How Bynder Grew From $19M ARR to a $48M Run Rate in 2018 Under CEO Chris Hall

Bynder was generating roughly $4 million a month in revenue — about $48 million annualized — by late 2018, founder and CEO Chris Hall told Latka in November 2018. Ten months earlier, in January 2018, the Amsterdam-born digital asset management company had been at $19 million ARR. The bridge between those two numbers was not organic growth alone: in February 2018 Bynder paid $49.1 million for Webdam, its number-one competitor in the US, and funded the deal largely with a bridge loan from Silicon Valley Bank instead of new equity. This piece works through the numbers Hall actually gave on tape, separates the host's arithmetic from the guest's claims, and follows the company forward — to $100 million in revenue by August 2022 and $130 million by August 2023 per GetLatka's database, under two CEOs who came after Hall.

From agency side project to funded DAM company

Bynder was incorporated at the end of 2013 as a spin-out of Label A, the Amsterdam development agency Hall had started in 2008. It began as an internal tool for moving digital assets between places; Hall told Latka the team "didn't even know" the product category was called a DAM when they built it. Because Hall owned the agency himself, the spin-out required no outside capital and left no agency stake to unwind.

The first outside money arrived in August 2016: a €20 million Series A from Insight Venture Partners — "the first sort of cash in," as Hall put it, worth roughly $21–23 million at the time. GetLatka's database records the round at $22.2 million, and it remains the only equity round on file. Everything after it was funded from revenue and debt.

Bynder revenue in 2018: $19M ARR in January, about $4M a month by November

Hall's own figure for the start of 2018 was €16 million in ARR — "call it 18," he said, then corrected himself upward: "it's 19." That January number predates the Webdam deal.

The November figure needs more care, because it entered the conversation as the host's arithmetic, not Hall's claim. Bynder was serving about 1,600 customers across two tiers — an SMB-enterprise tier paying close to $30,000 a year, and larger enterprise contracts running from $100,000 toward $1 million — with the average, Hall agreed, "closer to 30 or 35 thousand." Host Nathan Latka multiplied:

Hall's response: "that adds up pretty quick — yeah, in that range." So treat the ~$48 million run rate as an order of magnitude the CEO confirmed, not a reported financial. What Hall was firmer about was the shape of the year: from $19 million in January, "we more than doubled" over the following ten to eleven months.

An earlier version of this article placed the $4 million monthly run rate "shortly after the Webdam acquisition," which made the timeline impossible — no 80-to-90-person acquisition turns $19 million into $48 million in a few weeks. The tape resolves the contradiction: $19 million was the pre-acquisition January figure, and ~$4 million a month was where Bynder stood ten-plus months later, with Webdam's revenue consolidated and both businesses still growing. Fast growth, genuinely — but with a $49.1 million acquisition doing a large share of the lifting.

Bynder revenue over time

GetLatka's database also carries a "$20M in November 2017" milestone. That row conflicts slightly with Hall's own on-tape "$19M in January 2018" and appears to be the same figure filed under the interview's mis-stamped November 2017 date; Hall's on-tape number is the more precise one.

The Webdam deal, paid for with debt

Bynder announced the Webdam acquisition on February 15, 2018 and closed it on February 26 — $49.1 million to Shutterstock for the carve-out of its digital asset management business, a price recorded in both Bynder's announcement and Shutterstock's SEC filings. The deal brought a San Mateo office and 80 to 90 employees — on top of existing offices in Amsterdam, Boston, London, Barcelona, Rotterdam and Dubai — and took out what Hall called Bynder's "number one competitor in the US." By the taping, headcount stood around 350 across seven international offices.

The financing is the instructive part. Rather than raise equity, Bynder funded the deal "largely through debt": a bridge loan from Silicon Valley Bank, which the company was refinancing into a term loan at the time of the interview. Hall explained the mechanics — the bridge was supported by the VC and "basically convertible: you get a year extension on figuring out that loan, but if you can't get it, you basically have to convert to equity." Speed was the point. The bridge let Bynder close quickly and left a year to arrange permanent debt, with Insight's backstop as the fallback.

Integration was the hard part: a nine-hour time difference, 80-plus new colleagues, and the work of merging two comparable products into "one company, one product and one product roadmap, one support" while keeping both sides growing organically.

Retention, payback, and the Rule of 40

The unit economics Hall gave on tape: gross revenue retention around 93%, net revenue retention of 103–104%, CAC payback under 12 months, and growth-plus-EBITDA "trending healthily above" the Rule of 40, with cash flow turning positive after years of deliberate burn. Churn concentrated in smaller accounts — "usually the case in any kind of SaaS company," Hall said — and Bynder tuned its marketing and sales spend toward lifetime contract value rather than first-year revenue.

One correction to the tape itself: in the closing summary the host says "140 net revenue retention." Hall's actual figure, given minutes earlier, was 103–104%. The 93% gross retention figure matches in both places.

What happened after the tape

Hall ran Bynder for about another year. In October 2019 the company announced Bert van der Zwan — a software veteran of WebEx, Twinfield and Onguard — as CEO effective November 1, 2019, with Hall stepping back from day-to-day leadership. On March 2, 2022, Bynder promoted Bob Hickey, its COO and a company leader since 2018, to chief executive — the role he still holds.

On December 20, 2022, Bynder announced a majority investment from Thomas H. Lee Partners, with THL buying out Insight Partners' stake; the deal closed in early 2023. Neither side disclosed terms — dollar figures attached to the deal elsewhere are unconfirmed, so we do not repeat them — but the announcement described a business at $100 million ARR with 600 employees and nearly 4,000 brand customers. GetLatka's database records a $600 million valuation on the round.

Two stale entries on GetLatka's live company page are worth flagging openly: it still lists van der Zwan as Bynder's CEO, though Hickey has held the job since March 2022, and it credits this transcript to van der Zwan rather than to Hall.

"I haven't done a lot of things I regretted. It's more that I'd look back and say: I should have done that sooner. Acting sooner rather than later outweighs making mistakes every now and then." — Chris Hall, November 2018

Hall was 39 at the taping, re-reading Jason Fried's Getting Real, and named Amplitude his favorite tool for running the business. For Bynder's current figures, see the Bynder company profile.