“"These businesses are growing faster than they ever have. Now we see companies go $0 to $2 million in a year, and it's not even that remarkable. You want to see a company go $0 to $5 million or even more in a year to really make people wake up and listen."
Jake SaperGeneral Partner @ Emergence Capital
VC Mary Meeker's annual report on internet and enterprise trends takes on AI for 2025, and the change it documents is staggering. A key example: AI-native companies are hitting $100 million in revenue in their first couple of years, as opposed to the five-to-seven year average of traditional SaaS. This is creating an entirely new environment and urgency for VC investment.
Fueling the fire is intense market demand. As the report lays out, ChatGPT went from 0 to 800 million users in 17 months, while it took Facebook 4.5 years and Netflix 10 years to hit 100 million users. And time per session is growing at a rate (47% in 21 months) that goes past adoption to what SaaStr's Jason Lemkin calls "addiction-level engagement".
"Tech booms have come before, but this is different. This is genuine transformation," says Jake Saper, General Partner at Emergence Capital, a firm backing SaaS giants like Salesforce and Zoom. High-stakes reality may feel like familiar territory for VC, but AI-driven growth is pushing timelines and boundaries past comfort zones.
Breakneck growth: Saper confirms that an accelerated pace is the new norm for VC-backed companies. "These businesses are growing faster than they ever have," he states. "Now we see companies go from zero to $2M in a year, and it's not even that remarkable. You want to see a company go from $0 to $5 million or even more in a year to really make people wake up and listen."
A thrilling gamble: The intense drive to adopt AI makes this "the scariest and most exciting time to be a VC," Saper says. Marketing professionals face a similar paradox, navigating a surge of "noise" from countless startups and AI-generated content, making it an equally "scary and exciting time to be a marketer."
