Speed is the New Status Symbol

Slack took three years to hit $100M. Lovable took eight months.

Every deal I’ve watched this year got scored on the same thing, and it wasn’t the revenue number. Revenue momentum is the new metric: slope over time. How fast did revenue grow $0 →$1M? $1 →$10M? $10M →$100M?

Bessemer coined the term “centaur” ($100M in ARR) back in 2022 when hitting those rarified revenue numbers looked like IPO-readiness. Their numbers show why: the average Cloud 100 company took 10 years to get there in 2016. By 2024 that was 7.8 years. Slack held the record for a decade, doing it in 2.5 years from launch.

Bessemer’s newer cohort (they call them Supernovas) hit $100M in 1.5 years, with $40M of revenue landing in year one alone. With the likes of Cursor, Perplexity, Eleven Labs and Legora, the unit moved from years to quarters. Then Lovable trounced that record: eight months from launch to $100M ARR, doubling again four months later.

Ah the quaint days when Series A followed the $1M revenue mark. These supernova-centaur supernatural creatures blow through that mark on the way to $10M, and the round happens somewhere mid-climb.

Turns out, the centaur replaced the unicorn as the silicon valley it girl.

This first appeared in On Paper, where I write about building companies from both sides of the table. Subscribe there for more takes like this one!