A few weeks back the SA国际传媒 News team published a raft of information regarding the global and U.S. venture capital markets, along with dives into popular markets like Texas domestically, China globally, and more. One data point that we don’t track, however, is the percentage of ‘up rounds’ versus ‘down rounds’ in the period.

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In English, that means we don’t keep tabs on how many startups out of 100 who raise more capital do so at a higher valuation (price increase) or lower valuation (price decrease). It’s useful data. And so, when a new report dropped including the information we took note. Let’s explore.

Up Rounds

The Q2 (a that works with startups) venture capital survey writes that in the second quarter, “[u]p rounds exceeded down rounds 86% to 6%, with 8% flat in Q2 2019, an increase from Q1 2019 when up rounds exceeded down rounds 81% to 11%, with 8% flat.” I imagined that the preceding 81 percent rate was high; to see it rise to 86 percent one quarter later in the same year was eye-opening.

Luckily for us, Fenwick et al graphed their findings. Observe:

The chart shows us that not only was the Q1 81 percent up-round percentage tied for the local maximum, Q2’s 86 percent is the highest result in years. (An extended version of the same chart shows that the Q2 2019 up-round percentage is roughly tied for the all-time high set in early 2015.)

In contrast, while up rounds reached their recent zenith, down rounds slipped to their smallest portion of new capital events. Indeed, while up rounds reached their highest known percentage, down rounds managed to dip under flat rounds.

This may be all a bit more grokkable if we turn to probabilities. Here’s how it shakes out: If a company raised in the second quarter of 2019, it had about a 1 in 16 chance of raising at a lower price, about a 1 in 13 chance of raising at a flat valuation, and a about a 1 in 1.16 chance of raising at a higher price. Those are good odds!

Not All Good News

The whole Fenwick document is worth reading () because you should imbibe the full context of the above information. That setting includes some weak points worth noting while we’re here highlighting yet another bullish indicator.

Chief among which is a modest dip in the pace at which companies raising their Series D can boost their valuation, and a slightly sharper drop in “Series E and higher” up valuation increases. What that means is that the amount that companies raising a Series D, Series E, or later round can expand their value in between rounds is falling.

Not much, mind; the amount that Series D rounds repriced companies听up was still 89 percent after its decline. That’s not bad. But “Series E and later” price changes fell more sharply to a mere 39 percent gain.

This hints at a few things. Perhaps as startups reach deeper into the private markets, IPO prospects (ie the impact of public pricing on private valuations) is kicking in a bit more sharply, slowing private-market value accretion at late-stage startups. Or it could be that worry concerning the number of unicorns that will make it to a public offering before a correction is slowing super late-stage valuation growth.

You can fill in your own guess. What matters as a takeaway is that while early, and mid-stage startup valuations (Series B and C, say) are looking strong, things are weaker towards the end of the private capital game.

The Vision Fund 2 cometh, but perhaps not soon enough to reprice everyone at once. So, if you are looking for some big, late-stage checks, mind your expectations. For the rest of the startup world, the chances of raising at a nice premium from your last private round look good.

And those odds look the best for software-focused startup companies. Why? Because of all the categories of startups that Fenwick examined, the sharpest valuation increases were given, on average, to software firms. Once again, why? I’d reckon because as the public market rains favor on similar companies, venture capitalists can’t help but pay a little more for their smaller, private relatives.

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On Nov. 28, , an enterprise-focused cloud storage and productivity company, its fiscal third quarter, 2019 earnings after the bell. The Bay Area-based company beat expectations regarding revenue ($155.9 million, versus $154.6 million anticipated), and per-share losses ($0.06 adjusted, versus $0.07 anticipated).

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Shares of Box were up during the day before the report and in after-hours trading.听Box also raised the top end of its forecast for its current fiscal year (2019) “to $609.2 million, from $608 million,” . And its CEO that the company is on its听way to “$1 billion in revenue.”

Notably, Box isn’t alone in seeing its value appreciate. The surprisingly dynamic Bessemer Cloud Index that was recently remade into a daily ticker shows a similar rebound in cloud stocks in recent days. The Cloud Index fell into the 780s (it started at 1,000) in the middle of November, before rebounding to nearly 890 before the start of trading today. That’s quite a jump in about 10 calendar days.

So, after a somewhat dispiriting decline that matched what other stocks in the market were doing, more or less, cloud is nearly back to where it was earlier in the year. Which is to say a bullish position.

So What?

Why are we looking at a public company’s earnings report, and an index of public cloud companies? After all, we focus on private companies here at SA国际传媒 News. We are examining Box as it’s an important example of an SaaS startup that raised lots during the unicorn era and went public on the strength of its recurring revenue growth, rather than its profitability. The firm has since started generating cash quite often (measured quarterly) and expects to turn in non-GAAP per-share profit in the period roughly aligning with calendar Q4.

So, it makes for a good example. If Box does normal SaaS things, and the markets bid its shares down, it’s an indicator of where sentiment is heading; that impacts private companies as public comps impact private valuations.

The same principle applies to the basket of cloud stocks we mentioned before. If they fall sharply, private investors take note that public investors are revaluing the sort of company that they are putting capital into; if analogous stocks go bearish, startups grow fur.

So! All that said, let’s think about what Box is worth today, compared to its current revenue. We’ll get a workable revenue multiple out of the exercise, which we can then use as a general metric for thinking about what sort of recurring revenue modern software companies (which nearly all uses software-as-a-service as a business model, like Box) need to grow into to make their trailing valuations fit.

Cool? Great.

Box’s revenue figure doesn’t break out recurring incomes (its core products) from non-recurring services income. As such, we generally treat its revenue as a single lump when we want to calculate a recurring revenue figure. This distorts the resulting figure somewhat, but don’t let it worry you, we’re shooting for close here, not exact.

With $155.9 million in top line, our analog for Box’s annual recurring revenue figure comes to $623.6 million. Box was worth $2.57 billion before the start of trading today,听. Simple division gives us a current ARR multiple of 4.12.

That’s a somewhat low multiple, compared to other companies and figures that we have seen this year. However, with Box growing just over 20 percent year-over-year in its most recent quarter, the company is likely paying a revenue-multiple tax. The faster your ARR growth, mostly, the higher your revenue multiple will be.

Returning to our notes on Box’s public market performance, Box is trading lower than it did at the start of the year, and far under its early-summer highs. If that is attributable to its slowing growth I can’t say for sure, but I suspect it’s at least a few pieces of the puzzle. The lesson in this earnings report is that growth remains as critical to SaaS valuations as it has been; Box’s slowing growth rate’s impact wasn’t sufficiently erased by rising profitability at the company. Its value has therefore fallen in revenue-multiple terms.

And that brings me to my final point. I’ve thought about retiring Box as our regular ARR benchmark a few times, mostly because Box is now so much larger than private market SaaS companies that its maturity makes it an increasingly poor comp. But what we didn’t have, until recently, was something good to use in its place.

But the new Cloud Index probably fits the bill, even though it doesn’t provide similarly granular multiples. Still, given that it is a basket of SaaS stocks, it’s probably a healthier way to stack public sentiment against private companies.

So, I hereby commit to not covering Box’s next earnings report, at least here. It’s probably no longer sufficiently pertinent.

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