seen notable success in the expansion of our platform with our SMS offering, which launched in 2021. The number of customers that use our SMS offering represented 14.8% of our customers as of June 30, 2023”
To unify data, you need integrations, and in our view not enough attention is given to how important integrations are to every business. “we offer over 300 pre-built integrations and open APIs to bring additional profile and event information into Klaviyo.”
Pricing is volume and product based; volume is Klaviyo’s key value metric. “Our subscription plans are tiered based on the number of active consumer profiles stored on our platform combined with the number of emails and SMS messages sent. As our customers’ businesses grow, they utilize more consumer profiles and send more emails and SMS messages, which naturally increases their usage of our platform. Our revenue also expands when our customers add additional channels, such as SMS, or when their other brands, business units, and geographies start using the platform.”
All employees own equity. “Everyone at Klaviyo are owners, both in a literal sense of owning equity in our company and also in how we operate.”
Customer retention is strong and improving; 100%+ takes you to the holy land in our view. “Our NRR was 111%, 115%, 119%, 121%, 121%, 120%, 119%, 119%, 119%, and 119% as of March 31, 2021, June 30, 2021, September 30, 2021, December 31, 2021, March 31, 2022, June 30, 2022, September 30, 2022, December 31, 2022, March 31, 2023, and June 30, 2023, respectively.”
Inbound and self service drive the business, as this is a smaller ACV product. “we attract the majority of our new customers through inbound channels, such as word-of-mouth, agency partnerships, and platform integrations. Many of our customers come through our self-service channel by simply signing up for our platform without the need for a salesperson’s involvement.”
Nice growth, and just turned profitable. A trend to profitability is becoming a requirement for M&A or IPO. “We grew our revenue 62.7% year-over-year, from $290.6 million in 2021 to $472.7 million in 2022. Our net losses for 2021 and 2022 were $79.4 million and $49.2 million, respectively. In 2021 and 2022, our operating cash flow was $(22.7) million and $(23.6) million.” However, in the past 6 months Klaviyo turned a profit!
They play in a large market, but doesn’t everyone. Klaviyo focuses on retail. “Our estimated serviceable addressable market opportunity within this vertical is over $16 billion.”
Moving from SMB to mid-market and enterprise as a way to grow. “As of June 30, 2023, we had 1,458 customers generating over $50,000 of ARR, representing growth of 94% year-over-year. Going forward, we expect to continue to grow our mid-market and enterprise presence as we further invest in our outbound sales team and add new product capabilities.”
To be this big, you’ve got to sell internationally. “We have seen great success in these international markets, as sales outside of Americas represented 29.3% of our revenue in the year ended December 31, 2022 and 30.7% of our revenue in the six months ended June 30, 2023.”
Even successful companies like Klaviyo did cuts, so don’t be shy about it. They have 1548 employees today. But “in March 2023 we announced a reduction-in-force affecting approximately 8% of our global workforce.”
The CEO is a co-founder; our data shows 67% of CEO’s are the founder in SaaS. He makes only $78k annually and owns 38% of the business.
The business has not been cash efficient, but the trend to profitability is what matters for exit. Lifetime, they have generated only $0.19 of revenue for every dollar of investment, but they did recently turn profitable.
Rubrik
Going public in this environment requires lots or ARR, growing fast with excellent retention. “Our Subscription ARR grew from $532.9 million as of January 31, 2023 to $784.0 million as of January 31, 2024, representing a 47% increase. In addition, as customers experience the benefits of our platform, they typically expand their usage significantly, as evidenced by our average subscription dollar-based net retention rate of 133% as of January 31, 2024. We have seen our customer count grow to over 6,100 as of January 31, 2024 from over 5,000 as of January 31, 2023.”
Big operating losses are acceptable, so long as you have a true SaaS model that generates cash. “In fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, we incurred net losses of $(277.7) million and $(354.2) million, respectively. In fiscal 2023 and fiscal 2024, operating cash flow was $19.3 million and $(4.5) million, respectively, and free cash flow was $(15.0) million and $(24.5) million, respectively.” The difference between net losses and operating cash flow was cash collected from annual-pay contracts. Cash collected from annual pay contracts in 2023 and 2022 was $300mm and $339mm respectively.
Their pricing is simple and easy to understand. “Our platform can be purchased in three subscription editions. Our various editions include a combination of products across data sources (enterprise, cloud, and SaaS applications). We price our subscription editions primarily based on edition tier and data volume.”
Outbound sales for large prospects, while inside sales team handles smaller ones. “We primarily sell subscriptions of RSC through our global sales team and partner network, where we target the largest organizations worldwide to mid-sized organizations. We also sell to smaller customers through a high-velocity engagement model driven by our inside sales team.”
Good ‘ole land and expand. “We utilize a land and expand approach. Expansion happens along three vectors: the growth of data from applications already secured by Rubrik, new applications secured, and additional data security products. This expansion is driven by a natural flywheel effect in which the value of our platform increases as our customers’ data grows across various applications.”
Over time, you need to shift the focus to larger customers. “Additionally, as of January 31, 2019, 2020, 2021, and 2022 the number of customers generating more than $100,000 in Subscription ARR was 23, 137, 309, and 628, respectively.”
Support is bundled with the subscription. Don’t let the customer decide on whether to buy support. “Subscription term-based licenses provide our customer with a right to use the software for a fixed term commencing upon delivery of the license to our customer. Support services are bundled with each subscription term-based license for the term of the subscription.”