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AI companies are grabbing headlines for their explosive growth, but the data tells a more nuanced story. Standard Metrics’ “Startup Benchmarking Report: 2025 Year in Review” draws on five years of anonymized financial data from over 10,000 venture-backed startups to speak to stories like these.

In this report, we examine whether AI companies are truly outperforming their peers and for how long that advantage holds as they scale. We then look at the shape of the market by company size, observing how top decile companies are breaking out and how companies with under $1M in annualized revenue are struggling. Finally we break down S&M and R&D spend, looking at how spend translates into growth. This report is your data-driven guide to understanding what actually drove private market performance in 2025 — and what to keep an eye on going forward.

Excerpt

Are AI companies actually growing faster? Sometimes, but the more interesting question is where and for how long. The story changes at $20M in annualized revenue. Below it, AI companies are pulling away from non-AI peers, and that gap widened through 2025. Above it, the median AI company looks like any other company at the same scale, growing at 27-30%. The real story is at the top decile, where revenue growth for AI companies with $20M+ in annualized revenue hit 262% in Q4 2025.

Median AI and non-AI companies ran at near parity in YoY revenue growth through 2023 and early 2024, with AI slightly ahead. The two started to diverge in late 2024, with AI companies pulling away dramatically, finishing the year with a ~35 percentage point gap. At the top decile, non-AI top-decile growth rates are accelerating too, but AI is pulling ahead faster. AI top-decile growth is more volatile, but the trend is clear: the fastest AI companies are pulling further away.

Median AI and non-AI companies above $20M in annualized revenue have been running within a few points of each other since 2023, trading the lead back and forth. By Q4 2025, AI was at 30% YoY revenue growth versus non-AI’s 27%, effectively parity. Companies at this scale were largely built before the current AI cycle, and their growth trajectories reflect it.

The top decile of larger AI companies tells a different story. AI companies started well below non-AI in early 2023, crossed over in Q4 2023, and have been pulling ahead since, finishing 2025 at 262% YoY revenue growth. Both cohorts are accelerating at the top, but AI is accelerating faster.

Outline

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2025 year in review
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The AI growth question
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Where growth lives (and dies)
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Spending money to make money
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What we're watching in 2026
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