Scale Venture Partners

After successfully implementing a Product-Led Growth (PLG) strategy, many SaaS companies add a sales-led growth (SLG) motion to further accelerate growth. A sales-led motion empowers SaaS companies to navigate and address complex buying processes. While PLG effectively drives initial adoption and user engagement, larger enterprise deals with more complex stakeholder involvement and tailored solutions often require a sales-led motion. In this How We Scaled this, Peter Giordano walks through how to augment a PLG strategy with a sales-led motion, from mapping your buyer's journey to winning stakeholder support. The results: ?? Increased ARR 300%+ ?? Reduced CAC by improving sales process efficiency ?? Increased customer references 3x

Technology innovation has supercharged how we work for the past three decades. Hardware engineering, however, has been left behind, with most practicing engineers still working with software their mentors were trained on. With AI and the cloud, that's changing. Startups have a chance now more than ever to build new platforms to meet the moment and unseat long-entrenched incumbents. Read more from Omar Fidawi and Juliette Chevallier on the history of hardware engineering and the work that is key to advancing these fields. https://lnkd.in/gBTWRDy8

This quarter's flash report showed more of the same from Q2—and that's a good thing. The return to growth paired with ongoing gains in operating efficiency is holding, showing that the “year of efficiency” has given way to an era of sustainable growth. Key metrics: ?? Companies grew faster.?ARR growth rate rose from 24% to 31%. ?? Companies became more efficient.?Burn multiple improved by 23%, meaning companies burned $1.92 (down from $2.49) for every $1 in net new ARR generated. ?? Companies burned less.?Operating margin rose from (76%) to (67%). Read the full report. https://lnkd.in/gbUFimCi

This quarter’s flash report shows stability, with growth continuing to slowly reaccelerate paired with gains in efficiency – a positive trend to close out the year. The “year of efficiency” is shifting into an era of sustainable growth, a big shift from the hypergrowth and hyperburn days. If companies can continue to accelerate growth and compound steadily while marching toward convergence, they will be on their way to becoming great companies. Whether this new era holds into 2025 is yet to be seen, but for now, this balanced growth is a welcome change. Here are the top line metrics you need to know:? ?? Companies grew faster. ARR growth rate rose from 24% to 31%. ?? Companies became more efficient. Burn multiple improved by 23%, meaning companies burned $1.92 (down from $2.49) for every $1 in net new ARR generated. ?? Companies burned less. Operating margin rose from (76%) to (67%). You can read more here: https://lnkd.in/gRDDqQMw

The hype around AI GTM is real. But is it backed up by actual usage and adoption? In our Flash Survey, we asked GTM leaders about their current approach to integrating AI into their workflows and what impact they're seeing. Here are the key insights: ??While most organizations surveyed are deploying AI in an ad-hoc, individual-led manner, ~30% of organizations are piloting, planning to use, or using AI department-wide. ??Among the organizations that are taking a department-wide approach, adoption is largely still in the early innings: roughly 50% are currently in the pilot phase. ??Only ~5% of respondents have substantially overhauled their function to make use of AI. ??Over 90% of respondents are seeing some impact from their adoption of AI tools. Read the full report below.

Congratulations to the Spot AI team on their launch of Video AI Agents! Instead of "going to the tape" to see what happened after the fact, these agents work as an extra set of eyes to make workplaces safer, more efficient, and more secure.?This is a huge step forward, transforming passive video surveillance into a proactive problem solver.

Having made our first investment in intelligent apps in 2015, Scale is nearly ten years into AI investing. In conversation with Crunchbase's Gené Teare, Scale Partner Rory O'Driscoll cuts through the post-ChatGPT hype to break down AI's impact on the market into three waves. From BILL, Box, and WalkMe? to his most recent investments in applied AI startups Tavus and Klarity, Rory has been on the ground floor of investing in numerous technology shifts. Read more on how he sees this third wave of AI investment playing out. https://lnkd.in/gncjQfcw

Congratulations to the Fixify team on their raise! Fixify has revolutionized the helpdesk with a solution that is perfect blend of technology and human expertise. Their automation, powered by the latest in AI, can handle a majority of support tasks. Where automation reaches its limits, skilled professionals from Fixify’s team step in. We're excited to be part of Fixify's journey. Read more from TechCrunch and the Fixify team below.

Congratulations to honeycomb.io on the launch of Honeycomb Log Analytics and the Honeycomb Telemetry Pipeline! This launch enables the ingestion of any data type–including logs–into Honeycomb’s high-cardinality datastore and query engine. Honeycomb created modern observability. With Honeycomb, engineering teams can manage and analyze log data with speed, efficiency, and confidence, transforming observability from a cost center to a value driver. Check it out: https://go.hny.co/3BMkQys

We're excited to announce our investment in Galileo ?? AI is transforming the enterprise. But, the absence of effective evaluation and observability methods to measure the quality and trustworthiness of these new systems at scale poses a significant barrier to deployment. If you cannot evaluate the output of a language model, how will you test an application powered by one? And if you cannot test an application, how do you expect to deploy it in the first place? Enter Galileo. Galileo offers a comprehensive suite of tools for AI debugging and observability, enabling AI engineers and stakeholders to gain visibility into the performance of their AI models. By providing not only customizable evaluation functionality, but also error analysis and tracing, Galileo goes beyond bare bones evaluation and enables customers to understand not just if their models are wrong, but why they are wrong and how to fix them. Congratulations to the team!