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.
