Boltzbit Limited Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Doctor Yichuan Zhang has been passionate about AI since the start of his PhD at the University of Edinburgh back in 2010. Since the first year of his PhD, he started to publish several papers on Boltzmann machines and approximate inference in one of the most influential AI conferences, NeurIPS. His research contributes to the core of his current company, Boltzbit, at boltzbit.com. Doctor Zhang, are you ready to take us to the top? [00:22] >> Yes. [00:23] Okay. So Boltzbit's tagline is make AI accessible to everyone. What does that mean? [00:29] >> So, it means to really give people who have the data, the power of AI, so people can just develop AI from their data without having knowledge of machine learning or deep learning. [00:42] And who are these people? I mean, who are you selling to? [00:45] >> Selling to is business. Yes, mainly it's business and particularly for a lot of companies who have a lot of customer data and product data and they want to make automated decisions like product recommendations and user search, answer a lot of decision questions. This is [01:04] And what are are these companies paying on average per month or per year to use your technology? [01:10] >> So now we have the first customer, it is like 150 ks for the annual contract, right? But our main, our main business model is kind of like pay as you use, it's kind of cloud based SaaS. Model is basically based on how much data you upload on our platform and you train the model and then you pay as the computational hours. [01:35] And so you said one customer today? [01:38] >> Yes. One now we have our first customer. Yeah. [01:42] Well, congratulations. That's very exciting. When did you write the first line of code for your platform? [01:48] >> That's back two thousand twenty April, I think. Yeah. [01:53] 2020. And are you the sole co founder or do you have a team? [01:59] >> Now we have a we have team. Yeah. So we have three co founders and a plus now four developers. Yeah. [02:07] Okay. So there's seven people. [02:09] >> And one marketing person and one business person. [02:12] Yeah. There's nine people full time? Yep. Okay. And when you said three co founders, did you guys decide to split equity evenly at the beginning or not? [02:22] >> No, it's not evenly, like kind of I take some majority because I lead on the initial ideas and the others are my friend. Yeah. [02:32] So you you own the most out of the three co founders? [02:35] >> Yep. [02:36] Okay, very cool. Did you put a bunch of your own money into the business to build the MVP or no? [02:44] >> I would say kind of yes, because we spend quite some initial time with our salary and work on some prototypes before we raise the first round of money. [02:54] Yeah. How many months or how many years? [02:57] >> That's roughly like four to five months, something like Yeah. That, I would [03:02] And how much did you end up raising? [03:06] >> Our first raise is 800 k. And then last year, we raised $1,600,000. [03:11] What year did you raise the 800 k in? [03:14] >> That is 2020. Yeah. [03:17] Okay. 2020. So the 800,000. And was that that's sort of your traditional pre seed round? [03:22] >> Yes. That's the pre seed round. [03:24] And you said the run last year was for 1,600,000? [03:28] >> Yes. [03:29] 1,600,000. Okay. And how did you was that a did you come up with a valuation for that or was that a convertible note with no cap? [03:37] >> No. That is a VC investment. Is yeah. It is not loan. Yes. [03:44] Most people, when they're raising their seed round, are selling between, you know, 15 to 20% of their business. Is that what you did? [03:54] >> Yeah. Roughly. Yeah. [03:56] Okay. So that means you raised it like a 10 or $12,000,000 valuation, something like that? [04:03] >> Yeah. [04:05] 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 [04:28] 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 [04:52] 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. [05:05] >> Right? So [05:06] 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 not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder 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 [05:30] 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 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 [05:55] what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second, but if 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 [06:20] 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 interview. Okay. Was that fair? Do you think that was a good valuation or bad valuation? [06:35] >> I think that is kind of fair valuation because we are quite deep tech and we are in the very early stage, right? So I would say that's kind of fair, but of course I would like to have the valuation even higher, but these kind of things also, you know, it's always if you put it too high and later you get yourself into problem also. So we try to balance this in the best way. [07:00] Yeah. So monthly recurring revenue today, it sounds like it's about $12,500 or about $150,000 a year from one customer? [07:09] >> Yeah, roughly like that. [07:10] Yeah. How did you land the first customer? That's a very big first deal to land. How you find the customer? [07:17] >> So we found it very likely by our connections and it is also something like very specific niche vertical that is we know the problem pretty well, Right? So this is why we still like really try to use this early success to figure out, to discover more markets, more similar customers. [07:39] What is that use case? This first use case you're building? [07:42] >> Yeah, it is for search engine technology. So basically use Generative AI to automatically parse different types of documents, not only text image can be mixed and then combine those information together, allow user to interactively search. So you're not just giving an image, you can even highlight which part of the image that is using this most relevant. And this is something special we developed. [08:08] Did you have to buy a very large data set to feed your initial dataset to grow your algorithms, your AI, etcetera? Where did you get the initial dataset to train your models on? [08:19] >> Initial dataset, this is a good thing of generative AI because it can learn to find the data itself. So we use a lot of public data set and, you know, a lot of generative AI trained on very public data set. [08:31] Like what? Can you name a few of those data sets? [08:33] >> Like one of these, like COCO and ImageNet, a lot of public data that you can find on GitHub. [08:40] Interesting. Very cool. Okay. So nine people full time on the team today. Are you raising capital right now? [08:48] >> No. Not really. Yeah. [08:50] Okay. And so what's the next you just closed last month. Okay. What's so what's the next step? You have one customer today. Where do you think you'll get your next customer from? [09:01] >> We are exploring different verticals now for the next customer. We [09:08] >> don't know that exactly yet, but we are actively searching on that. [09:14] Which verticals are you exploring or is it all search? [09:18] >> No, we are trying to explore different vertical. I like financial, fintech is one, and also digital marketing is another one. Mhmm. [09:29] And and what is exploring those markets look like? Are you looking for partners in those spaces? [09:34] >> Yeah. Both both partnership, but also kind of like co sell and also tech partner in all forms. [09:46] Very cool. All right. This is great. In terms of team growth, are you hiring right now, or you're good with nine people? [09:56] >> We are we are still actively hiring, but roughly, we are we are at a stage where are quite happy with our development power. When we get on board with the next customers and we are potentially start to get the next customer sent in, we will start hiring again. [10:12] Very good, doctor. Okay, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite business book? [10:19] >> My favorite business book, I'd probably say The Mom Test. Yeah. [10:24] >> The Mom Test. [10:25] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [10:29] >> Well, that's hard to say. [10:33] >> I mean, Elon Musk, I think I followed quite quite often. I cannot say I'm really he's the only one, but he's on the news a lot. Yeah. [10:42] Number three. What's your favorite online tool for building Boltzbit? [10:48] >> Online tools for building Boltzbit? I [10:54] >> probably see GitHub. Anything open source that is very useful. [10:59] >> Yeah. [11:00] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? [11:04] >> I would say it varies. On average, I think maybe six hours. Yeah. Okay. But sometimes very extreme, it's three. [11:12] And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [11:16] >> I'm married. [11:17] And any kids? [11:19] >> No. I don't have a kid. [11:21] No kids. And doctor, how old are you? [11:24] >> Now I'm I'm 34. [11:27] >> 34. [11:28] Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20? [11:31] >> Sorry. Can you repeat the question? [11:34] Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [11:38] >> Something I wish I knew when I was 20. I think I wish I knew business more. I think back to 20, I'm a nerd. I only study scientific stuff. Yeah. [11:49] Well, sounds like you're getting into the finances very quickly with your first customer guys, boltzbit.com. Just another first customer, 150,000 a year contract. They also just raised a 1,600,000 seed round at somewhere between a 10 and $15,000,000 valuation. Nine on their team trying to figure out different use cases for this platform they've built deep, deep tech. Right now, this first one is actually effectively a search function that allows you to search images, text, all kinds of [12:13] media types to surface whatever it is that you're looking for. So exploring new use cases today in finance and digital marketing, we'll see where they go next. Doctor Yichuan, thanks for taking us to the top. [12:23] >> Thank you. [12:26] 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 [12:51] 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 [13:14] 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 [13:35] 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 people. [13:55] We got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. All right. I'll be in the comments. See you.