Denada Ramnishta is CRO at Efficient Capital Labs, where she turns partnerships into revenue engines and GTM programs into growth machines.
getty
There’s a problem in the AI industry: Most AI founders are running their companies like SaaS businesses.
But AI economics look nothing like SaaS economics. Traditional SaaS organizations have historically operated with gross margins of 75% to 85%, while AI-native companies are operating with margins of 50% to 65%, with some early-stage businesses running significantly lower as infrastructure and inference costs scale alongside usage. That’s an entirely different business model.
The fastest way to lose control of an AI company right now is to assume revenue and margins will behave the way they did in early 2000s SaaS. The AI operating model and cost structure are fundamentally different from traditional SaaS, and growth and capital strategies have to reflect that so the runway math doesn’t leave you exposed.
In SaaS, growth has historically improved margins. In AI, growth can compress them: Every prompt, workflow, search, recommendation and generated output consumes infrastructure. Usage scales infrastructure and revenue, and that single shift changes almost every decision that matters for a startup: pricing, product, hiring and financing.
AI is creating a generation of companies whose greatest challenge isn’t building demand but building sustainable economics as they scale.
Rebuilding The SaaS Playbook For AI Economics
Start with unit economics as a product requirement, not a finance report. Every AI founder should be able to answer, in real time, what it costs to serve a single customer, workflow and output.
Imagine an AI company charging an enterprise customer $2,000 per month. That revenue sounds healthy until you break down the actual cost to serve that customer:
• Inference and model usage: $450
• GPU and cloud infrastructure: $250
• Storage, vector database and retrieval systems: $100
• Third-party APIs and tooling: $75
• Customer support and success resources: $175
• Security, monitoring and compliance: $100
• Total cost to serve: $1,150
That leaves $850 in gross profit, or roughly 42.5% gross margin. A traditional SaaS founder would be alarmed by that kind of margin but it’s increasingly common in AI.
Now imagine the customer doubles their usage. Revenue stays at $2,000 because they’re on a flat-rate plan, but infrastructure and inference costs jump from $700 to $1,300. Suddenly, your gross margin falls below 20%. That’s a pricing problem.
And this is where many AI companies drift off course: They celebrate usage growth without understanding whether that usage is creating enterprise value or destroying margin. I’ve seen businesses discover that their top 10% of customers account for more than 60% of total infrastructure spend.
Remember, you can’t scale your way out of broken economics—more customers simply won’t solve a pricing problem.
A Shorter Runway
Another necessary shift: runway management has to start earlier than it did during the golden age of SaaS.
While SaaS founders have historically had a few growth cycles to figure out burn and runway optimization, AI founders don’t have the same luxury. Costs scale with usage from day one, and once you reach product-market fit, cost curves can steepen faster than revenue curves—shrinking your runway at the exact moment that traction looks strongest. Visual Capitalist recently reported that compute is now the largest cost center at leading AI companies, representing 57% to 70% of total spend, even more than talent costs.
The discipline here is simple but rarely executed well: Model burn against usage scenarios, not just headcount plans. Figure out what happens to burn if usage doubles, then triples. Then run those same scenarios with high-cost customer segments. You can’t plan sustainably if you don’t know what growth really costs you. Growth without margin awareness is just expensive optimism.
Capital strategy needs to evolve alongside this. Investors and lenders are no longer evaluating AI companies on growth alone; we’re evaluating whether growth is structurally sustainable. That means more scrutiny on gross margins, infrastructure efficiency, how costs scale relative to revenue, and your serviceable debt capacity.
Getting Funding Today
The conversation has shifted from “How fast can this grow?” to “What breaks when it does?” Founders who can clearly articulate their unit economics—and show a credible path to improving them over time—are more likely to get funding than those who are still optimizing for top-line expansion without cost discipline. More capital doesn’t fix weak unit economics; it only delays the consequences.
The shift also changes how capital should be used. Financing is no longer just a growth lever. In many early-stage AI companies, it’s a vehicle for bridging the gap between infrastructure spend and revenue realization. The AI startups that use capital well are matching the type and timing of capital to the shape of their cost infrastructure and revenue cycle.
The Real AI Differentiator: Sustainable Scale
We’re already seeing the first generation of AI companies hit a wall, and it’s not demand or product; it’s margin.
They’re adding customers, growing ARR and shipping features. From the outside, everything looks healthy. Underneath, infrastructure costs are rising faster than revenue, gross margins are shrinking and every new customer is making the business more expensive to operate.
That’s the dirty secret of AI right now: Some companies are scaling revenue while most are scaling away from profitability. As the AI industry finds its footing, undisciplined capital is emerging as the enemy of ambition.
Those who define the next decade of AI will know exactly what growth costs before they buy it, and they’ll be able to turn every dollar of capital into durable, profitable growth. They’ll understand their economics, manage burn intentionally, build predictable revenue and match financing strategy to business reality. And their ambition and vision will be coupled with a greater degree of discipline and clarity.
Anyone can buy growth. Only winners can afford to keep it.
Forbes Business Development Council is an invitation-only community for sales and biz dev executives. Do I qualify?
