Upfluence ARR: Kevin Creusy Corrected Our $9 Million Math to $6 Million on Tape

The old version of this post said Upfluence hit $9 million in ARR. The tape it was based on says the opposite. On December 5, 2018, Latka host Nathan Latka multiplied Upfluence's 1,000 customers by their $9,000 historical average contract value and floated $9 million ARR — and co-founder Kevin Creusy corrected him on the spot: "We're closer to six." Total revenue was about $6 million — roughly $4 million in pure SaaS ARR plus about $2 million in agency services. The $9 million was host arithmetic, not the company's claim, and Creusy explained the gap: some licenses are shared across as many as 16 subsidiaries, so customer-count math overstates revenue. We're correcting the record here.

Upfluence's real ARR in December 2018: $4M SaaS, $6M total

Creusy told Latka in December 2018 that new deals were closing at around $30,000 a year, up sharply from the $9,000 average across the company's five-year customer history — the cheapest contract ever sold was about $4,000 a year, the largest in the high six figures, "a little more than $150,000." The SaaS line had passed $100,000 in MRR only about twelve months earlier, meaning software revenue roughly quadrupled in a year, from $100K to about $330K a month. His stated target for 2019 was $8 million in ARR from software licenses alone.

Note what Creusy did when handed a bigger number than he'd earned: he talked the host down. That correction is why this post now carries different figures than its original headline.

Founded 2013, not 2016 — and three years as an agency first

The previous version of this post said Upfluence "emerged in 2016." That's wrong, and the tape explains where the confusion comes from. Creusy and three co-founders started the company as a tech business around 2013 — the live GetLatka profile also lists it as founded 2013. But in 2013, influencer marketing "wasn't even a keyword on Google," Creusy said, and nobody would buy the software. So for three years the founders ran what was effectively an influencer marketing agency powered by their own technology, building that service business from zero to $3 million in revenue.

June 2016 is when the SaaS product launched, not the company. Creusy — who had been CEO until that point — asked his co-founders to take over his job, hand him a budget, and send him to New York alone to build the software division from scratch. By the December 2018 taping, that division was two and a half years old. Today Creusy is co-founder and co-CEO, per his own LinkedIn and Crunchbase profiles.

The sales machine: a Shakespeare in the Park actor as SVP

Arriving in New York knowing nobody, Creusy hired his first American salesperson through a LinkedIn job posting — a former Shakespeare in the Park actor who, by late 2018, was SVP managing the entire worldwide sales team. Creusy sold alongside him to the first $100K in MRR: "You cannot delegate something if you can't do it yourself."

The structure he described on tape was unusually specific. New reps get five days of training, then three months as trainees on smaller-value calls. Juniors carry a $250,000–$300,000 new-ARR quota in year one; seniors carry $500,000; base salary runs about a quarter of quota. Calendar booking was fully automated — reps arrived each morning to eight or nine pre-booked demos, converting about 10% of the people they spoke to into paying customers. Around 90% of new customers found Upfluence online through paid channels like AdWords, not through the agency arm. Of the 62 employees at the time — 25 in New York, the rest across Paris, Lyon, and Switzerland — 16 were in sales and marketing.

Unit economics: cheap to acquire, hard to keep

The acquisition math was strong. Customer acquisition cost was about $8,000 against a $30,000 ACV — payback in roughly four months — and around $5,000 for smaller accounts, profitable at any deal size Creusy quoted.

Retention was the weak spot, and the earlier version of this post got it exactly backwards, framing a ~75% net revenue retention rate as "a focus on customer success and expansion." On tape, Creusy called it what it was. Upfluence was losing 2–3% of revenue per month net — expansion roughly offset contraction within accounts, but customers cancelling outright dragged annual net revenue retention down to 70–75%. Many buyers were testing influencer marketing for the first time and churned once the experiment ended. "It's a little higher than most SaaS companies," he admitted, and fixing it was "one of our key focuses for 2019." A 75% NRR means the existing base shrinks a quarter every year; Upfluence was growing anyway because new-customer acquisition was fast and cheap.

Funding: bootstrapped to cash-flow positive, then a Series A

Upfluence bootstrapped for roughly five years and was cash-flow positive when it raised its Series A about six or seven months before the interview — mid-2018. Creusy called it "$4 million" on tape; the January 2018 press release and the GetLatka profile both put it at $3.6 million, led by ISAI, and the profile adds a $340K seed round from 2015 for $3.9 million total raised. We'll take the documented $3.6 million over the rounded tape figure. Post-raise, the company was deliberately burning $100,000–$120,000 a month, giving it two to four years of runway.

Creusy also said the company was actively exploring venture debt for acquisitions and expansion, and mentioned being a happy Silicon Valley Bank customer. That was true in December 2018; SVB collapsed in March 2023, so the earlier version of this post praising SVB in the present tense on a 2025 dateline was doubly wrong. There's no public record of Upfluence taking a venture debt facility or raising further equity — total funding still stands at $3.9 million.

Where Upfluence is now

The company kept compounding without new capital. The live GetLatka profile reports $35 million in revenue as of November 2024 — revised up from a $21.5 million figure reported a month earlier — with an estimated $11.8 million for 2023, 127 employees, an average ACV of $35,000, and still around 1,000 customers. That last pairing is worth pausing on: flat customer count, roughly 6x revenue since 2018 means the average customer pays far more — consistent with the move upmarket Creusy described in 2018, when new deals at $30K were already triple the historical average. The 2023 and October-2024 figures are marked as estimates or since-revised on the profile, so treat the $35M as the company's most recent reported number rather than an audited one.

One more correction, this time to our own database: the profile currently credits the December 2018 interview to "Upfluence CEO Anne-Julie Gros." The tape is unambiguous — the guest is Kevin Creusy, and Gros's own listed title on the same page is senior project manager, not CEO. We've flagged it.

The $9M figure from this post's original headline appears nowhere in this table because the guest rejected it on tape.