Klaviyo Joins Revenue Unicorn Club

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Congratulations to Klaviyo as it crosses $1 Billion in annual revenue and joins the software Revenue Unicorns!

Let's see what we can learn from Klaviyo's journey...

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Revenue Growth

Klaviyo consistently grew revenue across all stages on its path to $1 Billion in revenue. Notably, Klaviyo’s revenue growth was greater than the Revenue Unicorn median from $250 Million to $750 Million in revenue.

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Gross Margin

Klaviyo has a durable gross margin structure, keeping pace with the Revenue Unicorn median across all revenue ranges. Box, Cloudflare, and DocuSign displayed similar gross margin strength across all revenue ranges.

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Sales & Marketing

Klaviyo invested less than the Revenue Unicorn median in sales and marketing until passing $1 Billion in revenue. BILL and Datadog also invested less than the Revicorn median for sales and marketing expense as a percentage of revenue across all revenue ranges.

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Research & Development

Klaviyo invested steadily in research and development during the Company’s lifecycle. Klaviyo’s spend on research and development trended in a similar fashion to Okta’s and Twilio’s approach on the path to $1 Billion in revenue.

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General & Administrative

Klaviyo’s general and administrative expense was above the median Revenue Unicorn as they scaled to $1 Billion in annual revenue. This is similar to Atlassian’s approach on the path to $1 Billion in revenue.

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Stock Based Compensation

Klaviyo SBC expense as a percentage of revenue fluctuated compared to the Revenue Unicorn median, but has receded after passing $1 Billion in annual revenue. When viewing SBC expense as a percentage of enterprise value, Klaviyo is at 1.7%, which is lower than the Revenue Unicorn median of 1.8% in the $1 Billion+ revenue range.

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Free Cash Flow

Klaviyo’s free cash flow margin improved with scale and leveled out after passing $1 Billion in annual revenue. Workday executed a similar path of improving free cash flow margin with business growth.

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Time to Reach $1 Billion in Revenue

Klaviyo reached $1 Billion in revenue after 12.25 years. This is shorter than the median time of 13.50 years it took other Revenue Unicorns to reach the $1 Billion mark. Other Revenue Unicorns that took a similar amount of time to achieve the $1 Billion revenue threshold include Veeva (11.75 years) and Okta (11.50 years).

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Other Revenue Unicorns founded around the same time as Klaviyo (2012 founding) include Snowflake (2012), Elastic (2012), and Zoom (2011). This set of companies took a median of 8.75 years to achieve $1 Billion in revenue (Snowflake at 8.75 years, Elastic at 10.00 years, and Zoom at 8.50 years).

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The Journey to $1 Billion in Revenue

For those of you that love data as much as we do, below is the full data set used for this analysis.

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Again, congratulations to the Klaviyo team! Stay tuned for the next Revenue Unicorn update.

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Note: The complete list of Revenue Unicorns used in the comparison can be found in the presentation here.

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About Klaviyo

Klaviyo was founded in 2012 by Andrew Bialecki and Ed Hallen. As per the Company’s materials, Klaviyo provides businesses of all sizes with powerful technology that captures, stores, analyzes, and predictively uses their own data to drive measurable, high-value outcomes. Klaviyo enables businesses to drive revenue growth by making it easy to bring their first-party data together and use it to create and deliver highly personalized consumer experiences across digital channels. Klaviyo’s SaaS platform combines their proprietary data and application layers into one vertically-integrated solution with advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities. This enables business users of any skill level to harness their data in order to send the right message at the right time across email, short message service (“SMS”), and push notifications, more accurately measure and predict performance, and deploy the specific actions and campaigns that drive the highest impact.

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The Company reported $280 Million in first quarter revenue for the period ended March 31, 2025. Combined with results from the preceding quarters, this recent performance boosts Klaviyo across the $1 Billion in annual revenue threshold as measured on a last twelve month basis to become the latest software Revenue Unicorn.

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About The Revenue Unicorn Playbook

The Revenue Unicorn Playbook is an analytical guide that explores the growth of public software companies from $100 Million to $1 Billion in revenue. The goal of the Playbook is to offer founders and company leaders a framework to examine their growth and investments as they scale. You can find the original Revenue Unicorn article here and presentation here.