Movable Ink Revenue: How Vivek Sharma Passed $40M ARR on One Pricing Axis

Vivek Sharma, who co-founded Movable Ink in 2010 and was its CEO at the time, told Nathan Latka that the company had “passed about 40,000,000 in annual recurring revenue” several months before their conversation, and that it was “still growing very strongly even past this $40,000,000 ARR.” He put the money raised to get there at “about $14,000,000”: about $9.3 million from roughly five years earlier, plus about $5 million added some six months before the interview as a small note from inside investors. He would not give an overall growth rate: “We are not doubling year over year, but we’re growing very strongly.”

The company’s later numbers, including the $100 million in ARR it said it had crossed by April 2022, are set out with their dates in the section after the interview. The tape itself does not say when it was recorded. Latka’s YouTube channel published the video on December 14, 2018, so every interview figure below describes the company at the time of the interview, at some point before that date.

Movable Ink revenue at the time of the interview

The $40 million came up almost in passing. Latka asked whether Movable Ink had bootstrapped or raised money, and Sharma answered with the funding and the ARR milestone in the same breath: “We have raised capital. We’ve been very capital efficient.” Latka then divided it out loud, calling it a $40 million “run rate today, which puts you at about 3,300,000 per month.” That monthly figure is Latka’s arithmetic on Sharma’s annual number, not something Sharma said.

Growth is where the conversation needs a close reading. Sharma would not give an overall rate: “I can’t break out exact numbers about overall GAAP revenue and ARR growth, but we’re still growing very strongly.” What he offered instead was narrower. Over the previous eighteen months the company had reorganised its sales teams and started going to market with partners, and “especially on the net new side, the new completely new logos, we’ve had triple digit growth in bringing in new logos and revenue growth.” He tied that number to new customers, not to the business as a whole.

Latka pressed, asking whether Movable Ink was still doubling. “We are not doubling year over year, but we’re growing very strongly,” Sharma said. Latka tried “High double digits?” and got only “We’re doing well.” Latka then offered a range of his own and repeated it in his closing recap. Sharma never agreed to it, so it is not his number. The tape supports three things about growth: not doubling, “growing very strongly”, and triple-digit growth in new logos.

One price: a CPM on the email open

As Sharma described them, Movable Ink’s customers were big consumer brands sitting on data (“There’s APIs, data, CSV files”) that they struggled to turn into anything visual. A marketer configures what he called “intelligent creative” and embeds it in an email. “And so when that email opens up, our code fires, and we’re able to generate the perfect visually compelling content at that moment of open.” It was, he said, “a pure play SaaS model,” with no on-premise version.

Pricing it, he said, “is probably the thing that we debated the most and argued about the most and tried to figure out.” His first attempt was an engineer’s answer. “I was a former engineer, and I think that was to the detriment of figuring out a pricing model,” he said. “So I had this crazy model early on that was looking at square pixels. I’m like, hey, if someone’s using up more real estate inside the email, they should pay us more. And it was ridiculously complex and it was just a dumb idea.”

“So the best thing was what is the convention? What are our customers used to paying for similar types of things?”

Vivek Sharma, co-founder, Movable Ink

The convention belonged to the email service providers his customers already paid, which had “established a framework for CPM based upon email sends.” Movable Ink copied the shape and changed the unit: “of course we can’t measure sends. We only show up when an email gets opened. So it’s CPM on email open.” Higher volumes earned a discount (“there’s some discounting that happens as you go into higher volume usage”), and that was the whole meter.

Price = CPM × emails openedThe email service providers metered sends. Movable Ink’s code runs only when a message is opened, so the open is the unit it can count, with volume discounts on top.

Latka asked whether there was a second axis underneath, such as seats on the marketing team. “You know, it’s basically that one axis,” Sharma said. New products were due within weeks, he added, with “different rate cards in different conditions, but the core concept still remains the same.” That was a plan at the time of the interview, not a launch the tape records. For the menu of alternatives he passed over, GetLatka’s primer on SaaS pricing lays them out.

Land with one use case, expand from there

A single meter with no seat count let the first contract be small. “We can start small. We don’t have to go take over their entire email program,” Sharma said. “We can land, come up with one or two compelling use cases in the first three months, get them up and running, really nail it, and then start to scale that out into doing far more meaningful things.”

The customers he named were large: “So most of our customers are large enterprises. So we’ve got brands like Starbucks, Nike, Hilton, The Gap, American Express using us.” Asked what a customer pays on average, he gave a range instead.

About $30,000a year: the floor for enterprise brands, per Sharma. There was a separate mid-market tier, and at the top “companies that pay north of $1,000,000 a year.”

The customer count came from Latka’s introduction, which credited Movable Ink with 500 consumer brands. Sharma confirmed that all of them paid: “No freemium. We got rid of that years ago.” He also said “lots” of companies paid several million dollars a year. Read that loosely. About $40 million of ARR across roughly 500 brands works out to about $80,000 per account on average, so accounts paying several million each can only be a small group.

Retention: gross “pretty average”, net “north of 110%”

Latka’s next question assumed churn was solved (“You wouldn’t be able to stretch those dollars far if churn was an issue”) and asked how Sharma measured it. Sharma started with the unit. “What we like to say is we are an ARR business, not an MRR business. Pretty much all of our contracts are on an annual basis,” he said, some of them multi-year. “So you can’t really look at churn on a month over month basis because it’s not being intellectually honest.” Movable Ink tracked it by cohort instead: take the accounts that started in a given month, see how many are up for renewal, and count how many it keeps.

Sharma’s own rule was to keep the two numbers apart: “So you’ve got to treat both of those independently, otherwise you can mask a very leaky bucket and gross retention problems if you’re only focused on net churn.” A blended net number is where a churn problem hides, which is the point of GetLatka’s explainer on revenue churn. He conceded that the gross line was ordinary and credited the land-and-expand motion for the net.

About $14 million raised, and a note he wasn’t spending

Sharma framed the funding against his peers. “Most companies that have gotten to this point, you know, they’ve raised 80, 90, 100 million dollars in capital,” he said. “We’ve only raised about $14,000,000 in venture capital and it’s been a long time since I’ve gone out there raised capital.” His preferred source was simpler: “our favorite source of capital, our favorite investor are our customers who pay us on time.”

The $14 million did not all come in at once. Latka assumed it had all been raised more than five years earlier, and Sharma corrected him in the next line: “We raised about 9,300,000 five years ago and we added about $5,000,000 to it maybe six months ago.” The newer money was “a small note with some inside investors,” and when Latka asked whether a venture debt firm was involved, Sharma said “not a venture capital, some inside investors.” Nor was it being spent: “Not even spending it, we just wanted a little more on our balance sheet given we’re a much larger business than where we were a long time ago.”

Latka asked whether the note was a bridge to a higher valuation. “No,” Sharma said. “It’s purely we’ve been in a ten year bull market, and we feel really good about the business and where things are going. But if there is a dip that happens, we’d rather have the money on our balance sheet when we don’t need it.” The aim was “enough of a war chest to be able to make the right decisions and not have an overreaction.”

Two more facts complete the balance sheet. Movable Ink was not cash-flow positive: “We are not cash flow positive. We could be, but we’re very close.” And it had bank lines alongside the equity: “We’ve got some facilities with Silicon Valley Bank for, you know, a revolver in place and things like that.” The type of facility had changed during the previous year. Asked whether the new one meant repaying a percentage of monthly receipts, Sharma answered only that “It’s an MRR based facility” and “Recurring revenue is tied to, yes, not GAAP revenue.”

The public record runs a little higher than Sharma’s count. TechCrunch reported in May 2013 that Movable Ink had raised an $11 million Series B led by Intel Capital, after a $1.3 million Series A in 2011, for $12.3 million in all. Sharma’s “about 9,300,000” is about $3 million lower. Silicon Valley Bank was among the participants TechCrunch listed in that round, but none of the sources here splits the $11 million between equity and debt, so the gap stays open. His own count held steady, though. In August 2020 he told TechCrunch that, with a new $30 million Series C, Movable Ink had raised a total of $39 million. That leaves about $9 million before the round, which suggests the note from inside investors was never counted as money raised.

Payback under twelve months, and a BMW

Latka asked how hard Movable Ink pushed on customer acquisition cost, offering bands of six, twelve and twenty-four months. “We haven’t had a hard target on CAC. I will say our payback periods, they are under twelve months,” Sharma said. A 5x benchmark for lifetime value to CAC came up next. The sentence “I think you’re doing really well with a 5x LTV to CAC” sits in Sharma’s turn on the transcript, though it reads like one of Latka’s benchmarks. Sharma’s claim was “We’re surpassing that by quite a bit,” and he gave no exact ratio. GetLatka’s note on the LTV to CAC ratio covers how that benchmark is usually computed.

“I used to drive a Mustang Cobra years ago and it sounds great and it’s got this big V eight, but this is the big powerful engine. What we built here is a BMW. It’s a more refined, efficient engine that we can count upon.”

Vivek Sharma, co-founder, Movable Ink

The team running that engine was, in his words, “about two fifty people”: about 180 in New York City, about 30 in San Francisco, 25 to 30 in London, about a dozen in Costa Rica, a couple in Japan and one person in Australia. Latka’s introduction said “200 plus employees”. That came from the bio, and Sharma’s own count was higher.

Asked whether Movable Ink was in acquisition talks, Sharma said, “We are not.” It had been approached before, “but every time we felt like the business is at an early stage and the potential hasn’t been realized.” Nobody had sold shares on the side either: “No one here has ever done a secondary.” He expected new product announcements within weeks and said of the next few years, “we don’t see that growth slowing down.” At the time, that was a forecast.

Since the interview

After the tape: $100M ARR, then a sale to STG

The war-chest instinct showed up again in 2020. On August 18, 2020, TechCrunch reported a $30 million Series C from Contour Venture Partners, Intel Capital and Silver Lake Waterman. Sharma, described there as founder and CEO, said that even with the new round Movable Ink had raised a total of $39 million, and that with COVID-19 it felt like “a good idea to have some dry powder on our balance sheet … if things turned south.” The company said it worked with more than 700 brands, and Sharma estimated that around 95% of its revenue still came from email marketing.

Movable Ink completed a $55 million Series D at the end of April 2022, VKTR reported on May 11, 2022. Cooley, the company’s counsel, said on May 4 that Silver Lake Waterman led the round, at a $1.3 billion pre-money valuation. The company’s announcement, reprinted by Pulse 2.0 on May 3, 2022, listed “Crossing $100 million in Annual Recurring Revenue” among its milestones, along with more than 550 employees, and put the total raised since 2010 at $97 million. That total counts the 2013 round at its announced $11 million ($1.3M + $11M + $30M + $55M = $97.3M). Counted Sharma’s way, $39 million plus $55 million, it comes to $94 million.

On June 26, 2025, Movable Ink announced a definitive agreement to be acquired by STG, a US private equity firm that invests in software. No other financial terms were disclosed. The deal was expected to close in July 2025, and the release said Sharma would remain CEO. It described a company with 600 employees that had won more than 100 new enterprise customers in the previous year. Altaroc, a fund that co-invested in Movable Ink with STG, says on its portfolio page that the company “now generates over $100 million in annual recurring revenues”. The page does not date that figure.

The leadership changed after the deal. Movable Ink’s press page lists a MediaPost story dated March 17, 2026, headlined “Change At The Top: Adam Stambleck Named CEO Of Movable Ink”. The company’s leadership page now lists Stambleck as chief executive and Sharma as founder and executive chairman.

Every row is a statement by the company, its CEO or an investor. None of the sources here gives a dated ARR figure after April 2022.

Learn sales earlier

Latka’s last question was what Sharma wished his 20-year-old self had known. The founder who once tried to price by the square pixel had an answer that fit.

“I have a computer science background. I was an engineer right out of school. I wish I had learned and taken a job that had me selling much earlier in my career. I think selling is such a valuable skill. Everyone should get some experience.”

Vivek Sharma, co-founder, Movable Ink