How the VentureIndex Score works
The VentureIndex Score rates internet businesses from 0 to 100 on scale, growth, revenue quality, efficiency, momentum and verification. Here's how.
Revenue alone is a poor way to compare internet businesses. A company doing $500K a month that has been flat for a year tells you something very different from a company that went from $2K to $8K in a quarter. The VentureIndex Score is our attempt at one number that weighs both, without pretending to know things we don't.
This post explains what goes into the score, how missing data is handled, and why some companies with impressive numbers still don't rank at the top. The full formulas are on the methodology page.
The six components#
Every company on VentureIndex is scored from 0 to 100 on six components, each with a fixed weight:
| Component | Weight | What it looks at |
|---|---|---|
| Scale | 20% | Current MRR (or average monthly revenue), on a log scale |
| Growth | 22% | 3-month compound monthly growth, year-over-year growth and how consistent growth is |
| Revenue quality | 18% | Share of revenue that is recurring, churn, refunds and how long revenue has been positive |
| Efficiency | 12% | Revenue per team member, revenue per visitor and margins |
| Momentum | 13% | The Momentum Score (below) |
| Verification | 15% | How much of the data comes from connected sources, and how fresh it is |
Scale uses a log curve on purpose. Going from $100 to $10K MRR is as meaningful as going from $10K to $1M, so a small, fast-growing company is not drowned out by sheer size.
We never fill in missing data#
If a component has no inputs, it is marked "not available". It is not guessed or averaged in. Instead, every score carries a coverage figure: the share of the total weight that had real inputs. When coverage falls below 50%, we don't publish a score at all and show "Insufficient data".
Scores are also pulled toward 50 when there is little history. A company with two months of data can't reach the top of a ranking on one lucky month: its score is shrunk in proportion to how much evidence we have. As history builds up, the pull fades.
Verified data counts for more#
Numbers a founder types in are useful, but they are not proof. Companies without verified revenue are capped at a score of 60, and company-reported values carry less weight. Connecting a payment provider with a read-only key is the only way past that cap. We cover how that works in what verified revenue means.
Momentum: growth, scale-invariant#
The Momentum Score is its own 0–100 number. It also feeds into the main score. It is built from relative change rather than absolute dollars:
- 30-day revenue growth (the biggest signal)
- Acceleration: whether the last 30 days beat the trailing three-month average
- Short-term run-rate changes, traffic growth and customer growth
- Development activity, when that data is available
Because it uses percentages, a company growing from $2K to $8K outranks a stagnant one at $500K. A damping factor keeps very small bases, like $50 to $200, from dominating. Companies need at least $250 a month in revenue and two months of history to receive one. You can see who is moving fastest in the trending ranking.
Privacy is respected, not worked around#
Founders choose which metrics are public, shown as a range, or private. When a component would reveal a hidden metric, its value is withheld from the public breakdown. Companies that keep a ranked metric private are excluded from that ranking, since a position would otherwise leak the number.
Where to see it#
Every company profile shows its score, coverage, confidence and the component breakdown it is allowed to show. To compare companies by score, open Explore and sort by VentureIndex Score, or browse the rankings.
The score is versioned. When we change a weight or a curve, the methodology page says so, and old scores stay comparable within a version.