Gong's Revenue Growth

Gong, a startup that helps companies predict their revenue from potential sales, has surpassed $300 million in annualized recurring revenue, the company announced on Wednesday. Since its founding in 2016, Gong has used AI to analyze customer interactions. The addition of generative AI capabilities in recent years has helped to fuel the company’s growth.

“We’re seeing great momentum. That’s why we’re excited to share the numbers,” Gong CEO Amit Bendov told TechCrunch. Gong was last valued at $7.25 billion when it raised a $250 million Series E in 2021 in a deal led by Franklin Templeton with participation from Coatue, Salesforce Ventures, Sequoia, Thrive Capital, and Tiger Global.

Valuation and Growth

Many companies funded in 2020 and 2021 received inflated valuations relative to their revenue and have since struggled to justify them. Assuming that Gong is still valued at $7.25 billion, the latest ARR figure implies that the company is now valued at roughly 24 times ARR and puts Gong in the same bucket as some of the largest, most watched AI companies. But Gong’s valuation may still be elevated relative to certain newer, exceptionally fast-growing AI startups.

For instance, Anysphere, the maker of the AI-powered coding assistant Cursor, was recently valued at 25 times ARR. Anysphere reached $100M in ARR from low-single millions in less than a year. (Investors typically assign higher valuation multiples to startups with faster growth rates.) Although Bendov didn’t share Gong’s revenue growth, he said it’s in the range of “top-quartile public SaaS companies.” (The Bessemer Ventures Cloud Index indicates that top cloud companies have annual revenue growth rates between 25% and 56%.)

Customers and IPO Plans

Gong counts among its 4,500 corporate customers companies like Canva, Google, LinkedIn and Square, Bendov said. Gong’s current ARR and growth trajectory likely puts the company on the path to IPO, and Bendov admitted that a public offering would be an important milestone but said it’s not in the works for 2025. “[An IPO] is very interesting but not the most important thing. We are focusing on building amazing products,” he said.

If not an IPO, as for raising another round from venture sources, Bendov said that Gong is nearly profitable and still has plenty of cash from its 2021 round. “We almost haven’t touched it.”

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