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Public story · 2026-07-19 · high
Jason Lemkin says the split between winners and losers comes down to whether AI adds new customers or just bigger invoices from old ones.
Why now: Covered in SaaStr's July 19 breakdown of the spend versus valuation paradox.
Software spend climbed 15% to $1.4 trillion even as half of SaaS trades below the S&P, per Jason Lemkin's SaaStr breakdown. The split decides whether a company's growth re-accelerates, like Palantir's jump from 27% to 85%, or stalls out with no AI edge at all.
Lemkin sorts SaaS into four buckets. Bucket one is AI-native with no legacy constraints: Harvey, Artisan, Monaco. Pre-AI companies catching a real AI tailwind land in bucket two, among them Twilio, WorkOS, and RevenueCat. Atlassian sits in bucket three: AI-driven expansion revenue with no new logos. A fourth bucket gets no AI advantage at all.
Twilio's growth went from roughly 4% to 20% on the same tailwind. SaaStr applied the same test to itself: the company went from more than 20 employees to three humans plus 21 AI agents. That's the org chart, not a metaphor.
The question travels past any single earnings call: is AI bringing new customers, or just bigger invoices from old ones? Atlassian is the trap case. Expansion revenue can make a growth chart look healthy while new-logo acquisition stalls. Eventually the market prices that gap in.
For anyone evaluating a SaaS company, that's the actual interview question. Which bucket does the AI story land in, and does the new-logo count back it up? A re-accelerating growth rate like Palantir's or Twilio's is hard to fake. Expansion revenue without new logos is easy to mistake for the same thing.
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