Bentley Systems, Incorporated Class B

It earns money mainly through recurring subscription fees rather than one-time or perpetual software licenses. Payment comes from both the contracting and engineering side of infrastructure projects and the ownership side that later operates them, sold mostly through its own direct sales relationships rather than through resellers.

The system scales by adding subscription customers to software that, once built, costs relatively little to extend to the next customer, rather than by expanding a physical operation. In the recent record on file, operating income has been rising while depreciation stays small relative to earnings, on a balance sheet where long-lived assets make up most of total assets, a composition CompanyGraph reads as consistent with that kind of operating leverage rather than as a direct measurement of it.

The system depends on external cloud computing providers to host and run its software and on a large base of skilled employees, whose labor makes up the largest part of its operating cost, to build and support that software. It also sits downstream of a wider set of upstream industries CompanyGraph maps as feeding into this one.

Its dependents are the engineering and construction firms that design and build infrastructure projects and the public and private organizations that later own and operate that infrastructure once it is built. By its own account, no single customer accounts for a meaningful concentration of its revenue, so this dependence is spread across many buyers rather than resting on a few large ones.

This kind of recurring-subscription software arrangement is not structurally rare: CompanyGraph tracks a substantial number of other companies that run the same kind of system. By its own account, the company points to the breadth of its product portfolio, the way its tools interoperate across a project's life, flexible commercial terms, and its direct sales relationships as what distinguishes it, but CompanyGraph has no evidence about whether rival firms are able to reproduce that combination.

By its own account, contract terms are short, running monthly, quarterly, or annually, or as a short-term named-user subscription, and the company states that it deliberately keeps engineering data in open, third-party-compatible formats rather than a closed format of its own. Short terms and open formats do not, on their own, describe a mechanism that would stop a customer from leaving, so CompanyGraph cannot see, from what the company discloses, why revenue nonetheless stays highly recurring.

CompanyGraph's general reading of this kind of subscription software business treats keeping renewals ahead of cancellations and recovering the cost of winning each customer as the constraint that shapes how far it can scale. The company's own risk disclosures test that reading rather than simply confirming it: the risk it names first is not renewal economics but the volatility of customer demand tied to the funding and timelines of long-running infrastructure projects, with the risk that subscribers do not renew named separately afterward. This suggests the pace of infrastructure investment may shape its scale alongside, or ahead of, typical subscription retention dynamics.

By its own account, the risk named first is that customer demand follows the funding and scheduling of long-running infrastructure projects rather than a typical software buying cycle. In the order it discloses them, it also names reliance on operations outside the United States, the risk that subscribers do not renew, consolidation among the firms that buy from it, difficulty integrating acquired businesses, and defects or failures in its software.

The system operates under privacy and data protection law across multiple jurisdictions, anti-corruption and export control rules tied to its foreign operations, and movement in several currencies outside the US dollar in the regions where it earns revenue and pays costs. By its own account, the pressure it names first is that customer demand moves with the funding and scheduling of long-running infrastructure projects, a different rhythm than a typical software renewal cycle, and it separately names exposure to tariffs and a possible trade war as a risk to sales opportunities.