ICONIQ

Great used to look different. For fifteen years, a handful of well-understood benchmarks could tell you whether a software company was on track. Growth rates followed a predictable decay curve. Expansion revenue did more of the heavy lifting as companies matured. Efficiency improved steadily as scale brought leverage. Those benchmarks weren’t wrong. They described the companies that built the last generation of great software businesses. But they don’t describe the identified “Pacesetters.” Some of the most successful AI-native companies today are reaching $100M ARR in quarters, growing 3–5x faster than the broader market and, in some cases, continuing to accelerate as they scale. More than 70% of gross new ARR is coming from new logos much further into the growth journey than historical software companies typically sustained. Some are spending ~2.3 times revenue on OpEx early on, then bringing burn multiple below 1x at scale. The ICONIQ Pacesetter Index was built to benchmark this cohort against each other, because the broader market is no longer a proper reference point. It keeps the fundamentals that still matter while adding metrics that have become newly critical in an AI-native market, including gross retention, gross margin, and burn multiple. What does great look like in 2026? The Index gives you a clearer benchmark. The rest is in how companies build against it. Read the full Pacesetter Index: https://bit.ly/4dcHSP0 *For educational purposes. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

Palantir Technologies CTO Shyam Sankar reveals the essential question that drives his team’s product development: What has to be true for this problem to actually be solved? For Sankar, the instinct is to get curious about the gap between capabilities and outcomes and to ask what the people closest to the work actually need. He traces that mindset to Palantir’s roots: showing up to solve someone's problem and refusing to stop at “good enough.” *For educational purposes for company founders and executives. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

Pacesetters are investing more heavily in growth, but the efficiency behind that spend is what makes the numbers interesting to us. Their cost structures can run up to 2x higher than peers at the same stage, yet their burn multiples remain at parity with those peers, and in some cases are better. The result is a different growth model: higher spend generally paired with more revenue generated for every dollar invested. See the full efficiency data: https://bit.ly/4itVBEv *For educational purposes for company founders and executives. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

Product-market fit can look obvious in hindsight. In the moment, the signals are often much harder to read. At TechCrunch Disrupt, ICONIQ’s Anu Bharadwaj will join Rajeev Dham, Partner at Sapphire Ventures, and Rahul Vohra, Founder & Head of Superhuman Mail, for a conversation on the signals they believe founders should pay attention to when evaluating whether they’ve truly found product-market fit, and the red flags that suggest there’s still work to do. 📅 Tuesday, October 13, 1:00–1:40pm 📍 Builders Stage 🔗Sign up here: https://lnkd.in/gSMXmt32 *For educational purposes. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

We published the ICONIQ Pacesetter Index a few weeks ago, which sparked lively discussion about what growth looks like at scale and how quickly the benchmarks are shifting. Some of the discussion explored what separates the companies pulling away from the market and added useful historical context. A $100M+ ARR company growing 115% would once have been a rare outlier. Within the Pacesetter cohort, it represents the median. That puts the familiar triple, triple, double, double, double growth trajectory in a different context. At $100M+ ARR, doubling revenue now places a company around the middle of the cohort. Others pointed to another important dimension of the data: this level of growth is generally accompanied by strong underlying economics, with gross margins and net revenue retention remaining healthy across the cohort. For founders and operators, the more useful question is where your own company sits against these benchmarks, and which gaps matter most. Read the full Pacesetter Index: https://bit.ly/4dcHSP0 *For educational purposes. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

The bigger the satellite, typically the more power it can generate. And Karan Kunjur believes power will determine much of what becomes possible in space. That idea put K2 Space Corporation at odds with much of the conventional thinking in the industry when Karan and his brother Neel Kunjur started the company four years ago. While others focused on making satellites smaller, they set out to figure out how to build large, powerful systems faster and more efficiently. At ICONIQ Frontier, Karan joined ICONIQ’s Tengbo Li to share how that bet is taking shape. Their conversation starts with Gravitas, K2’s first satellite, and extends to the infrastructure that could eventually move into orbit: communications networks, optical links, sovereign capabilities and, potentially over time, compute itself. Karan also shares how AI is changing the work happening inside K2 today, giving its exceptional engineers more leverage as they tackle problems that span hardware, software and entirely new environments. https://lnkd.in/eNaXbvPQ *For educational purposes. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

How long can a conviction about AI stay true when the technology keeps changing underneath it? “Every three, four months you get a curveball,” Nikesh Arora told the ICONIQ Community at Frontier. Nikesh, chairman and CEO of Palo Alto Networks, joined Divesh Makan to open the day with a conversation shaped by that uncertainty and by what it means for the founders and operators building through it. Agents have changed the conversation, open-weight models have introduced a new set of possibilities, and even the economics of inference are still being reconsidered. For Nikesh, that pace of change raises a more fundamental question than where to add AI to an existing product. He challenged the room to think about whether the product itself should be rebuilt around what AI now makes possible, drawing a comparison between products that simply add AI features and those that are designed from the ground up around a different technological premise. That same willingness to rethink assumptions helps explain why he believes startups can continue to win emerging categories. Large companies have scale, customers, and resources, but founders often have the freedom to attack a new problem from first principles before the market has fully decided what the answer should look like. The conversation also moved into cybersecurity, where the gap between the speed of attack and the speed of response is becoming harder to ignore. It was a fitting opening to ICONIQ Frontier, and a reminder that in a market moving this quickly, some of the most important questions are still very much open. https://lnkd.in/gPt5u3RY *For educational purposes. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

On October 2 Outtake and OpenAI are teaming up to share how they created Dynamic Discovery to help power a more adaptive approach to finding threats.  Outtake CEO Alex Arjun Dhillon, Outtake engineer Tracy Meng, and OpenAI engineer Nishanth Singaraju will unpack how they built this technology using OpenAI’s Agents SDK and how they believe adaptive search represents the next evolution of digital risk protection.    Register here: https://lnkd.in/duqXy3CU  *For educational purposes. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

We’re honored to partner with Viswa Colluru, PhD and the Enveda team as they accelerate the discovery of medicines for people in need around the world. For Viswa, that mission is deeply personal. He grew up around his father’s pharmacy in India, close enough to see how medicine could change someone’s life. When his mother later faced a treatable cancer his family couldn’t afford to medicate, that closeness turned into resolve. He wanted better ways to get medicines to people faster and at lower cost. Morphine, aspirin, and metformin all originated in nature, and nearly half of all oral medicines still do, yet an estimated 99% of nature's chemical diversity has never been examined. Finding and testing it has historically been too slow and expensive to do at scale. Colluru started Enveda in 2019, determined to change that math. Enveda’s AI platform, PRISM, finds promising molecules already at work in nature and helps determine what they can treat. Seven years and 17 development candidates later, three of Enveda's medicines are in human trials, two with positive early clinical results in 2026: a daily eczema treatment that improved symptom severity by an average of 85% in early testing, and a therapy designed to help people sustain metabolic health after GLP-1 medicines. https://lnkd.in/grqPJSmJ Alex Gorsky | Caroline Xie | Sruthi Ramaswami | Shikhar M. *For educational purposes. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.

A “zoo of point solutions” Is how Mark Swan describes the technology inside many wealth management firms. Nothing talks to anything else, so advisors spend their days moving data between systems. New AI point tools only add additional animals to the zoo. The Nevis team made the opposite bet. Build more of the stack upfront and integrate deep into the custodians, so a conversation becomes a task, a button is pressed, and the account is opened. Learn more about Mark and his journey to co-found Nevis: https://lnkd.in/gCGgP-q3 *For educational purposes for company founders and executives. This is not investment advice or an offer to invest. Refer to Outreach Disclaimer link in profile.