软件：独角兽初创企业是突破还是陷入困境？（2025年版）

Software: Unicorn startups breakout or broken? (2025 edition) IPOs are starting to pick up and our public market Cloud SaaS sector tracking list is slowlyshrinking (Navan and Netskope are the latest couple to leave the list, listing at NTSK withoutgain since IPO; NAVN and moving -40% since IPO). Like kids who can't wait to open ourpresents, we decided to update our earlier 2023 work, and look at the longer list of latestage “pre-IPO unicorn” startups today. With GenAI firing on all cylinders we expected alarge part of the new names to be “Born-in-AI”, but also wondered about the weakness ingeneral VC funding and how that would play out for the COVID-bubble set that had made up Peter Weed+1 917 344 8390peter.weed@bernsteinsg.com Mark L. Moerdler, Ph.D.+1 917 344 8506mark.moerdler@bernsteinsg.com Firoz Valliji, CFA+1 917 344 8316firoz.valliji@bernsteinsg.com We identified a 113-company list of $3B+ valuation late stage VC-backed CloudSaaS vendors, up from 86 at $2B+ in our prior work. This expansion reflects limited IPOs(6 left our list through this route) and M&A (4 left our list via acquisition) while VC investmentdollars and valuations are up since we last published. VC-investment is now ~50% focusedon GenAI (from <20% before) and dominated by a small set of mega-sized companies.Beyond “Born-in-AI”, the total number of rounds and dollars remain well below 2019 Armin Hadavi, CFA+1 917 344 8463armin.hadavi@bernsteinsg.com Luwei Yang+1 917 344 8342luwei.yang@bernsteinsg.com Shelly Tang, CFA+1 917 344 8342shelly.tang@bernsteinsg.com Headcount trends offer insight on pre-IPO companies' health.In the privates theconcept of ARR per employee (“APE”) caught on post COVID to validate commercialefficiency. Thus, it doesn’t surprise us that when we look at growth in employment vs. We notice the fastest headcount growers over-index to AI winners.Hyper growersare mostly AI-platform companies (Exhibit 18, Exhibit 19), but there are a few others, thatare seen as big AI winners up the software stack (Exhibit 20, Exhibit 21). Separately someprior winners are now left behind by AI (Exhibit 22, Exhibit 23, Exhibit 24). Unfortunately,there are also a lot of companies that have just gone horizontal and seem unlikely to bea profile of an easy IPO, with annualized growth <5% (Exhibit 25, Exhibit 26, Exhibit 27, For our covered companies, we observe generally limited competitive threat.Inour SMID-Cap coverage, cybersecurity software companies don’t see much competitionimpact as most novel companies in the space are attacking greenfield vs competing withestablished players. Within IT/dev/infrastructure software, most exposure is in adjacentexpansion areas, but those should remain accessible even with the competitors' continuedgrowth. It is similar for Global Software, but there are also a number of vendors targeting BERNSTEIN TICKER TABLE INVESTMENT IMPLICATIONS We did not observe any new incremental competitive threats relative to existing models and expectations for our covered Table Of Contents Funding backdrop: After a post-covid hangover, we’re seeing an AI-driven rebound in 2025.................................................................... 3How are “pre-IPO unicorns” fairing? Updating our earlier work with data from 2024-25............................................................................ 5Examining the late-stage Startups with a 2024/25 round, we notice four fingerprints:............................................................................... 9We did a similar analysis in our 2023 work… what happened to those companies?................................................................................... 11What about the 74 that haven’t raised since COVID (or before)? Three profiles emerge............................................................................13Implications for our coverage: SMID-Cap software..................................................................................................................................................14A detailed look across the 113-company list and their headcount trends.......................................................................................................19 DETAILS FUNDING BACKDROP: AFTER A POST-COVID HANGOVER, WE’RE SEEING AN AI-DRIVEN REBOUND IN COVID saw a massive bubble in VC investing, and a rapid deceleration into 2023 — settling ~70% below COVID levels. This wasparticularly painful for RoW (Rest of the World) investments, which have declined not just from the COVID peaks, but are below And it is not just funding dollars, it is the number of rounds as well. In fact, even with funding seeming to hit bottom in Q1’23,the number of deals continue to decrease (Exhibit 2). The focus on larger and later stage companies becoming apparent as the While venture capital investing has optically recovered by late 2024 from its lows, and now well above the pre-2020 levels forfour consecutive quarters, nearly all of that