Stripe Economics' 10 September analysis covers an average of 72,000 non-AI SaaS businesses a week in 2026. It tracks payments processed by Stripe, a proxy for revenue. Aggregate growth accelerated; growth in the median-business index slowed early in 2026, then recovered.

The indices compare the same businesses each week and adjust for seasonality and currency movements. They exclude AI-native companies and cannot measure payments outside Stripe, costs or profit margins. Stripe publishes the index data; download the CSV used here. The chart calculates 52-week growth from those published levels through 24 August 2026.

Stripe measures current customer demand in its own sample. Our multiples measure what investors pay for expected revenue in a different group of listed companies.

The median listed business-software multiple is 2.34× expected annual revenue in August 2026, compared with 2.93× a year earlier. The March-to-August recovery from 2.14× amounts to 9%; over the full year the multiple is still down 20%.

Miro provides a private-market example of the valuation reset. On 10 September 2026, Bending Spoons agreed to acquire the collaboration platform at an enterprise value of $1.355 billion. Including net cash, the implied equity value is approximately $1.79 billion, about 90% below Miro's $17.5 billion funding valuation in 2022. Miro now has around $600 million in annual recurring revenue: substantial software demand can coexist with a much lower valuation. The acquisition remains subject to regulatory approvals and other closing conditions.

Generative AI has the highest median multiple of the five themes, at 4.7× in August. Vertical SaaS follows at 2.5×.

Cloud software sold off from January 2026, bottomed on 10 April and recovered through the summer. Andreas Helbig marked the round trip on 27 August, dating the SaaSpocalypse January to August 2026. The index levels in the next chart come from Nasdaq, S&P Dow Jones Indices and Bessemer Venture Partners, not from Dealroom.

These charts cover different companies

The cloud index tracks share prices for 65 selected cloud companies. Our business-software dataset covers a much wider group of 1,349 listed companies, and its chart measures revenue multiples. Stripe's payment data covers another set of businesses.

These are separate findings about different companies. We would need to compare share prices, revenue and multiples for the same companies to establish what explains the gap.

Prices have moved, and a few names re-rated a long way. The chart below sets each company's share-price move against the mood in high-engagement posts about it on X. The sentiment reading is frozen at 15 June 2026 and the share prices run to August 2026, so the two are a couple of months apart.