Three new $100M ARR club members and a call for the next generation of growth-stage startups

Time flies.

It was nearly a year ago that The Exchange started keeping tabs on startups that managed to reach $100 million in annual recurring revenue, or ARR. Our goal was to determine which unicorns were more than paper horses so we could keep tabs on upcoming IPO targets.

We found that Bill.com, Asana, WalkMe and Druva were impressively large and growing nicely. Since then two of the four companies from that post have gone public.

GitLab, Egnyte, Braze and O’Reilly Media joined the club before 2019 was even closed, with two of those companies taking part in the recent Disrupt conference, talking about how they managed their historical growth.

In early 2020 we added Sisense, Siteminder, Monday.com and Lemonade to the club, wrote about ExtraHop’s path to $100 million ARR, Cloudinary’s epic growth sans external capital, Siteminder’s own records and BounceX reaching $100 million ARR while it rebranded to Wunderkind.

As the year rolled along, MetroMile, Tricentis, Kaltura and Diligent joined the club. As did Recorded Future, ON24 and ActiveCampaign. There were even more names: Movable Ink, Noom, Riskified, Seismic, ThoughtSpot, along with Snow Software, A Cloud Guru, Zeta Global and Upgrade.

Today we have three more names to add to the group: UserTesting, Udemy’s business arm, and Expensify. But, more than merely adding those companies to the mix — more after the jump — I wanted to shake up our radar a bit as we head into 2021.

Yes, The Exchange will keep tabs on startups and other private companies that reach $100 million in ARR, or annual run rate, as the case may be. But next year we also want to find the startups around $50 million ARR that are growing like hell. We want to go a year or two earlier in growth histories to better watch how startups scale into nine-figure revenues, instead of hearing about it after the fact.

So, if you are a startup that is expanding aggressively and will reach the $50 million revenue mark inside the next quarter or two, please say hello. I suspect a good cut of the global unicorn market could fit this bill, and therefore might provide a window into which highly-valued startups are growing into their valuations.

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It’s going to be fun. Now, let’s quickly chat about the latest members of the $100 million ARR club.

UserTesting, Expensify and Udemy’s business arm

You’ve heard of each of our $100 million ARR companies this morning, so there’s less need for prelude and introduction. Here’s the group:

Expensify

Expensify is an expense-tracking company well-known around the technology world, so it’s no real surprise that it has reached the $100 million ARR threshold, a feat it announced yesterday.

But the company did us one better than merely dropping a single data point and racing back into the shadows. Instead, Expensify also disclosed that it has “maintained profitability for years [and] recorded its highest monthly revenue ever in October.”