The planning rule that guided B2B for 15 years, roughly one new hire for every $200K to $300K of added revenue, no longer holds for the sector's top performers. The median company still runs at about $237K of revenue per employee. A group of public and private leaders now adds a person for every $1.75M to $9M of revenue.
AppLovin is the most extreme software case. Its second-quarter 2026 revenue was $1.92B, up 53%, at an 84% adjusted EBITDA margin. On 876 full-time employees at the end of 2025, that annualizes to about $8.8M per person. Anthropic's S-1 puts trailing-twelve-month revenue per employee above $6.6M at September 30, 2026, up from $1.4M a year earlier, even as headcount tripled. Palantir's third-quarter revenue of $2.31B, up 96%, annualizes to about $2.0M across 4,634 staff, who number only 205 more than at year-end 2025.
The pattern extends to established companies. Cloudflare announced a cut of about 20% in May, mostly in G&A. Growth then rose from 34% to 36% and 39%, and revenue per employee moved from about $496K to about $690K. Atlassian cut about 1,600 jobs in March, and its cloud revenue grew 31% to $1.213B in the following period, against guidance of 23%. Net revenue retention stayed above 120%.
Bending Spoons runs the most aggressive version. Its revenue per full-time employee rose from $1.12M in 2023 to $2.57M in 2025, helped by cuts such as 75% of WeTransfer's staff. Its net revenue retention is 95%, below Cloudflare and Atlassian, and the model is untested on products still seeking new markets.
The figures carry caveats. Anthropic and Bending Spoons disclose their own numbers. For Nvidia, AppLovin and Palantir, the ratios annualize the latest quarter against the last disclosed headcount, which overstates results for any company that has hired since. Nvidia also sells chips and systems rather than software. Even so, the gap to the median is too wide to be a measurement artifact.
