How AtomBeam Technologies CEO Charles Yeomans grew AtomBeam Technologies to $175.7K revenue and 2 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest it is charles yeomans he's the ceo of two technology firms and ceo at a financial services firm he was also a key architect of two of the nation's largest insurance brokerages he was an investment banker at naval intel and an enable intelligence officer and has an a b from kenyan college and an mba from stanford now building adambeamtech.com software increases iot bandwidth by 4x charles you're ready to take it to the top i am all right so just be clear your software helps people increase their bandwidth is that accurate yes that's absolutely right how does it work so uh essentially it's this that we take a really old idea which is the use of code books and we combine that with some pretty fancy math that's mit level stuff along with machine learning and what we do by doing that we're able to take advantage of the fact that you see a lot of patterns in these little these little files that machines generate iot files but we see instead of one like compression does we look in thousands and because of that and because of our use of code books we can take we make a piece of software that is small light ultra fast 400 times faster than compression and it will work on the tiniest little files as you can imagine like under 10 bytes and if you were to try to apply compression to that you would find it would make them bigger consequently because we're super fast and we reduce it on an average of 75 percent we get a an average of four times more bandwidth simply with software so we can take your existing network and quadruple its capacity interesting now what do people pay uh you on average per month to use this technology oh it varies tremendously because the uses are so varied if you were to talk about somebody um using it say to over satellites um they might be if they're for example they were paying um 10 000 a month they might be paying us a couple thousand dollars but they're also avoiding paying 40 000 that they would be paying if they didn't use our stuff so it's a pretty good deal so your sweet spots i know you have a big range but your sweet spot might be 5 000 bucks a month something like that yeah but i mean i got to tell you that this the companies that are either using it or considering using it are extremely large i mean we're talking fortune 100 size and they are talking about in many cases deploying it on a huge number of uh machines and so is that how you upsell that's why your price was upside it's based off number of machines yeah it is so it's really you know it on a on a per machine basis it's either pennies or a dollar or something it's really small but the i i'm talking about like like a mate like we just want to uh prove a concept in a in a competition in sweden with saab saab makes uh military aircraft they make uh all sorts of other defenses how many machines would they deploy on day one um well they they are just they're just getting started but they you know it'll probably be hundreds of airplanes many other machines that it's like think of it this way we are how machines can communicate any machine can communicate more effectively with other machines no i understand that charles what i'm trying to understand is when someone's going to pay you over a million bucks a year is that because they're installing it's on over a million machines yeah maybe not a million machines but yeah um a lot i would say so it's a dollar per machine per month that's sort of where you blend out yeah to say that's a reasonable approximation okay it's going to vary a lot depends on the use but yes that's fair fair okay and and so give me the backstory here when did you launch the company uh the end of 2017 20 and you were sold founder or no no i had a co-founder uh ali ashgar riyahi who is a technology uh founder and you guys just say did you guys just say you know what we're going to stick right down the middle and be fair we'll just put it 50 50 or did you split equity differently oh we split it up it was pretty close to 50 50 after um you know they consider we the money that came in and all that uh so were you fronting a bunch of the money the startup capital um most of it came from um uh private investors um and we've also done a crowdfunding round so oh i see so it was like maybe you have 40 percent he has 40 and then investors own whatever 20 percent so we no we own much less than that because the investors have come in you know for you know four over four million now uh got it when did you do that round um the last round uh we did the crowdfunding round closed in um september and how much was that for uh that was two and a half two point six million just okay what platform did you use to do that start engine ah yeah we love howard great platform what evaluation did you set i forget what a structure is there a capper evaluation there was a cap and a on a convertible note and the cap was 10. okay got it cap was it that that's post well it's a cap yeah so it'll convert later um are you looking at raising equity now so that would actually convert or no yeah we are um we we you know we're we're approaching a point at which we're really going to rap and uh so the thing is think of it this way if if one satellite company and we have a big satellite company is late stage of incorporating it once they deploy then satellite data and bandwidth is a commodity if it's one provider is providing satellite bandwidth at price x uh minus and well everybody is at price x and they're at x minus 10 say then boom everybody else has to use it or they're way behind because we are the same thing as launching a bunch of new satellites so understood big-time dramatic effect of when you're talking about a commodity think about selling west texas intermediate crude everybody sells it for price whatever the price is but if suddenly somebody sells it for 20 less a barrel then everybody will buy that understood so just you said you raised 4 million 2.6 was equity crowdfunding where'd the other 1.4 come from accredited private investors um um wealthy individuals that sort of thing so would you call that like your pre-seed before the equity crowdfund yeah i think that's fair okay got it interesting how did they feel about the crowdfunding i mean that's a lot of extra people you have to deal with in an equity crowdfunding most of them were okay with it i would say they were all okay with it um i i think they were fascinated because it's such a new thing and people aren't used to it and uh and all that so you know i would say that overall you know it would everyone was very supportive mm-hmm very cool so you go into 2017 you get your first customers on you get some capital to build the mvp how many customers are now serving today uh let's see who are well you know we're in really in poc mode with with all of them right now including the department of defense uh so you know how many pocs do you have out and are they paid uh some are paid um uh let's see um one two three so there's about four that are very active and there's uh two or three more that aren't as active okay so when you say four are active four have paid for the poc uh no uh too uh paid got it how do you get the other two that aren't paying to start paying yeah that's a fair point um i think uh part of it is we need to ask uh but part of it is that um you know we you know i mean part of it is you say okay the process we're undertaking with customer x with this a big satellite company is they're putting engineering effort in we're putting engineering effort in it's not like it's lopsided one way or another once it's up and running we're going to they're going to add a surcharge on to everybody who uses our stuff and we're going to split the revenue so it's almost kind of a joint effort to get customers that we both are undertaking is different from an end user say talk to me more about your team how many folks full time um full time is right around 14 at the moment 14. how many engineers um [Music] seven seven okay so heavy engineering which which makes sense here and um tell me a little bit more about sort of like next steps right so you raised 2.6 on 10. you mentioned you're are you looking at raising the net equity around now um we are not officially yet um but uh we're trying to get um a couple of accounts closed uh and then yeah jump into the equity we're getting a lot of interest from i get called by venture guys a lot and make you nervous though that you're so deluded already pre-rev and your pre-revenue of course i mean how can i manage that you you just do the best you can you do it at you know like our next round will be at a significantly higher valuation for example um and uh you know certainly yeah i'm not arguing that you know we you know took a fair bit of dilution but you know you got to get the money or you're not going to get far what's this question who you take the money from investors who require equity or customers who require a great product yeah right now that is absolutely right and our preference not surprisingly is to take it from customers uh and we have yeah you're close it sounds like yeah given the number of big customers that you know are out there either using it confirmed that it works and now they're i get the sense that you're nervous to ask for big contracts though i sort of get the sense that you're winning yeah that's a good question yeah i mean i i i think you're right i think you know we need to get over that uh you should just look in the mirror tonight charles and just practice looking and saying uh i just practiced saying ridiculously adverse yeah exactly say say um our full pricing if you want the full suite of souls is a million dollars a year with a two-year minimum contract would you like me to send over the docusign just practice saying it over and over yeah all right so are you available you know i i cannot i would be a very bad i'd be a very bad salesperson for your product i don't know well enough but i do think this happens a lot with founders i think there's a ton of founders that undervalue the majority of founders undervalue what they've built and they're so nervous to ask for the contract value that they deserve yeah i i think you're probably right i think you know you struggle and struggle and then you get to a point and you think you know please somebody and then people start to show up and you think well you know yeah it is a really good value proposition i mean like you know we can literally save somebody 80 of what they're paying right now for something we can do all kinds of cool stuff and i'm not i'm only scraping the surface here of some of the things this thing could do when i talk about you know the 75 reduction thing but you know when you when you stand in front of so when you sit in front of somebody and you say okay this is what i i want from you guys ah you know it it's hard to you know and and so it says okay we need to get better at that and you're absolutely right and there are things that i've already thought about but you know this is inspiring me to get better about it you're totally right yeah yeah well no this is great i'm just trying to learn from you get in your head a little bit and understand the growth so far so uh equity crowdfunding you raise capital there team of 14 you think some of these four or five pocs hopefully will convert to paid do you think you can pay by the end of the year i think you know at least a couple will be um i don't know it's hard to say because sometimes they're stop and go and plus you have you know the holidays and stuff like that so i would hope so at least too how long do you have you set any end date on this in other words if this define what would what this company would look like if it is still not working a year from now where you'd say it's time to shut it down um it's not going to be that way um it really won't be that we have committed investors who are saying that they will continue to support it if we don't get out of our own way and really get some sales rolling um then yeah then we've gotta look at all sorts of things but we're not going to be sitting here a year from now with things not working and no money and we're shutting it down that won't happen all right well on that note charles let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book ah i think um i would have to say master and commander by patrick master and commander number two is there a ceo you're following or studying um yeah that's a good question um [Music] most of the ceos i've followed in the past was back when i was a banker and i had some ceos that i thought were just terrific and i still consult with them occasionally name one um sure um mike well i call him shooter mike shoot is his name mike shoot very cool yes number h-u-t-e s-h-u-t good uh number uh number three what's your favorite online tool for bill or the one that you use the most oh that i use personally yep um um i use it's pretty mundane i i use a compression for pdfs that it's called sagia i mean it's like i mean you've said the most frequent and that's it you know so number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night ah well real sleep or just you know please average sleep yeah it's probably i probably get a good seven plus i mean okay in charles situation married single kiddos uh uh all of the above except single but you know how many kids uh two um one is a senior in college and the other is a senior in boarding school in new hampshire and charles how old are you i'm 65. last question something you wishing you when you were 20. there's a long list um i think the most important thing is to go in with your eyes open and associate yourself with the best possible people and be honest with them and make sure they're honest with you guys there you have it uh adam beam tech again helping you do do compression more effectively we got four or five pocs out there right now plenty of capital to work with uh they've raised they just raised a bunch on a crowd funding um campaign again with the goal here of increasing your iot bandwidth team of 14 people looking to scale bring on some more engineers we'll see what happens next year hopefully they convert some of these pocs into real paid customers as they price per machine all right thanks charles for taking us to the top yep many thanks nathan thanks for your time one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any 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