Methodology

How the $100M ARR Breakout Club is ranked, sourced, and verified.

The SR Momentum Score

Momentum measures speed. Size is secondary. The score tracks how fast a company is moving right now. A size-weighted score would just pin the biggest company at #1 forever; what matters is change.

The score is 0–100, weighted across five universal buckets:

• Funding momentum (30). Round recency, cadence, valuation step-up (if disclosed), total raised (log).
• Hiring velocity (25). Headcount growth, open-roles trend, GTM:ENG role-mix shift.
• Backer quality (20). Lead-investor tier, notable angels.
• Curation corroboration (15). Weighted presence across breakout lists (Ramp, Harmonic Hot 25, a16z, YC, Next Play, Founders You Should Know, Early Days).
• Heat / attention (10). News-mention acceleration, social follower growth, search-interest trend.

Overlays

• Recency decay on every time-based input. A $100M round 3 months ago beats the same round 30 months ago.
• Repeat-founder bonus: +0–3, small and static.
• ARR / efficiency, when disclosed, nudges the score and raises the confidence tier, never dominates.
• Negative events: layoffs or down-rounds apply an explicit penalty.

Anti-gaming

News + social are the easiest signals to fake (PR pushes, bot follows), so they are capped at 10 combined. Hard-to-fake funding + hiring carry 55 of the 100. Category-specific weights (app-rank for consumer, GitHub stars for dev-tools) are a v2 layer. They don't ship now.

Confidence tier (data completeness)

The tier is derived from how much we know:

• Estimated: funding + hiring only.
• Reported: plus curation and backers (credible secondary sources).
• Verified: plus disclosed ARR or traction (company confirmation or primary filing).

Low-confidence scores are shrunk toward the set median (Bayesian) so a company with one noisy signal can't spike to the top while coverage is sparse. Those scores are annotated in the UI as 94 · est..

Sources

Every figure is shown with its source and the date it was last verified. We do not auto-publish un-reviewed data. The receipt is the moat: this is the one place that always shows where each number came from and when.

What it is

A working index with a sourced decode attached to every row: the Startup Riders Growth Playbook. The scarce part is not the number. It is the teardown, the source, and the date.