How much revenue do you need to IPO in 2025?

Playback speed

Share post at current time

Share from 0:00

0:00

Transcript

How much revenue do you need to IPO in 2025?

CJ Gustafson

Feb 15, 2025

Transcript

How Much Revenue Do You Need to IPO in 2024?

The IPO bar has risen—big time. In the 2010s, companies like RingCentral and Etsy went public with $100M-$250M in revenue. But today? You likely need $500M+ just to get a shot.

We’ll break down how IPOs evolved from the SaaS boom to the 2021 mega-deals (think Coinbase, Snowflake, and Airbnb), the 2022-23 freeze, and why 2024’s IPO class—Reddit, Klaviyo, Instacart—looks different.

Plus, we’ll preview 2025’s biggest potential IPOs, including Stripe, Databricks, and Deel. What’s the new rule? If you want to IPO, bring half a billion in revenue—or a damn good reason why you deserve to be public.

Visit mostlymetrics.com for more analysis like this

Discussion about this video

Run the Numbers

Run the Numbers is a twice-weekly podcast about financial metrics and business models, designed for ambitious people operating tech startups. It's a collection of things host CJ Gustafson (CFO at Partstech and writer of Mostly Metrics) has learned and thought about in the trenches as a tech CFO.

This show is meant to serve as a playbook of sorts for the stuff CJ wishes he knew earlier in his career, both from experience and from copying people smarter than himself.

Topics frequently touch upon Startup SaaS Metrics, Annual Budgeting, Financial Forecasting, Headcount, Equity, Dilution, and Fundraising – and how all of these drive business performance and growth.

Listen on