Measured the way acquirers measure.
LouieAuto's unit economics are calibrated against the standard benchmarks an M&A analyst uses to price vertical AI SaaS. This page documents the formulas, inputs, and expected-value ranges so the first post-acquisition cohort has a pre-agreed yardstick.
Rule of 40.
Rule of 40 is the combined growth rate plus profit margin. Above 40 earns a multiple premium; above 60 earns a 2–3x premium over the private-SaaS median.
Inputs (post-acquisition base case)
| Year-1 ARR growth (from 0 to attach) | Not meaningful in year 1 of tuck-in; treated as N/A |
| Year-2 YoY ARR growth | 120–200% (attach ramp on acquirer's book) |
| Year-3 YoY ARR growth | 60–90% |
| FCF margin at Year 3 run-rate | 55–70% (85% GM less 15–25% G&A absorbed into acquirer) |
| Year-3 Rule of 40 | 115–160 (illustrative base case) |
Rule of 40 above 60 carries a +2.2x multiple premium per 10 points over the baseline (Aventis Advisors 2026). At 115–160, the implied multiple premium vs. median private-SaaS is meaningful — and is one of the inputs that takes the strategic-value math from "clean tuck-in" to "premium tuck-in."
Net Revenue Retention.
NRR measures expansion + renewal net of churn on an existing cohort. Above 120% earns a 2–3x multiple premium over NRR < 100% (SaaS Capital; Windsor Drake).
Expansion paths built into Louie
| Rooftop expansion | Starter (1–2) → Growth (3–9) → Enterprise (10+). Per-rooftop pricing compounds automatically as the dealer group adds stores. |
| Module-tier expansion | Base modules → Whisperer → Vision appraisal → Fraud pack. Each tier is an upsell at contract renewal. |
| Performance-share uplift | Optional share-of-PVR-lift pricing at renewal. Dealers who measure 6x+ value-to-price have high willingness to trade subscription certainty for share-based upside. |
Base case NRR target: 120–140%. Input: 6x–16x value-to-price ratio means dealers have pricing headroom at renewal. Stretch case (performance-share revenue captures a fraction of the uplift): 160–200%.
Gross margin.
Gross margin in LouieAuto is structurally high because the only variable cost is LLM inference.
Total variable cost: $260–$520 Revenue per rooftop per month: $2,000–$2,500
Gross margin GM = 1 − (Variable cost / Revenue) ≈ 79–87%
The multi-provider LLM router is the gross-margin moat. An acquirer with existing Anthropic, OpenAI, Azure, or GCP enterprise agreements gets the inference cost for effectively zero marginal spend. Acquirer-side gross margin: 90%+.
Cohort framework.
The cohort framework is defined today and ready to measure against the first 10 attached rooftops under an acquirer's distribution.
| Cohort signal | Target range | Measurement cadence |
|---|---|---|
| Onboarding time to first value | < 30 days | Weekly during first 90 days |
| Daily active dealers per rooftop | > 4 | Daily |
| AI query load per rooftop per day | 200–600 | Daily |
| Month-2 module adoption breadth | > 6 of 71 modules in active use | Monthly |
| Dealer-reported PVR lift (self-report survey) | > $100/unit | Quarterly |
| Gross retention at Month 12 | > 95% | Monthly after Month 12 |
| Logo churn at Month 18 | < 3% | Monthly after Month 18 |
This framework is pre-wired into Louie's operational telemetry today. Post-acquisition, the first cohort of attached rooftops has a pre-agreed dashboard — no negotiation about what to measure.
Honest caveats.
LouieAuto has no commercial ARR as of April 2026. Every cohort number above is a framework target, not a historical result. The intent of this page is not to claim traction that does not exist — it is to pre-negotiate the yardstick so the first 8 quarters under acquirer distribution have a clean measurement scaffold.
The Rule of 40 and NRR ranges assume a tuck-in deployment on an acquirer's existing dealer book. Independent-go-to-market would produce a different profile (slower ARR growth, higher CAC, lower FCF margin in Years 1–2).