SEON Has Never Raised a Price. Net Retention Is Close to 200%

In December 2021, SEON’s API was hit more than 90 million times. Tamás Kádár charges four to eight cents a call, bills in arrears, and has never raised the price since the company started.

That combination — usage pricing, no commitment, no price increases — produces a net dollar retention figure he puts at close to 200%.

The company started with a fraud problem of its own

Kádár and his co-founder Bence launched a crypto exchange while at university and got hit with fraud. There was no off-the-shelf answer they could use.

We tried to solve the problem ourselves, but we couldn’t find an official solution. We have decided to develop a tool in-house and then pivot it into SEON.

The product works from a single data point — an email address or a phone number — and associates the digital profiles attached to it. Customers send that data point to the API, get enriched data back, and make their own decision. The named customers span neobanks (Revolut, Nubank), subscriptions (Patreon), online gambling, online lending and buy-now-pay-later.

The gateway partners bring volume but not revenue concentration. Kádár is clear that the long tail arriving through payment gateways is not where the money is: “the majority of the revenue and the API cost comes from bigger businesses,” and those come direct.

The pricing decision

Four to eight cents per API call, post-paid like an AWS bill, no credits purchased in advance.

This is why it’s so friction free, so we always post-bill our clients so they don’t have to top up anything. They can just use the system.

Asked whether the price has moved up or down market over time, the answer is neither: “it’s always been like that and we’ve never raised prices since the beginning.” The average contract lands around $55,000 a year — roughly $4,500 a month — and nobody is committed to it.

Revenue growth = customer growth × customer’s own volume growthWith usage pricing and no commitments, both halves are outside SEON’s control — and both were running hot in 2021.

How 200% net retention is actually built

Kádár puts gross revenue churn at about 5% a year, and is specific about what causes it.

We don’t see businesses switching from us to other tools. What you see is they cease to exist, usually due to some business continuity issues.

Latka reassembles the arithmetic on air: 5% gross churn against roughly 200% net dollar retention means expansion around 105%. SEON’s existing customers, in other words, more than doubled their spend over the year without a single price change.

Some of that is passive — customers processing more transactions. Some of it is deliberate. The customer success team runs a bonus scheme the chief commercial officer introduced shortly before the interview, and Kádár pulls up the model live rather than guess at the numbers.

• The floor is a 2% net expansion uplift — measured month over month against the previous month’s base.
• Commission scales with the uplift — roughly the same percentage as the expansion delivered, so 2% expansion pays 2%, 5% pays 5%.
• It recurs — paid monthly, for around a year on the expanded revenue rather than as a one-off.

It’s a new scheme, so — but actually it works very well, so I can recommend to all the startup founders out there.

The revenue line

At the time of the recording SEON was doing about $900,000 a month and had not yet crossed a million — “not yet, that’s very close.” Latka annualises it to a $10.8 million run rate. A year earlier it had been about a third of that, roughly $300,000 a month.

The customer base almost doubled over the same period, which means the growth came from both halves at once: new logos and existing accounts hitting the API harder. The GetLatka profile carries $10.8M for the date of this conversation, sourced from what Kádár says here.

The Series B he is in the middle of raising

SEON had raised $13 million to that point: a $500,000 seed at formation, a $1 million bridge in 2019, and a €10 million round in 2021 that funded offices in London, Austin and Jakarta. The Series A sold 10–20% at a post-money valuation he says was close to, but not over, $100 million.

He is raising again, and unusually willing to talk about the target: $60–80 million, at a valuation he hopes is six to eight times the A, with dilution held to the standard 15–20%. The market context he cites for that is the giveaway about when this conversation happened.

What we see on the market today is quite insane. Valuations are multiplied — a multiplier of 40 to 80.

Latka supplies a comparable from the same weeks: Cognism, around $25 million of revenue and roughly doubling, raising at a $436 million valuation. In January 2022, a fraud-prevention business at a $10.8 million run rate with 200% net retention could reasonably expect that arithmetic to apply to it too.

Where the money goes

Not to sales. The plan Kádár describes is to add almost a hundred engineers to the Budapest headquarters, which holds all R&D and product. The company had 140 people at the time, about 70 of them engineers, with roughly 40 across the commercial org — ten quota-carrying business development managers, a similar number of SDRs, and a customer success team being recruited into.

A company that grows because its customers grow does not need to double its sales force. It needs the API to keep working when the volume doubles again.

Asked what he wishes he had known at twenty — he is 27 at the time of the recording, and pushes back on the premise before answering — Kádár lands on the one thing a bootstrapped-then-venture-backed founder learns late.

Investing in acquisition is more important than I would have thought back then. But yeah, it’s a journey, we’re all learning, right?

Sources Tamás Kádár’s interview with Nathan Latka, recorded 26 January 2022; revenue, headcount and funding rows from the GetLatka SEON profile.