What a dollar of revenue was worth this summer, depending on what you sell

These aren't like-for-like. One is a buyout of mature SaaS, two are strategic acquisitions and one is a minority funding round. But the ordering is the story.

What buyers are paying for

Airtable is growing more than 20% a year and is still priced like a utility. Lovable and Cursor are priced on how fast they're growing. Hugging Face is priced on what it's strategically worth to the world's biggest AI chip company.

Read across the four, and buyers are paying up for three things:

• Growth that compounds at AI-native speed. Cursor's run-rate doubled between February and June.
• A place in the workflow that's hard to replicate: the tool people open first thing and close last thing.
• Strategic scarcity: something a big company can't easily build and can't let a rival own.

A solid SaaS business with none of those is priced on cash flow. That's a fine business to own. It's a different business to raise money for.

One caveat on the numbers: these multiples use each company's most recently reported run-rate, from June to August. Fast-growing companies look cheaper on a forward basis, which is exactly the bet their buyers are making.

Score your own business

You don't need a banker to get a rough read on where you'd sit. Answer these honestly, in writing:

1. Growth: is revenue growing faster this year than last? If it's slowing, buyers will price the slowdown, not the history.
2. Workflow: if a customer cancelled tomorrow, what would they have to rebuild? A spreadsheet, or a process their team runs every day?
3. Data: do you hold something that gets more valuable the longer a customer stays, such as history, integrations, configuration or content?
4. Replaceability: could a decent team with today's AI tools rebuild your core feature in a quarter? If so, that's the discount a buyer will apply.
5. Strategic fit: is there a larger company for whom owning you would be defensive, not just nice to have?

Mostly "no" isn't bad news. It means you're building a cash-flow business, and you should run it like one: profitable, efficient and not dependent on the next round.

Mostly "yes" doesn't mean a buyer is coming. It means you know which story is true for you, and which numbers to put in front of an investor first: growth if you're growing fast, retention and depth of use if customers can't do without you.

If your answers are mixed, pick the one you could move most in a year. Usually that's workflow: get further into how your customers spend their day, and the other answers start to follow.

If you run a services business

In our view the same logic carries over, in different words. A firm that grows by adding people is mostly selling its profits. A firm that owns something repeatable, like a productised service, a method clients ask for by name, a data set or a channel, has something a buyer can grow without you. If you'd like your agency to be worth more than its profits one day, start by asking which of your services could run without you in the room.

Where founders go wrong

The common mistake is borrowing the story without the substance: adding "AI" to the deck to borrow Lovable's multiple. Buyers check growth rates and retention, not adjectives. An honest cash-flow story beats a borrowed growth story every time.

The Monday-morning version: answer the five questions above and share them with your co-founder or your most honest adviser. The answers you argue about are where the value is.