2025 produced some of the fastest-growing companies we’ve seen in over a decade.
AI-native businesses, often extremely well funded, captured unprecedented demand and scaled at extraordinary speed. But for the vast majority of B2B SaaS companies, 2025 looked very different.
It wasn’t a year defined by explosive growth or easy wins. It was a year shaped by decisions, often difficult ones, and by a growing recognition that clarity matters more than pace.
Across the founders, boards, and GTM leaders we worked with, the companies that made genuine progress weren’t the ones doing more things in parallel. They were the ones willing to stop, diagnose honestly and commit to fewer bets with far greater conviction.
The idea of ‘clarity before acceleration’ became the defining theme of the year for ScaleWise, and it’s the lens through which we’re looking at what it will take for B2B SaaS Founders to scale and graduate in 2026.
But before we look ahead, let’s take a minute to look back on the year just gone…
2025: The Year Focus Became a Competitive Advantage
The biggest learning from working so closely with founders and GTM leaders in 2025 was this: most growth problems are not caused by a lack of effort. They’re caused by unresolved strategic tension.
Founders often sense that something isn’t working, but the pressure to keep moving makes it difficult to slow down and diagnose properly. At the same time, GTM leaders are expected to execute at pace while the underlying assumptions they’re building on continue to shift. The teams that broke through this tension were the ones willing to pause, ask harder questions, and accept that doing less, but with more conviction, often unlocked growth faster than adding more activity on top of an unstable foundation.
Patterns we saw across GTM and Hiring
By the end of 2025, several market-wide patterns had become impossible to ignore.
Fractional leadership moved from being a short-term fix to a deliberate strategy. Founders increasingly used it to de-risk critical hires, access senior support quickly, and inject pattern recognition at moments of real inflection. At the same time, hiring slowed across the board, but expectations rose sharply. Every role was expected to create leverage fast, not simply add capacity.
Marketing accountability tightened significantly. Boards became far less tolerant of vague demand metrics and far more focused on pipeline contribution, ICP alignment, and how effectively marketing supported the full revenue system. This wasn’t just a shift in measurement, but in mindset. GTM performance was no longer judged by activity or volume, but by coherence and impact.
For many Seed to Series B companies, the defining challenge of 2025 wasn’t ambition or effort…it was transition. Poorly defined ICPs, persistent misalignment between sales and marketing, founders acting as the connective tissue across the GTM system, and mistimed leadership hires surfaced again and again. Many teams were stuck in the uncomfortable space between founder-led intuition and scalable process, unsure which rules still applied and which no longer did.
The companies that outperformed weren’t necessarily the ones with more talent or capital. They were the ones willing to make hard trade-offs early, treat GTM as an interconnected system rather than a collection of functions, and invest in clarity before attempting to accelerate.
Understanding where growth is actually breaking down
Internally, 2025 was the year ScaleWise properly crystallised what we’re best at. The most significant milestone was the launch of ScaleAudit, our GTM diagnostic. In many ways, ScaleAudit formalised what we’d been doing instinctively for years: helping founders and leadership teams understand where growth is actually breaking down, rather than chasing surface-level symptoms.
What changed with ScaleAudit wasn’t just speed, although decisions did happen faster. It was the quality of the conversations. Leadership teams moved away from opinion-led debates and towards evidence-led alignment. Founders, GTM leaders, and boards finally had a shared language to talk about GTM strategy, ICP, ownership, conversion mechanics, and priorities without talking past each other. That early clarity created leverage, not just at the start of engagements, but throughout them.
2026: Our Predictions
Looking ahead, 2026 will reward commitment over optionality…but not everyone will be playing the same game. The market is becoming increasingly bifurcated, and founders who fail to recognise which race they are actually in will struggle. The opportunity in 2026 is not just to grow, but to grow in a way that matches your reality.
The era of running multiple ICPs, channels, and GTM motions in parallel is ending. Capital efficiency, leadership bandwidth, and buyer fatigue are forcing teams to choose fewer motions and execute them exceptionally well before expanding. What’s changing in 2026 is not just how companies grow, but what kind of growth they are optimising for.
At one end of the spectrum sit VC-backed, AI-native companies operating in a high-velocity, high-risk race. Growth is no longer an ambition; it’s an expectation. These businesses are often rewarded for explosive ARR expansion long before questions of durability, gross margin discipline, or retention are fully answered. The pressure is to move fast, dominate attention, and reach liquidity before the model is forced to prove itself under sustained operational load. Some will win spectacularly. Many won’t.
Running alongside this is a much larger, quieter group: non-AI-native SaaS companies and established platforms building for long-term compounding. These are businesses integrating AI thoughtfully into real products, live workflows, and established customer relationships. They are operationalising AI with credibility, security maturity, procurement muscle, and customer behaviour informing product decisions. Their growth is intentional rather than performative, focused on durable economics, retention, and a Rule-of-40+ mindset. They are designing businesses meant to survive contact with reality over a ten-year horizon.
What unites both groups is that systems will matter more than individual heroics. While talent will always matter, investors and boards are increasingly wary of growth that depends on standout individuals or founder-led rescue missions. In 2026, the most valuable GTM leaders will be those who can operate across sales, marketing, and product… and explain how revenue is created end-to-end inside a system that works without constant intervention.
As funding becomes harder to access outside the AI hype cycle, ICP clarity will move firmly into the boardroom. No longer treated as a marketing exercise, boards will ask who the company demonstrably wins with, why those customers compound, and whether expansion is happening by design or by drift.
AI will play a critical role in this shift, but not in the way many expect. In 2026, AI won’t fix broken GTM foundations…it will expose them. Teams with clean data, clear ownership, and agreed success metrics will use AI to diagnose conversion drop-offs, test assumptions faster, and improve deal execution. Teams without those foundations will simply accelerate confusion.
The biggest mistake founders will make in 2026 is assuming there is a single race. The real opportunity lies in recognising which race you are in (high-velocity hype, long-term compounding, or the powerful middle ground of established SaaS augmented by AI) and designing your GTM systems, expectations, and time horizons accordingly.
How Investors’ Expectations Are Shifting
As we move into 2026, investor expectations are becoming more nuanced… and more demanding. The extraordinary growth of some AI-native companies has reset surface-level benchmarks for what “good” looks like, while simultaneously sharpening scrutiny beneath them.
In many high-velocity AI businesses, questions of durability are moving to the forefront. Investors are paying closer attention to how recurring revenue truly is, how exposed unit economics are to infrastructure and model costs, and whether growth is driven by sustained customer behaviour or short-term demand spikes. Momentum alone is no longer enough to indefinitely defer these questions.
At the same time, many investors see growing opportunity in established SaaS companies that existed well before the AI shift and are now thoughtfully integrating AI into real products and live workflows. These businesses bring something the hype cycle can’t manufacture quickly… real customers, operational credibility, and metrics that stand up to scrutiny.
As a result, investor scrutiny in 2026 will sharpen further around repeatability. At Series A and B, investors were never underwriting growth based on a single strong quarter or a handful of marquee logos, but in 2026, they will pressure-test this more explicitly than ever. The focus will be on whether growth can happen again without heroic effort, whether revenue is driven by a clearly defined GTM motion, and whether performance is resilient to changes in people, spend, or market conditions.
Clarity of GTM assumptions will matter as much as outcomes. Founders who can clearly explain why a specific ICP converts, where deals stall, and how they get unstuck will inspire more confidence than those with larger but less legible numbers. Capital efficiency will increasingly be read as a signal of GTM maturity, while leadership hires will be judged on the leverage they create, not the layers they add.
What it will take to graduate in 2026
While AI-native rocketships will continue to graduate between funding rounds at record speeds and raise huge rounds at high valuations, everyone else will need to follow a different approach.
Graduation in 2026 won’t be defined by funding milestones or speed. It will be defined by conviction under pressure.
The companies that graduate will commit to a clear GTM truth…who they win with, how they win, and why that motion works and will resist the temptation to reshape that truth every quarter in response to noise or short-term misses. Ambition will be aligned with reality, with targets, hiring plans, and investment levels grounded in what the GTM engine can actually support.
Growth will be pursued deliberately, not emotionally. Teams will kill initiatives early, double down selectively, and stay calm when performance wobbles, confident in the system they’ve built.
In 2026, graduation will belong to the companies that can hold a clear line while the environment shifts…and prove that their growth is not just possible, but repeatable.
We’ll be exploring these themes in more depth in Season 2 of Making The Grade, where we unpack what it really takes for companies to graduate between funding rounds.
Why We’re Excited About What’s Next
What excites us most about 2026 is the opportunity to help companies avoid mistakes we’ve now seen hundreds of times.
Too often, capable teams lose momentum not through lack of ambition or effort, but because misalignment creeps in early and compounds quietly. ScaleWise is increasingly positioned to step in at those moments of inflexion – before misalignment becomes expensive – and help founders make better decisions, faster.
ScaleAudit is a core part of that journey. It gives leadership teams a shared, evidence-based view of what’s actually happening inside their GTM system, creating clarity before acceleration. Building on that, in 2026 we’ll also be launching Scale360 — a fixed monthly model designed to give scale-ups access to high-impact insight and GTM talent at the moments they need it most. Our belief is simple: companies shouldn’t have to choose between speed and judgment as they scale.
If the themes in this piece resonate, and you’re thinking about how to navigate your next phase of growth with greater conviction, please get in touch here.
