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Valuation

$20M

2024 Revenue

$10M

Customers · 2022

10

Funding

$5.7M

Team

25

Founded

2014

Birdzi Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

Birdzi is a B2B SaaS customer intelligence platform that sells personalized marketing and promotion technology exclusively to supermarket retailers. The company's platform sits on top of existing grocery loyalty programs, using first-party transaction data and machine learning to generate six to eight individualized offers per shopper per week, replacing the traditional CPG-driven coupon model with a shopper-first personalization engine.

As of mid-2022, Birdzi serves approximately 10 grocery chain customers at an average monthly contract value of roughly $40,000, producing an annualized run rate of close to $5 million. The company reached cash flow positive status by mid-2022 after burning $150,000 per month as recently as 2019, adding nearly $2 million in ARR over the prior 24 months despite operating through the pandemic.

Founded by Shekar Raman, who serves as CEO, Birdzi has raised approximately $9.4 million in total funding across a $1 million pre-seed round in 2014, a $3.5 million seed round in 2018 at a roughly $20 million post-money valuation, and $1.2 million in convertible notes closed in 2021. The company is targeting $5 million in realized revenue as the threshold for a competitive growth equity round it expects to pursue in early 2023, at which point Raman projects a valuation of $50 million to $60 million.

Last updated

Birdzi Revenue

Birdzi was running at approximately $3 million in annualized revenue in 2019. By mid-2022, the company had added nearly $2 million in ARR over the prior 24 months, bringing its run rate to close to $5 million, based on 10 customers paying an average of $40,000 per month, or roughly $400,000 per month in aggregate.

Birdzi Revenue GrowthReported revenue / ARR over time$0$2.5M$5M$7.5M$10M$12.5M201420162018202020222024$0$3M$4.8M$10MSource: GetLatka.com interview on Jul 13, 2022 with Shekar Raman
YearMilestoneSource
2024Birdzi Hit $10m revenue in April 2024
2022Birdzi Hit $4.8m revenue in July 2022
2019Birdzi Hit $3m revenue in January 2019Watch[1]
2014Launched with $0 revenue

Raman confirmed the $400,000 monthly revenue figure when host Nathan Latka calculated it live during the interview. The average annual contract value has grown from approximately $300,000 at the time of Birdzi's 2019 appearance on the show to approximately $500,000 by mid-2022, a gain Raman attributed to consistent upselling of new platform capabilities informed equally by internal R&D and customer-identified pain points.

Looking ahead, Raman stated a target of $5 million in realized revenue for the full year 2022 as the threshold for pursuing a growth equity round. Using the approximately $2 million ARR added over 24 months as a trailing growth indicator, a GetLatka estimate for 2023 revenue would range from roughly $5.5 million on a deceleration-adjusted basis to approximately $6.5 million if the recent growth pace holds. This is a labeled estimate; Raman did not provide a 2023 revenue projection.

Birdzi Valuation, Funding Rounds

Birdzi reached a $20M valuation in 2018, set during its Seed round.

Birdzi has raised $5.7M in total funding across 3 rounds, most recently a $1.2M Convertible Note round in 2022.

Birdzi Capital Raised & ValuationCumulative capital raised and post-money valuation by roundCapital raised (cum.)Valuation$0$0$5M$1.3M$10M$2.5M$15M$3.8M$20M$5M$25M$6.3M201420152016201720182019202020212022$20MSource: GetLatka.com interview on Jul 13, 2022 with Shekar Raman
YearRoundAmountValuation% SoldSource
2022Convertible Note$1.2M--Watch[1]
2018Seed$3.5M$20M18%Watch[2]
2014Seed$1M--

Founder / CEO

Shekar Raman

CEO

Shekar Raman is the CEO and founder of Birdzi. He confirmed this title in the July 2022 interview. Raman founded the company in 2014 with the initial $1 million pre-seed raise and has led it through three funding rounds and a pivot to cash flow positive operations. He is 52 years old as of the interview date.

Volker Hauf holds the title of Chief Architect at Birdzi, according to the company's confirmed roster, though Hauf was not interviewed in this episode and no further detail about his background was discussed in the transcript. Raman's net worth was not discussed in the interview. A rough GetLatka estimate, based solely on an assumed ownership stake consistent with a founding CEO who has raised $9.4 million at a last known valuation of $20 million in 2018, would be speculative without a confirmed current valuation or ownership percentage, and is therefore not produced here.

Q&A

QuestionAnswer
What's your age?55
Favorite online tool?-
Favorite book?-
Favorite CEO?-
Advice for 20 year old self-

Customers

Birdzi had approximately 10 grocery chain customers as of mid-2022. The average monthly contract value across those customers is approximately $40,000, equating to an average annual contract value of roughly $480,000, which Latka rounded to $500,000 in his on-air summary and Raman did not dispute.

New retailers typically enter at a starting monthly contract of $10,000 to $20,000. Through upselling of additional platform capabilities over a period of roughly two years, Raman said those contracts expand to $50,000 to $60,000 per month. The platform generates six to eight personalized offers per shopper per week, delivered via email, and can execute campaigns for hundreds of thousands of shoppers within one hour. Birdzi targets supermarket chains specifically, a universe Raman described as a couple of hundred chains in the United States representing approximately $400 billion in total sales.

Birdzi serves 10 customers.

Birdzi Business Model

Birdzi operates on a monthly subscription model with a campaign-based component. Contracts are structured as recurring monthly fees that scale with the number of campaigns a retailer runs, rather than a flat per-seat or per-user fee. The company reached cash flow positive status by mid-2022, a significant shift from a monthly burn rate of $150,000 that Raman confirmed was in place as of the 2019 interview.

The company's product roadmap is split 50 percent internal innovation and 50 percent customer-informed development, a balance Raman described as central to the upsell motion that has driven average contract values from $10,000 to $20,000 per month at entry to $50,000 to $60,000 per month after expansion. With 10 customers at a $40,000 average monthly contract, implied monthly revenue is approximately $400,000, which Raman confirmed as approximately correct. Profitability beyond cash flow positive status was not discussed in detail. The total addressable market Raman cited for the promotions segment of the grocery industry is $4 billion, representing roughly 1 percent of the $750 billion U.S. grocery industry total. The broader target segment of supermarket chains accounts for approximately $400 billion in total sales across a couple of hundred chains.

Point-in-time figures shared on the GetLatka podcast, each linked to the exact moment it was said on camera.

Customers (2022)

10

Nathan Latka: I was gonna say how many customers are you working with today? About 10. Shekar Raman: About 10. Yeah.

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Average revenue per user (2022)

$40,000

Nathan Latka: So all of your customers are paying more than $40,000 a month, some paying much more? Shekar Raman: Yeah, I'd say the average is around 40.

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Annual profit (2022)

true

Shekar Raman: Right now we are cash flow positive, and I guess it's a good position to be in, but we see a lot of new opportunities come into the market, which we think will go out and raise some growth capital for.

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Birdzi Employees & Team Size

Birdzi had 28 full-time employees as of mid-2022. Of those, two hold quota-carrying sales roles. Raman described the sales motion as enterprise-oriented, with each representative expected to close two to three deals per year given the complexity and length of the grocery retail sales cycle.

Birdzi employs approximately 25 people as of 2026, up from 18 in 2023. It serves 10 customers that rely on its solutions.

Birdzi Team GrowthReported headcount over time0612182430201420162018202020222024002525Source: GetLatka.com interview on Jul 13, 2022 with Shekar Raman
YearMilestoneSource
2024Reached 25 employees (October 2024)
2023Reached 18 employees (December 2023)
2022Reached 28 employees (July 2022)Estimated
2021Reached 16 employees (December 2021)
2019Reached 22 employees (May 2019)

Frequently Asked Questions about Birdzi

What is Birdzi's revenue?

Birdzi generates $10M in revenue.

Who is the CEO of Birdzi?

The CEO of Birdzi is Shekar Raman.

How much funding does Birdzi have?

Birdzi raised $5.7M across 3 rounds.

How many employees does Birdzi have?

Birdzi has 25 employees.

Where is Birdzi headquarters?

Birdzi is headquartered in Iselin, New Jersey, United States.

Compare Birdzi to the industry

Birdzi operates across multiple industries. Browse revenue, funding, and growth data for Birdzi in each sector below.

Full Interview Transcripts

How he Doubled ACV to $480k selling niche SaaS to 10 Grocery Stores, now $4.5m in revenueJul 13, 2022

[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Shekar Raman. He's the CEO and founder of birdzi, a B2B SaaS company and industry pioneering customer intelligence platform that helps supermarket retail deliver a true supermarkets retail, sorry, deliver a true one to one automated marketing and personalization platform at scale using machine learning and other data driven technologies. Shekar, you ready to take us to the top? [00:20] >> Yes, I am, Nathan. Good to be back on. [00:22] I know. It was 2019 last time you were on. So this is great. Just to be But clear, those that are just learning about birdzi, are you only selling to grocery stores? [00:31] >> Currently, yes. We have been asked by a number of other retailers about platform will work for them, but maybe towards the beginning of next year is when we'll try to transition into maybe C stores. [00:41] Okay. So I go into a grocery store, if they're using birdzi, are they going to get my phone number or email? Or how do they get that? Is that at the checkout when the people go, Hey, do you want to give me your email address to get updated offers and stuff? [00:51] >> No. Typically, work with retailers that already have loyalty programs, so they already have loyalty programs implemented, and our platform kind of goes on top of that. So we take first party customer identified data where you put in your loyalty number or your phone number so we know exactly what you bought in transaction. And we use that data to then track customer behavior trends and then figure out what offers to send you. [01:16] I see. Okay. And what might one of those offers sound like? Know, 10% off toothpaste if I come back before Wednesday? [01:22] >> Yeah. So the unique thing with the birdzi platform is typically the way the promotion industry works is it's CPG driven. So the brands will say, hey, here's what I want to put out coupons on, or here's what I want to get deals on. And then the retailers essentially will try to identify the audience that works best for those offers. What we did is we flipped the equation. We said, let's start with the shopper. Let's look [01:46] >> at Nathan. Let's look at his purchasing behavior and what will get him back into the store. Forget about what's on sale. Let's see what will get him back in the store. Is it 10% off sushi, 10% off pizza, whatever it is, let's create a promotion tailored around his personal experience and interests, and then figure out how to get that funded down the road. [02:06] Very interesting. Okay. So what are grocery stores paying you on average per month to use this platform? [02:13] >> Oh, it depends on the number of campaigns they run, but it can run anywhere from $40,000 to $60,000 a month. [02:19] Okay. [02:19] >> What they typically pay us. [02:22] So all of your customers are paying more than $40,000 a month, some paying much more? [02:26] >> Yeah, I'd say the average is around 40. [02:28] Average is 40. Okay, fair enough. That, you know, this is a very much than an enterprise motion, right? $100,000 ACV. You have a big No, sales [02:38] >> not right now. It's just a couple of people. Because, you know, the industry, while it's big from an addressable perspective, and the grocery industry is about $750,000,000,000 but there's only a couple of 100 supermarket chains that are really in our target market, right? And so they represent about $400,000,000,000 in sales in total. And what we're really going after is 1% of that is our truly addressable market, a $4,000,000,000 market. So we're going after a $4,000,000,000 TAM, [03:07] >> which is really where the promotions industry is, right? Where coupons and sale and your weekly ad items, that's about the money that's spent on that part of the business. And that's where we're going after. [03:19] So how many folks are on the team today full time? [03:22] >> About 28. [03:23] And how many of those are sales folks with a quota? [03:27] Two. Two. Wow. Okay. So how many deals do you expect one sales rep to close then in a quarter or a half year? [03:35] >> Yeah. So we, right now, we're looking at a velocity around two to three a year. [03:40] That's a long sale. They must be very patient, right? [03:43] >> It is, yeah, it is. You know, grocery industry is a tough business. So what we have been very successful at doing, however, is expanding revenue constantly with innovation, right? So we've had a fantastic track record of going in at a retailer at maybe $10, $20,000 a month and expanding that out to $50, $60,000 a month in a couple of years. [04:06] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this, you love watching these interviews with SaaS founders. But imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [04:29] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [04:54] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, private equity firm is different. If you're gonna do a minority sale, that's different. And if you sell the whole business, that's a different valuation. You can see all those when I hover over here. Right? So the teal is what a VC would pay. Yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright. Now what's cool about this is this is [05:15] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show. So traction, 1,200,000 seed round, 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired, the valuation and the multiple. Maybe you're [05:41] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down, what they raised, what valuation they raised at, and what percent that they sold. There's never been a larger dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. Alright. We're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if [06:03] you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation here, and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl. Again, all that valuation data live right inside the platform. I hope to see you there. Alright. Let's jump back into the [06:29] interview. I was gonna say how many customers are you working with today? About 10. Okay. About 10. Yeah. Mean, I can vouch for this, by the way. When you came on in 2019, you said the average ACV was about 300 ks. Now it's 500 ks. You've definitely expanded there. And is that because you're upselling new products or seeds [06:46] >> Correct. Or Well, you know, a lot of our roadmap is informed by our customers. So we see their pain points and they come back to us and say, can you solve this? Can you solve that? And we wind up then building a platform base of it. So 50% is coming from pure internal innovation and R and D, and 50% is informed by the customer. [07:03] I see. And can we take 10 customers times that 40,000 ARPU you guys are doing about $400,000 a month in revenue? [07:10] >> Yeah. That's about that's that would be about right. [07:12] That's great. Look. Considering the space you're in, right, in that pre COVID, you were doing about a 3,000,000 run rate. The fact that you sort of grew in your space Right. Added almost $2,000,000 of ARR in the past twenty four months is pretty darn impressive. [07:28] >> Yeah. Well, know, entrepreneurs are never satisfied. Everybody wants to be 10x in two years. [07:32] That's right. That's right. Now, you Do you have to pursue growth at all costs? Have you raised a bunch of capital? [07:38] >> Not really. Not since the pandemic. We had some just some internal note rounds, but that's about it. For today, of course, we're cash flow positive. Not really looking to raise money until maybe the end of the year. Have some [07:50] That's a big deal too, because when you last come out in 2019, you told me you were burning $150,000 a month. [07:55] >> Correct, correct. So right now we are cash flow positive, and I guess it's a good position to be in, but we see a lot of new opportunities come into the market, which we think will go out and raise some growth capital for. [08:06] Mhmm. So and just to be clear, including the convertible notes, how much have you raised total to date? [08:11] >> About 9,400,000. [08:14] Oh, wow. That's a lot. Wait. So these were big convertible notes because when you came on last time, you had only raised a million dollar seed round in 2014, right? [08:20] >> Correct. And then 2018, we did about three and a half. Oh, okay. Yeah. And then in 2020, we we converted some notes and did another 1.2. [08:30] Okay. Okay. Got it. And that was in, sorry, 2020? [08:33] >> 2021 is when we close those notes. [08:36] Yeah. Okay. Right. Okay. Got it. So three point so pre seed of a million, seed of 3,500,000 in 2018, 1,200,000 notes over the past twenty four months. [08:44] >> Correct. [08:45] I see. I see. Okay. Now when you look at your pre COVID valuation, right, when you raised that 3,500,000, what what did you I mean, most people are selling in there. See, maybe like 20% of the business. Were you sort of in that same range? [08:56] >> Yeah. About the same. [08:57] Yeah. Okay. So so what does that mean? That means you were at like a 25,000,000 valuate 20,000,000 valuation, something like that? [09:03] >> You got it. You got it, Nathan. Yeah. Got your numbers right. Yeah. [09:06] Do you care about valuation right now or no? [09:08] >> Right now, no. I think we're just putting our nose to the ground and just focusing on growth, revenue growth. And we think that if we get the right velocity and the right market cap that we're going after, the valuation will take care of itself. [09:21] So if you do want to go out and raise some growth equity, what do you think you have to get revenue to before you can do a competitive growth equity round? [09:27] >> I think if we get a finish this year with a 5,000,000 realized revenue, I think we'll get about a 50,000,000 to $60,000,000 valuation. [09:37] Value. Yeah, interesting. Maybe you'd be looking at like around like either late Q4 this year or early Q1 next year. [09:43] >> Yeah, we're thinking more early Q1. [09:45] Early Q1, interesting. And how are you thinking about that? I mean, would you structure that as 100% on balance sheet or there'll be a portion of secondary? Like, you know, you're getting to the stage where you can probably pull secondary. Right? [09:56] >> Yeah. You know, I I think we're thinking about a couple of things. You know, obviously, there have been some investors who have been with us from day one, so we're trying to see if we can give them some early exit options, liquidity options, and to help some of the initial team take some money off the table. And maybe we'll raise a larger round as a do a recap plus some growth capital. [10:16] Hey, one thing you should consider, by the way, so as you know, Founderpath, now we're a $120,000,000 fund. One of our big use cases is exactly what you just described. Right? So you raised a million pre seed in 2014. They've been around for six, seven, eight years. They're probably going, Shekar, man. Give me a return here. So let's say you you have to negotiate what to pay them out at. So they're gonna say, give me 10 [10:37] x, and you're gonna say, I'll pay two x. Right. Right? But, like, let's say you agree on two x. You need 2,000,000. Because your revenue is at almost 5,000,000, we could give you up to 50% of your ARR. So we could give you 2,200,000 and go use it, and you can use it to go buy out your early investors and buy back 20% equity. [10:53] >> Right. Ah, it seems like a pretty good thing. Should look into it. [10:56] Yeah. I'm not pitching you. I'm more just telling the story so everyone else can hear it and go, oh, could see how that would work. But we should actually talk about that offline. We'll see if it works. [11:04] >> Absolutely. Absolutely. [11:05] All right. Talk to me about more product, right? So, you've doubled ARPU, right? So, what new products are building you for these grocery chains? [11:11] >> Yeah. So I think one of the big, I think it's quite revolutionary, which is typically what happens in, like Nathan, like I said, in the promotions business is retailers go out and seek deals from brands like Kellogg's and Unilever. And they say, okay, I'm going to give you a dollar off a case of cereal. And then what the retailer will then go do is go put it on their weekly ad on their front page, hoping [11:37] >> to move that at a dollar off, right? Yep. So they're restricted by the amount of deals that they have to offer back to the shoppers. And that I think is a huge constriction on personalization because you don't really care what's on sale or not. You want a product, you know, if you go to the store. And so what we decided to do is let's flip this equation. And I think the challenge that the retailers had was [12:00] >> really they didn't have systems that were big enough to figure out, if you had a million customers, how do you create unique deals for each of those million shoppers? Yep. That's really the problem we solved, is we have a system now that automatically generates for every individual shopper, six to eight offers a week that gets emailed out to them and executed. Wow. Think about now using the entire store catalog for creating your promotions. No longer restricted [12:27] >> by what's on sale, what's on deal. I'm creating, so I'm able to now manage individual customer journeys. So I grow Nathan from being a new customer all the way to a loyal customer by driving promotions specifically for him, him or her, right? That's very good. And I believe this is scale. So this used to take, there are big companies that do this like Dunnhumby, which will do it, but they have 400 analysts sitting behind [12:51] >> with, you know, systems, and they'll do it. We managed to do it in one hour for a retailer. They can execute these campaigns for hundreds of thousands of shoppers in one hour. [13:01] Wow. Well, Shekar, I'm excited for you. I hope you double ARPU again before you come on again. That would be a big win for you. But in the meantime I'm excited. We're out of time. [13:08] >> I'm excited for you too. [13:09] We're out of time here. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book? [13:13] >> I've got to say recently, Build by Tony Fadell. [13:16] >> Yep. [13:17] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [13:21] >> I think to me right now, the most interesting person in the world is Elon Musk. I don't know if I necessarily follow him, but I study [13:30] >> Yeah. [13:31] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building birdzi? [13:35] >> Got to say HubSpot. That's become my new favorite. [13:38] Let me ask you another question. [13:39] >> I'm just [13:39] sort of throwing this in. It's a new one. What are you most curious about right now in terms of just like SaaS in general? Like, Like, you know, related to how you grow faster. What are most curious about? [13:48] >> I think I'm curious about how to widen the reach of our technology. That's what I'm really curious about. I think a lot of times you get stuck in rut thinking and you don't understand where else your technology might apply. I'm constantly looking to, looking at places that I can apply. [14:04] I love that. Number four, how many hours of sleep do you, by the if you liked that question and you think I should add that to the Famous Live all the time, just shoot me a text, (703) 431-2709. And you say, Nathan, ask that every time and I'll do it. Okay? I listen to you guys. Alright. Shekar, we'll see what they say. Number number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [14:22] >> As I say, it's gone up. It's about six and a half. [14:26] Okay. That's pretty darn good. And situation, married, single, kids? [14:29] >> Married, two kids. Well, one is working, the other is in college. [14:33] That's the way to do it. And how old are you? [14:36] >> I am 52 going 26. [14:39] 52 going 26. I love that. Alright. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [14:45] >> Yeah. Absolutely. Absolutely. I'm sorry about that. No. [14:49] No. You can feel free to mute it. No worries. What's something you wish you knew back when you were 20? [14:53] >> That I can do anything that I want. Guys, [14:57] they sell to grocery stores. It should have been killed during a pandemic. They didn't. They added another $2,000,000 of revenue. Now doing almost $5,000,000 in terms of run rate, selling a personalization and marketing tool to grocery stores to get shoppers to come back in. They help groceries create custom offers for every single visitor to that grocery store over the past call it one, two, three, five, twelve months. Again, growing nicely. They did a 3,500,000 seed round [15:17] back in 2018 at about a 20,000,000 post money valuation. Now 28 people on the team, two sales reps looking to scale past their current 10 groceries, grocers that use them. But big ACVs, $500,000 ACVs as Shekar continues to grow. Shekar, thanks for taking us to the top. [15:30] >> Thank you, Nathan. [15:32] One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 1PM [15:58] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [16:20] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign [16:42] up for that at nathanlatka.com slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those [17:01] people. We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright. I'll be in the comments. See you.

Birdzi CEO Shekar Raman: How Birdzi hit $1.9M in Revenue, 6 Customers in 2019May 22, 2019

hello everyone my guest today is shakar rahman he is uh basically the founder of a company called birdsee which we're going to jump into here today he's got a masters in electrical engineering with a focus on digital signage processing and pattern recognition he worked as a research engineer developing machine learning algorithms for dna sequence classification on the human genome project in the early 90s then as a software engineering engineer at bell labs in the speech recognition group before moving on to data center technologies he founded birdseed to help shoppers find products in a supermarket inspired by an idea that his 11 year old daughter had shakar you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right so you gave your 11 year old 50 equity in the company right we're still negotiating there you go go figure all right so what is birdseed doing how do you make money so first correction uh we pronounced it bird's eye bird's eye okay and the intention was of course uh shoppers find products in the supermarket so give them a bird's-eye view of the store um of course we don't want to confuse it with the frozen food company uh and hence the change in the spelling but bird's eye today uh we started off really funny i uh after my idea from my daughter i sat at lunch one day at uh my previous employer and frank and i were talking and i threw this idea out of him and he says uh shaker let's do it and i was like are you sure and that's kind of how we started down the journey never owned a business in retail never did anything with supermarkets uh technology guy and i just felt that i was solving a problem that a lot of people a lot of shoppers had supermarkets because they always felt that somehow the grocers were placing products so that it was kind of always a puzzle for you to find out where where the stuff was next and we set out to create a platform to solve that so who are you selling to the consumer or whole foods we're selling it to the to the supermarket chains themselves okay so we're kind of a b to b to c model uh so we provide solutions that then finally find their way into mobile apps that supermarkets put out and so we're essentially powering the technology the mapping the product location customer intelligence that are uh being delivered through mobile apps and websites of the supermarket grocery chain so with that in mind on average what are one of these customers paying you you know per per year per month we have a couple of pricing models typically it's a per store per month fee where we charge them for based on the modules that they select from us you know it can go anywhere from uh five to ten thousand dollars per year per store okay you said five thousand per year per store correct okay and then when you launch this company put on a timeline for me we the idea was 2010 uh we really went into market late 2014 we were just fussing around and stuff until then first customer late 2014 today we're in about 400 growing to about 600 stores across about six big regional chains you said six regional chains yes okay and and if i look at kind of 400 locations times 5 000 again per year that puts you at about 2 million run rate right now is it accurate hang on so we're a little past that right now very good and so where were you exact if you're at that today where were you exactly a year ago just so we can understand growth we're at about 129 growth right now year over year uh we're looking to finish this year with about a little over three uh uh 2019 and though next year is looking like another 100 year growth do you think you can hit 6 million by december 2020 that's that's what we're looking at are you doing this all bootstrapped no no i mean initially of course unfortunately i was blessed with a pretty strong network of people so the first couple of million was friends and family close people who knew me and then after that it was really professional investors and uh we have one big banking company in dallas called rev tech ventures who focuses on retail technologies that's a leader investor in our last round okay so how much total into the company a little over seven million oh a little over seven okay good and that was all equity or any of that kind of debt or convertible note some of it was convertible everything is now equity now oh good okay it's all going to have any outstanding yeah that's great all converted and what's the team look like today how many folks so in the us uh it's funny that our team grew organically so it's all people who knew people so people that i used to work with so terrific chemistry and the core team has worked with each other for over 12 years before we started bird's eye so there are eight people full time in the u.s about five moonlighting for us doing uh special specialist jobs and then we have a team in india so totally it's about 26 people okay 26 folks and then help me understand some of the economics on this right so so what does your churn look like annually um and then what does expansion revenue look like across these six logos so our goal is you know you know our goal is to actually help retailers drive personalization to their customers so the retailers are paying for the platform as a sas platform but ultimately it's really being opened up to vendors and manufacturers who want to communicate personalized messages or coupons back to shoppers through our platform and we do a rev share with the retailer so the longer term growth is driving content through our platform that's being sponsored by vendors and manufacturers so we start with let's say 5 000 and for really our trajectory is to grow that five thousand to about 25 to 30 000 per store per year but that remaining remainder incremental revenue coming from brands participating on our plan but if you look at if you look at all the stores that sign up for you exactly a year ago 12 months ago today is their renewal day how many of them on average are renewing versus canceling or downgrading so we've got a pretty good renewal rate i'd say upwards of 90 okay so maximum worst case 10 churn and then that same cohort do you exp you know you lose 10 of them but do you expand others in that cohort by more than 10 absolutely absolutely you know what our customers are constantly always adding new stores or opening new stores acquiring new chains so for instance this year we've had a couple of our customers who've added uh in the course of this year over 25 stores okay uh so what's average expansion look like like 50 year over year more yeah we're looking at about 50 to 75 percent year over year okay so we just revenue retention then is like that one 140 something like that yeah a little over yeah a little over i mean you're obviously terrific with your numbers yeah yeah well i mean it's a nice business right because you land six logos and then it's just become it because like actual you could argue that you could build a 10 million business without signing up any new customers you just need to have a machine to get all of their stores on you exactly exactly exactly and then you know and you know you're absolutely right you know our longer longer-term strategy of score is of course to onboard more and more shoppers on our platform that we get insights into their purchase history and customer intelligence and ultimately the data has tremendous value from a syndicated perspective for people who want to understand purchase behavior across the market how many how many monthly active users do all of your apps combine have across all the stores so we do a couple of things nathan apart from just apps we also deliver emails on behalf of these customers uh so we're also doing personalized emails and today we deliver somewhere over six million personalized emails and when i mean personalized every email has got unique content for that shopper specific to their purchases are six million unique shoppers or you hit some of them four or five times no it's about it's about four million unique shoppers across our network okay that's very good yeah yep cool that's very good all right um and then talk to me about kind of how aggressive you're being i mean are you still burning capital today are you back at breakeven we are really close to break even so next quarter will be our first positive quarter okay so like you're burning you're talking like 10 grand a month you're burning or 100 grand or what um closer to between 150 and 200. okay that's fair enough so you think you can close that 150 right now and in the next quarter be at basically break even that's right which brings me to my next question if you're optimizing to get a door to break even it means you're preparing for a fundraise so that you have maximum leverage so how much are you looking to raise we're looking to raise five okay and why is that the right number uh well two things we've got a pretty aggressive growth roadmap based on our understanding of the market now we've obviously deeply embedded with our customers we understand their pain points and we've identified some key growth areas that we feel we can invest in to expand our offering and i mean you obviously have to negotiate this but in an ideal world do you hope you can raise this on what like a 15 20 pre minimum we're looking at the 25 free okay fair enough so you know you want to sell like less than call it 15 of the company that's right yeah fair enough do you think you'll get it i think so i think we have some really exciting things that we're working on right now that we're planning on releasing we're working on a concept called personalized wellness where we feel today people go into the grocery store with an intention of self-care of they think that food is medicine and i think that concept is the catching a lot of steam people are careful about what they eat and i think the biggest problem that people have when they walk into a grocery store is they don't understand what kind of products they're buying they want grocery guidance in terms of am i buying the right stuff is this going to be good for me and so we're developing an ai-based platform which is going to be a mobile app which allows users to essentially scan a barcode and will tell you that product is good for you based on your intolerances dietary needs and your health conditions or medications that you're taking interesting all right very good let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book uh stephen covey uh seven habits of highly successful people number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah and some of them are the usual suspects i'd say the elon musks and the steve jobs of the world but i think you know one of the ones i really got inspired by which is the zoom video that you i saw on your youtube channel was uh was was the zoom video it was the zoom founder all right i just find it's uh amazing that you had an industry that was already saturated that somebody came in and disrupted yeah and i just find yeah and he can't buy his own tool by the way like he created the first market which is kind of fun number number three what is your favorite online tool for building your company um i'd have to say uh linkedin and twitter yeah number four how many hours i sleep to get every night it used to be three to four about two years ago but i've realized that i do much better on seven hours of sleep what's your situation married single how many kids a single two kids of course i know both my kids now are founders of different companies with me one with uh and burst on another is a social media app that we just launched last month with another daughter i love that all right and how are you i just turned 50. 50. very good last question what do you wish your 20 year old self knew i wish they knew that the world was massive and there's opportunity in every corner you just got to be looking and curious and you can make the life you want guys look around stay curious bird's eye again they are helping shoppers understand where products are in any grocery store working with six major brands across 400 of their locations doing about 150 000 per month in revenue that's up from 68 000 a month a year ago so 129 year-over-year growth they're burning about 150 000 per month right now but have profitability or break even at least insights in the next quarter they raise seven million dollars 26 folks on their team 10 gross revenue churn annually worst case 50 expansion so 140 net revenue retention as they look to scale now hoping to raise a 5 million round on hopefully a 25 pre we'll see how he does shakar thanks for taking us to the top thank you sir

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