Buyers don’t pay for a software company’s past. They pay for the cash it will produce in the future, and for how confident they are that it will keep coming. This guide breaks a valuation down into the factors behind it, the ones an owner can actually influence, and shows what AI changes about each.

How the guide works

Every factor comes back to three questions a buyer asks: how predictable is the business, how well protected is it, and where is it headed? For each one, the guide shows how much it matters, what good and great look like, and whether AI changes the measure itself or just how buyers read it.

What’s inside

• The financial factors buyers weigh most, from size and growth to profitability and how well a company keeps its customers

• The qualitative factors, from the strength of the product and technology to the management team and the size of the market

• The new questions AI has added to every buyer’s checklist

• How software pricing is starting to change, and why it matters for value

• Plain-English definitions of the measures buyers will check

It’s a guide to how buyers think, not a valuation. Use it to see where your business stands and where to focus before starting a process. The guide is drawn from our full report, A Framework for B2B Software Valuations in the AI Era.