ICONIQ's growth benchmark sample is not the software market

The record

In September 2026, ICONIQ Growth published “2026 State of Scaling: The Great Sorting”, an annual report on software-company growth and operating efficiency. The report states its methodology directly: it summarizes quarterly operating and financial data from 137 software companies, a mix of ICONIQ portfolio companies where data was available and 11 public companies selected against the firm's own IPO-performance criteria, supplemented by ICONIQ's proprietary surveys, public filings and transcripts, and third-party sources including S&P Capital IQ, Silicon Data and the Ramp AI Index. Among the report's headline figures: forward revenue multiples for companies growing at least 20 percent year over year rebounded from roughly 7 times in the first quarter of 2026 to 9.2 times in the second, and net retention for the report's high-growth cohort ran between 120 and 146 percent.

What the documents establish

These are ICONIQ's own figures, drawn from its own portfolio and a hand-selected public comparison set, not an independent audit of the software industry. The report states that company-level data is aggregated or anonymized, and a companion document, the ICONIQ Pacesetter Index, defines its own high-growth cohort, companies with revenue growth in at least the top quartile for their scale range over the past three years, as an evolution of an earlier ICONIQ framework called Enterprise Five. Both documents describe ICONIQ's own network and its own definitions; neither claims to represent the median software company.

The operating read

A benchmark built from a growth-equity firm's own portfolio and a small, criteria-selected set of public comparables will tend to look stronger than the broader market, because both selection methods favor companies already performing well. Editorially, a founder using this report to set a growth or retention target should treat the published figures as a description of ICONIQ's own network at the top of its distribution, not as a market median, and should ask what portion of the sample overlaps with companies ICONIQ has already invested in.

What to check before you decide

Before adopting a growth-equity firm's benchmark as an internal target, check the following.

• Does the report disclose how much of its sample is the firm's own portfolio versus outside companies, and how the outside companies were selected?
• Are the metrics defined the same way the reader's own company measures them, particularly for net retention and revenue multiples?
• Does the edition being cited carry its own publication date, so that a later edition's figures are not mistaken for this one's?

ICONIQ's report is a genuine primary document about ICONIQ's own network; the decision it supports is choosing a comparison set deliberately, not adopting the first benchmark that circulates.