Stage-based metric stacks: Which KPIs actually move your valuation

For a long time, startup metrics were treated as a downstream concern: Growth came first and reporting followed later. That approach no longer holds.

In a more selective funding environment, investors are placing greater emphasis on efficiency, discipline, and business fundamentals. Growth still matters, but it must be supported by clear evidence of repeatability and sound capital allocation. Metrics are how that evidence is evaluated.

What many founders miss is that the key performance indicators (KPIs) investors care about aren’t static. The metrics that influence valuation at pre-seed differ materially from those that matter at Series A or Series B. Tracking too many numbers — or emphasizing the wrong ones — can obscure the signals investors are actually looking for.

Here, we outline the stage-based metric stack investors expect at each phase of business growth, explain why those metrics matter, and show you how to align internal reporting with external fundraising narratives.

Capital remains available in the startup world, but it’s more carefully allocated today than it was a few years ago. Investors are underwriting risk with greater scrutiny and focusing on efficiency, decision quality, and the durability of growth. They’re not only evaluating upside potential, but also assessing whether teams understand their own economics and can deploy capital deliberately.

Knowing how to track startup growth is as important as choosing which metrics to report. The wrong metrics introduce noise, raise questions, and can weaken your company’s position in valuation conversations. Effective reporting comes down to selecting a metric stack that reflects your company’s stage and priorities.

To pick the right business metrics for your company, select metrics that demonstrate:

• Which risks you’ve already addressed
• Which assumptions remain unproven
• Whether growth is repeatable or opportunistic
• How efficiently capital converts into enterprise value

Below is a practical framework for startup KPIs by stage, with emphasis on the metrics most closely tied to valuation.

Pre-seed: Evidence of opportunity

At the pre-seed stage, investors aren’t underwriting revenue; they’re underwriting market understanding and opportunity.

The objective in this stage is to demonstrate that a real problem exists for your company to solve for customers, that the founding team understands that problem (and the customers) deeply, and that early users respond to your product in meaningful ways.

Metrics that matter at pre-seed:

• Founder-market fit: Track metrics that help show customer engagement, fast iteration cycles, and other evidence that product decisions consistently improve engagement or retention.
• Early engagement signals: Keep tabs on waitlist growth, activation rates, usage frequency, and retention over short windows.
• Early customer acquisition cost (CAC) proxies: Look for early signals of the amount of effort and resources it takes to acquire an initial user or customer. 
• Burn and runway: Burn should map clearly to learning milestones that answer high-risk questions about the company, such as validating demand and acquisition channels — not on prematurely expanding headcount. Generally, investors are looking for 12 to 24 months of post-raise runway.

At this stage, valuation reflects confidence that the company can unlock meaningful growth in the future. Strong customer engagement and disciplined burn suggest your company will reach product-market fit before running out of capital.

Tip: Simple financial dashboards for founders make it easier to track cash, spend, and runway. Clear categorization, clean expense tracking, and a single source of truth for cash position matter more than forecasts. To streamline your company’s processes, see how Mercury simplifies expense management with corporate cards and reimbursements.

Seed: Proof of repeatability

The seed stage is where belief turns into evidence. Investors now want to see that your company’s growth isn’t accidental, and that you understand the mechanics behind it.

Metrics that matter at seed:

• Monthly recurring revenue (MRR) or annual recurring revenue (ARR): Early revenue validates customers’ willingness to pay for your product, and investors care more about how consistently revenue is growing than the current total revenue.
• CAC, lifetime value (LTV), and retention: These metrics begin to show how your business might make money over time. At this stage, investors focus more on whether these numbers are improving consistently than on short-term fluctuations.
• Churn and cohort behavior: Track who leaves, when, and why, as well as whether retention stabilizes or improves over time across customer groups and lifecycles.
• Burn multiple and runway: How many dollars does your company burn to generate a dollar of new ARR? While highly industry-dependent, a burn multiple above three is generally considered high, and investors will look for at least 18 months of runway. Calculate your startups cash burn rate.
• Go-to-market (GTM) motion clarity: How does your company acquire customers and do these numbers align with your go-to-market strategy? 

At the seed stage, investors value teams that can grow quickly without burning through their capital. When the underlying economics and metrics make sense, company valuation tends to be stronger.

Tip: This is where founders benefit from financial systems that connect spend, revenue, and runway in one view. Fragmented data makes it hard to answer investor questions with confidence. To solve this problem, Mercury’s financial workflows centralize financial data into one dashboard.

Series A: Efficiency meets scale

Series A is where metrics stop being directional and start being comparable. Investors will benchmark your company against peers. Outliers will get attention and weak spots will get pressure.

Metrics that matter at Series A:

• ARR growth rate: This metric tracks growth, as well as acceleration and consistency.
• Net revenue retention (NRR): NRR measure whether existing customers stay and increase their spending over time, indicating durable value from the product. 
• CAC payback period: This metrics captures how long it takes to recover customer acquisition costs.
• Gross margin: Tracking your company’s gross margin offers proof that scale improves economics, not the opposite. For SaaS companies, the benchmark gross margin is about 70% or higher. Calculate your startups gross profit margin.
• Sales efficiency (magic number): This is how much revenue is generated per dollar of sales and marketing spend. Calculate you SaaS startups magic number.

Series A valuation is tightly coupled to scalability. Investors pay premiums for businesses that show operating leverage early.

Tip: Forecasting and reporting discipline matter here. Investors expect clean monthly reporting, clear variance explanations, and confidence in forward-looking assumptions. To achieve this, accounting automations can help founders maintain accurate records with less effort.

Series B and beyond: Operating leverage

By Series B, growth alone isn’t impressive, but how you grow is. Investors are underwriting durability.

Metrics that matter at Series B and beyond:

• Contribution margin: Track your company’s unit-level profitability after variable costs. (For example, this could be one subscription or one ecommerce product sale.) This number should be positive and improving quarter over quarter.
• Expansion and upsell revenue: Track revenue growth from existing customers who purchase additional products, features, or higher usage tiers over time. 
• Cohort analysis: Analyze revenue, retention, and margin by similar customer groups.
• Operational leverage: Capture revenue growth relative to headcount and operating expenses (opex) growth.

Later-stage valuation rewards predictability and margin expansion, especially when customer groups that joined at the same time retain well and spend more over time.

Tip: Integrated financial operations — including banking, cards, spend controls, and reporting — reduce friction and improve your decision quality at scale. Demo how the Mercury dashboard brings it all together in one, clean interface.

Some metrics are valuable for operating the business day to day, but they rarely influence valuation directly. These typically include:

• Vanity metrics: Such as total sign-ups without corresponding retention or engagement.
• Activity metrics: Such as demos booked or emails sent without clear link to conversion or revenue.
• One-off channel spikes: Like spikes that don’t repeat or scale, such as short-term traffic or sign-up surges from a single campaign.
• Raw traffic figures: Such as pageviews or visits that are disconnected from acquisition cost, conversion, or downstream revenue.

Investors don’t dismiss these metrics. During due diligence, when they closely review how the business operates before investing, they often look at these numbers to understand how the business works, including how customers find and buy the product, how quickly the team tests and learns from new ideas, which marketing channels are being used, and more. So, these metrics help provide context, but they won’t ultimately drive valuation. 

Valuation is driven by sustainable growth, efficient use of capital, and repeatable results. Metrics that don’t connect to those themes are unlikely to move pricing, even if they look impressive in isolation.

Metrics aren’t just numbers. They’re a story about how you allocate attention and capital over time. Strong founders don’t present dashboards; they present intent.

You’ll want to be able to explain:

• Why a particular metric mattered at a certain stage
• What decision it informed
• What changed in the business as a result

This narrative builds investor confidence. It signals judgment, not just awareness. Investors see that you’re not reacting to numbers in hindsight, but using them deliberately to guide trade-offs, prioritize resources, and reduce risk.

When founders align their startup performance benchmarks with their operating philosophy, valuation conversations shift. You’ll stop defending numbers and start explaining outcomes.

Below is a summary of the core metrics investors expect to see at each stage of growth. Rather than tracking everything at once, use this as a reference to prioritize the metrics that most directly influence valuation at your company’s current stage and the tools that can help you.

Metrics create leverage only when they’re accurate, contextual, and aligned with the company’s stage.

Founders who succeed in valuation discussions aren’t those with the most data, but those with the clearest signal. Clean systems, consistent reporting, and intentional metric selection enable stronger narratives and better outcomes.

That clarity is where modern financial tooling becomes a strategic advantage. When founders combine disciplined operations with disciplined reporting, valuation becomes less about persuasion and more about evidence.

Ready to start tracking essential metrics? Explore how Mercury helps founders turn clean financial data into leverage.