Upfluence ARR: Kevin Creusy Corrected Our $9M Math to $4M SaaS Plus $2M Agency

The old version of this post said Upfluence hit $9 million in ARR. The tape it was based on says otherwise. In the December 2018 interview, Latka host Nathan Latka multiplied the roughly 1,000 customers co-founder Kevin Creusy had cited by their $9,000 all-years average contract value and floated $9 million ARR. Creusy first called that "generally accurate," then raised "a few other factors," and when Latka asked again whether ARR was in the $9 million range, he corrected him: "We're closer to six." That six was the whole company, agency included, not SaaS ARR. Asked whether it was pure SaaS, Creusy split it: "There is agency revenue about $2,000,000 and ARR and SaaS is 4,000,000." So Upfluence's ARR was about $4 million, and total revenue, SaaS plus agency services, about $6 million. The $9 million was host arithmetic, not the company's claim, and Creusy explained part of the gap: one license can be shared by, in his example, 16 subsidiaries, which the company counts as one customer but 16 users. We're correcting the record here, including our own previous headline, which called the $6 million ARR.

Upfluence ARR in December 2018: $4M SaaS, about $6M with the agency

Creusy told Latka that new customers were paying close to $30,000 a year, well above the roughly $9,000 average across all of the company's years: the average deal, he said, had been "growing really a lot this year," and customers who signed two years earlier "would have had a much better deal." The smallest contract Upfluence had ever sold was about $4,000 a year; the largest, a little more than $150,000. The SaaS line had passed $100,000 in MRR only about twelve months earlier. On our arithmetic, that is a $1.2 million run rate growing to $4 million ARR (about $333,000 a month) in a year, a little more than threefold. His target for 2019 was $8 million in ARR from software licenses alone, with the company as a whole "a little higher." That was a goal when he said it, not a result.

The customer count deserves the same care. Creusy's 1,000 was the tally for "the entire company over five years," a span that takes in the agency years, and the company's own September 2018 funding release said that since launching its SaaS offering it had "served over 500 clients worldwide." So the 1,000 is best read as a cumulative figure, not a count of paying software accounts in December 2018.

Note what Creusy did when handed a bigger number than he'd earned: after a first "generally accurate," he talked the host down, and Latka thanked him on air for "correcting me." 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 it as "a tech company five years ago," he said, and Upfluence's September 2018 release and its about page both give 2013 as the founding year. But at the time, influencer marketing "wasn't even a keyword on Google," Creusy said, and nobody wanted to 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.

2016 is when the software launched, not the company. Creusy recalled the first software contract as June 2016; the company's 2018 release dates the launch of its SaaS offering to October 2016. Creusy, who had been CEO until then, asked his co-founders to take over his job, give him a budget and send him to New York, where he arrived alone, to start the software division, "a startup inside the startup." By the December 2018 interview, he said, the software business was two and a half years old. The 2018 release quotes Vivien Garnès as CEO. Today Upfluence's about page lists both Creusy and Garnès as co-founder and co-CEO.

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

Arriving in New York on his own, Creusy hired his first American salesperson through a job posting: a former Shakespeare in the Park actor who, by late 2018, was SVP managing the sales team worldwide. Creusy sold alongside him in the early months of the software's recurring revenue, on the view that you cannot hand off a job you can't do yourself.

The structure he described on tape was unusually specific. New reps get about five days of training, then three months as trainees on smaller-value calls. A junior, meaning under a year in, sells $250,000 to $300,000 of new ARR a year; a senior sells about $500,000. Base pay, he said, is about a third to a fourth of that, and he agreed with Latka's summary of one fourth of quota. Calendar booking was fully automated: reps arrived each morning to eight or nine pre-booked demos and converted about 10% of the people they spoke to into paying customers. More than 90% of new customers found Upfluence online, through channels he listed as CPC, AdWords and lead nurturing, rather than through the agency arm. Of the 62 or so employees at the time, 25 in New York and the rest in Paris, elsewhere in France and Switzerland, he put 16 to 20 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, "about a fourth" of it, and Creusy said a client is bringing cash in after the fourth month. CAC ran lower for smaller customers but stayed around that ratio; he agreed with Latka that a customer pays back at any deal size, correcting the host's example of a $1,000 contract to "more like 5,000" at the low end.

Retention was the weak spot, and the earlier version of this post got it backwards, crediting a ~75% net revenue retention rate to "a focus on customer success and expansion." On tape, Creusy called it what it was. Upfluence was losing 2% to 3% of revenue a month, net: expansion roughly offset contraction within accounts, so the loss came from customers leaving outright. When Latka suggested net revenue retention was about 100%, Creusy answered "No. No. No. We are about 70%," then "70 to 75%." The two figures agree: losing 2% to 3% a month compounds to keeping roughly 69% to 78% of revenue over a year. Many buyers were testing influencer marketing for the first time and moved on once the experiment ended. Churn was "a little higher than most SaaS company you would have," he admitted, and fixing it was "one of our key focus for 2019." Retention of 70% to 75% means the existing base shrinks by a quarter or more every year; Upfluence was growing anyway because new customers came in 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 first round, a Series A that Creusy placed "six, seven months" before the interview. He called it "$4,000,000" on tape. The company announced the round on September 4, 2018, about three months before the interview, at $3.6 million, led by ISAI with French Partners participating; Maddyness, reporting it the day before, described it as the first raise after five years of bootstrapping. We'll take the documented $3.6 million over the rounded tape figure. An earlier version of this post also counted a $340,000 seed round from 2015, taken from our database, for $3.9 million in total. The company and the guest both describe the Series A as its first raise, and our profile no longer lists that seed.

After the raise, Creusy said, the company was burning $100,000 to $200,000 a month, depending on the month, and had two to four years of runway. On our arithmetic, $3.6 million alone covers 18 to 36 months at that burn; he did not say what else went into his estimate.

Creusy also said the company was looking into venture debt "as we speak," with acquisitions and expansion in mind, and that it was "a very happy Silicon Valley Bank customer," the first place it would look. That was true in December 2018; SVB failed in March 2023, so the earlier version of this post praising SVB in the present tense on a 2025 dateline was doubly wrong. We found no company announcement or press report of a venture debt facility or a later equity round, and the only funding our profile lists is the $3.6 million Series A.

Where Upfluence is now

Upfluence has not given Latka a revenue figure since this interview, and the figures our profile shows for later years are estimates, not reported numbers. GetLatka estimates put it at $11.8 million in December 2023 and $21.5 million in October 2024; LeadIQ's estimate, which is the profile's headline, is $35 million for November 2024. They disagree with each other (the $35 million is dated a month after the $21.5 million), so read them as a range of outside guesses, not a growth curve. An earlier version of this post called the $35 million the company's most recent reported number and drew a sixfold-growth story from it. That was wrong.

The only public filings we found are the French company's. UPFLUENCE SAS, registered in Lyon, reported revenue of €2.05 million for 2018 and €2.05 million for 2019 in its public accounts, and those accounts have been partly confidential since 2020. They cover the French company alone, so they do not measure the whole business: they sit well below the roughly $6 million Creusy gave for the company in 2018.

The 2017 and 2018 dollar rows are Creusy's own figures; the euro rows are statutory accounts for the French company; the 2023 and 2024 rows are estimates Upfluence has not confirmed. The $9M figure from this post's original headline appears nowhere in this table because the guest rejected it on tape.