For years, SaaS growth was measured by headcount. The fastest way to show momentum was to add bodies: new engineers, new sellers, new marketers. Bigger teams meant bigger ambitions. But that assumption no longer holds.
The latest 2025 Jurassic SaaS Benchmarks Report shows a sharp reset: the average Series A company today has just 15 employees, down from 20 in 2023. Hiring in 2024 hit historic lows. What was once seen as a sign of strength (rapid team expansion) is increasingly viewed as a liability.
Efficiency Over Expansion
The first driver of this shift is capital efficiency. The blitzscaling era of 2021 and 2022 created bloat. Companies grew teams ahead of revenue, assuming capital would always be available. In today’s environment, investors are more disciplined. Payroll is the single largest controllable expense, and reducing it is the most direct way to preserve runway.
Metrics such as ARR per employee, revenue per head, and burn multiple now carry more weight than raw headcount growth. A smaller team delivering strong results is valued more highly than a larger one with mediocre output. In other words, productivity per person has replaced hiring velocity as the measure of success.
The AI Effect
The second driver is technology. AI is compressing the amount of labor required to operate a SaaS business. What once demanded entire teams, like customer support triage, reporting, data entry, and content drafting, can now be handled through automation.
Companies that adopt these tools are reallocating dollars away from payroll and toward platforms that amplify productivity. The report highlights this shift: firms using AI are seeing operating expenses as a percent of revenue decline, even as they maintain growth investments in sales and marketing. This is structural, not cyclical. As AI continues to mature, the need to hire for “headcount scale” will only diminish.
Growth From Within
The third driver is the changing nature of SaaS growth itself. With net new customer acquisition slowing, expansion ARR (e.g., upselling and cross-selling) is becoming a larger share of total growth. That dynamic reduces the need for oversized sales teams and increases the importance of customer success and product-led expansion.
The data shows gross margins remain strong, averaging 77% in the benchmark set, but this performance comes from cost discipline and efficiency, not unchecked hiring. Companies are learning to grow by doing more with what they already have.
The New Normal
Taken together, these forces explain why lean teams are here to stay. Startups are making fewer but higher-impact hires. Employees are expected to wear multiple hats and operate cross-functionally. Specialized needs are filled with fractional or contract talent instead of full-time staff. And tooling, especially AI-driven platforms, stands in for headcount in areas that once required entire departments.
The mythology that growth equals more people has been replaced with a new reality: scaling is about leverage. How much can each person, and each dollar, produce? That is the benchmark that matters. The data confirms it: lean is no longer a temporary adjustment. It is the operating model of modern SaaS.
So, What Now?
If headcount no longer signals growth, what does? Leverage. The most successful SaaS teams today aren’t just lean; they’re deliberately lean. They move faster, use tooling more effectively, and treat productivity gains as a team-wide mandate.
The first steps to creating efficiency as a mandate are simple, but not easy: challenge every team member to find one way to use AI to 10X their own output over the next 30 days. That means more than simply streamlining a clunky workflow or reducing manual tasks – it means rethinking what the roles of yesterday look like when game-changing technology is added. Teams within our portfolio have run, and are running, this exercise right now. Now, even though a bar like ‘10x production’ is likely too high to be achievable in a matter of weeks, the way your teams respond to this exercise and the window it provides into their thinking is invaluable as you understand who will help you steward in this new era.
Of course, there’s always more than one way to turn hard corners, but the takeaway is clear. The teams pulling ahead aren’t the biggest; they’re the ones making every hour and every hire count.
