Gong's multiple compression since 2021

The valuation reset shows that Gong moved from being priced as a hypergrowth category winner in 2021 to being priced more like a scaled software business in a crowded market. By 2025, Gong had grown from roughly $135M ARR in 2021 to more than $300M ARR, but call recording had spread across Apollo, Outreach, 6sense, HubSpot, and others, so the market paid less for each dollar of revenue even as the company got much larger.1 2 3 4 5

• In 2021, Gong’s $7.25B Series E implied about a 54x revenue multiple on its then roughly $135M ARR. By January 2025, with Gong crossing $300M ARR, that same 2021 valuation worked out to about 24x ARR, showing how much software multiples compressed after the 2021 peak.1 2 3
• The business did not simply stall. Growth slowed sharply after the COVID boom, bottoming at 16% in 2023 as sales layoffs and hiring freezes cut seat expansion, then reaccelerated in 2024 as Gong sold more products per customer and raised contract values across about 4,500 customers.2 3
• This pattern was broader across sales software. Outreach reached a $4.4B valuation in 2021 and was at about $250M ARR in 2023, while People.ai was valued at $1.1B in 2021 and reached about $40M ARR in 2023. Investors shifted from paying for category excitement to paying for durable revenue scale and product breadth.4 5

Going forward, Gong’s upside depends less on restoring a 2021 style multiple and more on proving that recorded customer conversations are the raw material for a larger revenue platform. If Gong keeps turning call data into forecasting, engagement, and workflow products, valuation can expand again on stronger fundamentals rather than scarcity and market heat.2 3