Headcount follows demand

👋 Hey, Egemen here.

I expected AI to slow hiring at private software companies this year. ICONIQ’s new data shows three of four growth groups did slow down, but companies growing more than 100% a year grew median headcount by 146%.

Here’s a snapshot of what’s on the menu today:

Ava is the first AI BDR to run outbound end to end, and you decide whether she runs autonomously or on copilot.

She finds leads or ingests accounts from your CRM, enriches them, sends personalized emails on behalf of your reps, follows up, handles replies and books meetings. Website visitor de-anonymization, intent signals, and a parallel dialer come built in.

A small team can manage her centrally for thousands of reps who never log in. Everything syncs two-way with Salesforce and HubSpot.

Ava runs outbound for companies like DoorDash and Grammarly, and one customer deploys her across 1,000+ reps. Ava is SOC 2 Type II audited, SSO and GDPR ready. Ava is how revenue teams grow pipeline without growing headcount.

Book a demo

Several public software companies cut 10 to 20% of their staff this year and cited AI. I assumed private companies would slow hiring too. Then I read the 2026 State of Scaling report that ICONIQ published on 17 September. It covers quarterly data from 137 software companies, and I had to split my assumption by growth rate.

Three of the four growth groups slowed their hiring in 2026. Companies growing under 25% a year added 2% to headcount, compared with 4% in 2025. The 25 to 50% group fell from 18% to 6%, and the 50 to 100% group fell from 46% to 34%.

Companies growing above 100% sped up. Their median headcount grew 146%, after 115% in 2025.

AI adoption does not explain the gap. ICONIQ reports high AI use regardless of performance. More than 70% of employees across its portfolio use AI tools daily, and R&D reaches 86%. At $25M to $100M ARR, top-quartile companies now bring in $290K of ARR per employee, up from $265K in 2025.

I read the chart as a demand chart. With AI, a slow grower can hold headcount flat and still hit plan. ICONIQ hears of companies that use attrition to delay or skip backfills. A company growing 100%+ runs out of people anyway, so it keeps hiring.

Sela fits the pattern at an earlier stage. The company sells AI voice agents to mortgage lenders and announced a $21M seed and Series A on 22 September. It crossed $10M in annualized run-rate revenue in 18 months with 17 full-time employees.

That is about $590K per person. ICONIQ’s top-quartile mark for its fastest-growing AI companies at $10M to $25M ARR is $145K. Sela plans to grow to 50 people over the next year. At today’s revenue, a 50-person team would still bring in $200K per person, above that mark.

(Source: Sela, “Sela’s AI Agents Help Originate $1B+ in Loans per Month, Company Raises $21M”, 22 September 2026)
(Benchmark: ICONIQ, “The ICONIQ Pacesetter Index”, 17 September 2026)
Revenue per person is my math on Sela’s reported figures.

👉 Set your 2027 hiring plan from your growth rate. Below 50% growth, freeze backfills for one quarter and give the open work to AI tools and the current team. Approve only the roles that still do not fit. Above 100% growth, hire ahead of demand and track ARR per employee each quarter. If it falls two quarters in a row, slow hiring until it recovers.

Check out what our readers also enjoy reading:

For Deel's "Feeling of Deeling" campaign, agency SuperBloom needed one consistent brand voice across markets—deployed fast, without sacrificing quality or consent. In this on-demand video session, SuperBloom and Voices break down the casting, production, and governance, plus what they'd do differently and where AI voice is headed next.

Watch On-Demand Now

Get ready for Return on Influence Festival '26. An entire day dedicated to influencer marketing with speakers running some of the best programs in the world. October 21, 2026, 10 am - 5 pm ET.

Save your spot now

San Francisco, CA / Web data for AI agents / announced 22 September 2026

Firecrawl has raised a $75M Series B. Smash Capital led the round, and Altos Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners, Y Combinator, Freestyle and Offline Ventures joined. CEO Caleb Peffer, CTO Nicolas Silberstein Camara and CGO Eric Ciarla co-founded the company.

Developers use Firecrawl to search and scrape the web for AI agents, and more than 1.5 million users build with it. The team created its GitHub repo in April 2024, and the repo now has more than 183,000 stars.

With the round, Firecrawl launched Alexandria, a knowledge platform for AI agents. It gives an agent one way to find and pull sources from the live web and from official data providers. Firecrawl ran its own test of 845 tasks with a blind AI judge. Agents on Alexandria scored 21% higher on answer quality than agents on built-in web tools.

Peffer wrote that Firecrawl will spend “a good chunk” of the round buying knowledge from people. It already pays several data providers, including Wikimedia Enterprise. A self-serve program comes next, so individuals and organizations can earn when agents use what they know.

firecrawl.dev / See how Alexandria works