How Benevity CEO Andrew Abreu grew Benevity to $133M revenue and 450 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is brian de latinville he is the ceo of a company called benevity the global leader in csr and employee engagement software brian helps fortune 1000 clients reinvent corporate giving programs in a way that provides better social and business returns while simultaneously tackling the biggest struggles in the social impact landscape brian are you ready to take us to the top i will take you as high as i can how's that hey that works for me all right so for people that don't understand this space how would you kind of describe the business in a sentence or two and what is your revenue model how do you support yourself so we're probably in in the intersection of csr hr and brand so we're trying to help companies engage employees and customers around purpose meaning our business model is is uh we kind of have an api suite so that's slightly separate but the bulk of our revenue business comes from our cloud product which is an employee giving volunteering grants management kind of platform and so we have professional services revenue implementation managed services fees subscription revenue based on eligible employees and then a pizza slice uh transaction processing fee okay and if you look at kind of past just we can understand the the revenue mix the past 12 months if we look at your revenue pies a hundred percent what percent was just pure sas uh 50 okay so fairly significant yeah that's great um okay so with that in mind um let's break down the use kind of a use case a little bit more so is there a company you can talk about that uses you and specifically can you can you kind of share exactly how they use you sure uh we'll we'll pick um maybe the biggest and best program in the world is microsoft is as a client so they um they use our sas product and they call it uh microsoft gives or something so it's kind of white labeled um by different companies i think the only client that uses it and calls it benevitti is apple but so they would do their employee uh giving and volunteering and grant making through our platform and so that they get a single user experience and coherent reporting across those different sort of budget cycles okay so it's really like a report this is what i'm trying to understand though right so people are listening going wait why did they need help with that so really it's helping identify giving back opportunities reporting on what the activities look like what else yeah so i mean at its essence it's it's trying to help uh companies help people be their best selves and do that through [Music] a democratized user-centric approach to searching for and giving to charities of choice with or without corporate matching uh searching for volunteering opportunities those sorts of things got it is that a time thing or a money thing they're looking to donate you know they at microsoft they have to give 20 hours per month or it's a thousand bucks at the end of the year here's how you can donate to it it's time money and product um could be skills based volunteering around board board participation or helping uh charitable recipients of their product uh giveaways implement them those sorts of things or just paint painting a fence i mean it it depends on the individual and give me a sense i'm sure you have many different customer cohorts but just for the sake of time what would the average kind of logo or brand pay you per year to get this kind of tool just the sas just the sas component uh on average it's probably a hundred thousand ish yeah so does this mean i mean the reason i ask at that price point you really can put an inside sales team behind it you can afford to put significant touch on the sale yes i mean we're we're uh unfortunately i mean we're turning away probably 60 plus percent of our inbounds because they're too small for our deployment model so it is it is fairly high what's too small for you in terms of team size right now it's anything below 500 employees but but we tend to focus more on 5000 and above um and put put this story kind of on a timeline for me when did you launch the company we've been around since 2008 spent a couple of years building out the back end and the platform the receding entities in the various countries which is a big part of the the moat if you will in this space and then we built the cloud product in 2011 um and so we're unfettered by revenue for for the first uh few years but so how did you support yourself did you guys raise early on yeah i would i've been fortunate i had had a a a couple of uh ecwid liquidity events in in growth companies and so i i've i've funded each of the angel rounds in the early days and we avoided institutional money until our metrics were were pretty compelling yeah that's that's obviously a nice place to be there help me understand though you know your own personal capital plus investment dollars total capital on the company to date is about what uh not really um we we have a private equity investor that now owns the majority of it and oh okay when did when did that happen uh well the first the first firm came in at 2015 a firm called jmi equity and last january uh general atlantic uh came in meaningfully and and took out most of the original angels and and uh and financed a couple of small acquisitions and set us up to sort of realize the potential of this thing besides the acquisitions and paying up the early investors did any of that money go to the balance sheet or was all really secondary no there was some treasury as well oh what does that mean treasury went into the company coffers oh god different term i haven't heard that one before very good well look my my research team based off public filings i mean it looks like before this kind of happened about 38 million bucks has gone into the company i mean is that fairly accurate before ga no no with ga and jmi both those together about 38's gone in canadian yeah no that was the jmi transaction in 2015. oh i see got it it would have been you know ga was probably an a nine figure investment got it so the ga one was undisclosed the jmi one was 38 back before that yes got it fair enough that's great so which was secondary back then as well yeah so help me understand as a founder that's exited a couple companies um you know we have a lot of we have a lot of founders like you that listen to the show you know maybe had a 600 500 400 you know million ex in the past how do you decide you know many people say well listen it's great you have your own money but you shouldn't risk it if you can help it right you're backable now so so how did you really that battle in your head i mean how did you say okay now is the time to go 38 million from jmi versus keep using your own money and keep building well i mean uh for one thing we're a b corporation so that the goal in this was not necessarily um you know just the rapacious pursuit of of of another exit and profit we're really trying to scale this thing to to to make doing well by doing good more than a catchy tagline so so that did have some influence on the extent and of my willingness to use my own my own funds and we had a very supportive angel network of oil and gas folks here in calgary and and so we we uh we really wanted to wait until the capital was something of a commodity and we could choose the right fit in terms of the private equity firm around culture and strategic value and some of those sorts of things i'm not sure if that answers the question exactly no it does i think it's fair i do think i do think b corps are still kind of sexy and new for those people that don't understand how they operate can you give us a quick rundown yeah i mean it is the easiest way to think of it is it's a for-profit business that has a social mission baked into its its articles of incorporation so that it's recognizing that as a stakeholder if you will and and uh i actually have tax benefits to that no no there's there's there's no real i i i will besmirch the b corp people but there's no there's no my hope is yeah lawyers roll around here at some point i hope the designation goes away because i believe that all companies can pursue hybrid goals like that without a special designation but a lot of companies use it for marketing purposes and to point out to the world that they have a sustainability or other sort of um uh social driven agenda yeah and and so how effective have you been at kind of installing this agenda across again these fortune 1000 brands and maybe said differently you know how many customers are you serving today yeah we have about 450 uh enterprise clients that the bulk of whom are our are large uh companies there's a few sort of mid-market type companies in there and not all of them use all of our product suites so so we're interested in cross-selling and upselling and in some of the usual things but we have uh you know the metrics we we track obviously in addition to the for-profit metrics and revenue and some of those uh obvious ones we track our social impact metrics so we will distribute um around 1.2 billion dollars this year to a 150 000 global charities and that's the money that all the microsofts and the apples and everyone are kind of using you to put through to the local communities right and they're and their people so there's typically matching funds and donation currency incentives for volunteering those sorts of things very cool you're going to hate the rest of these questions...