Breaking: Designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman Discuss AI Hardware ProjectRead more

Photo via Shutterstock.

For Software Firms, Price Increases Are Becoming a Bigger Growth Factor

Photo: Photo via Shutterstock.

After a flood of earnings today, from the likes of MongoDB, Broadcom and Nutanix, we’re pretty much done with tech’s latest quarterly earnings season. (Next earnings season is only six weeks away—whoopee!) As we look back at what we learned, here’s something that’s worth thinking about: Price increases for enterprise software firms are likely to underwrite revenue growth in the next year or so. Various companies in the sector have announced price increases in the past 12 months—from Salesforce to Shopify—in at least some parts of the world. Understanding what’s driving top-line expansion is therefore going to require looking beyond the actual number—how much of growth is due to price increases and how much to acquiring new customers. 

To get a sense of why that is, check out last week’s IPO filing by e-commerce marketing software firm Klaviyo. The filing showed that the firm’s revenue grew 54% in the first half of this year, which sounds great. But more than half of the increase resulted from existing customers spending more, both because some moved into a higher tier of service and because of a price increase, the filing said. That’s not the best way to drive growth, particularly given the competition Klaviyo faces (for more on that, see this story.) 

Access on the go
View stories on our mobile app and tune into our weekly podcast.
Join live video Q&A’s
Deep-dive into topics like startups and autonomous vehicles with our top reporters and other executives.
Enjoy a clutter-free experience
Read without any banner ads.
Former Apple design chief Jony Ive and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Photos by Getty.
Exclusive
Designer Jony Ive and OpenAI’s Sam Altman Discuss AI Hardware Project
Jony Ive, the renowned designer of the iPhone, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman have been discussing building a new AI hardware device, according to two people familiar with the conversations.
From left to right: Blair Effron, Robert Pruzan and David Handler. Photos by Getty; Tidal Partners.
Exclusive Finance
Disputes, Employee Misconduct Rattle Centerview’s Silicon Valley Dreams
The San Francisco Bay Area–based bankers at Centerview Partners, the investment bank that advised Silicon Valley Bank’s owner and Credit Suisse through recent turmoil, got two doses of bad news last week.
From left, a Google TPU, Broadcom CEO Hock Tan and Google Cloud chief Thomas Kurian. Photos via Getty, Google and YouTube.
Exclusive google semiconductors
To Reduce AI Costs, Google Wants to Ditch Broadcom as Its TPU Server Chip Supplier
Google executives have extensively discussed dropping Broadcom as a supplier of artificial intelligence chips as early as 2027, according to a person with direct knowledge of the effort.
Art by Clark Miller
Exclusive startups entertainment
MasterClass Takes a Crash Course in Frugality
MasterClass had a problem with the shoot featuring its latest star instructor, Walt Disney Co. CEO Bob Iger.
Photos via Eiso Kant (left) and YouTube/VMWare Tanzu (right)
AI Agenda startups ai
How GitHub Copilot’s Co-Creator Raised $126 Million to Compete with His Former Employer
Recent interest in artificial intelligence has focused on large-language models that aim to do everything from writing Shakespearean poetry to solving math riddles.
Art by Clark Miller
The Big Read policy
Europe Has Figured Out How to Tame Big Tech. Can the U.S. Learn Its Tricks?
Late last month in Belgium, Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) had a pressing question for Paul Tang, a Dutch politician and member of the European Parliament.