How Boltzbit Limited CEO YICHUAN ZHANG grew Boltzbit Limited to $446.7K revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

dr yutrin zhong has been passionate about ai since the start of his phd university in edinburgh back in 2010 since the first year of his phd started to publish several papers on boltzmann machines and approximate interference one of the most influential ai conferences near ips his research contributes to the core of his current company both spit ai at boltsbit.com dr gutron you ready to take to the top yes okay so bolt spits tagline is make ai accessible to everyone what does that mean so it is 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 and who are these people i mean who are you selling to selling to is business yes many it's business and particularly for a lot of like companies who have a lot of customer data and product data and you want to make automated decisions like product recommendations and user search answer a lot of decision questions and what are what are these companies paying on average per month or per year to use your technology so now we have the first the customer it is like 150k for the annual contract right but our main our main business model is kind of like pay pay as you use these kind of cloud-based sas the model is basically based on how much data you upload on a platform and you train the model and then um you pay at the competition hours and so you said you said uh one customer today yes one now we have our first customer yeah well congratulations that's very exciting when did you write the first line of code for your platform ah that's uh back 2020 april i think yeah 2020. and are you the sole co-founder or do you have a team uh now we have a we have team yeah so we have three co-founders and a plus now for developers yeah okay so there's seven people in total and one business yeah so there's nine people full time okay and when you said three co-founders did you guys decide to split equity evenly at the beginning or not uh no it's not evenly like kind of i takes a majority because i lead on the initial ideas and the others my friend yeah so you you own the most out of the three co-founders yep okay very cool did you put a bunch of your own money into the business to build the mvp or no um i would say kind of yes because we spend quite some initial time without salary and work on some prototypes before we reach the first round of money yeah how many months or how many years uh that's roughly like four to five months something like that i would say yeah and how much did you end up raising uh our first race is 800k and then last year we raised one 1.6 million what year did you raise the 800k in uh that is a 2020 yeah okay 20 20. so the 800 000 and was that that's sort of your traditional pre-seed round yes that's the proceed wrong and you said the run last year was for 1.6 million yes 1.6 million okay and how did you was that did you come up with a valuation for that or was that a convertible note with no cap no uh that that is uh a busy investment that is uh yeah it is not loan yes most people when they're raising their seed round are selling between you know 15 and 20 percent of their business is that what you did um yeah roughly yeah okay so that means you raised it like a 10 or 12 million dollar valuation something like that uh yeah oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 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 founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to 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 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 attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to 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 well 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 data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations 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 all right let's jump back into the interview okay was that fair do you think that was a good valuation or bad valuation i think that is kind of fair evaluation because we are quite uh deep tech and we are in a 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 at least these kind of things also you know it's always if you push it too high and later you get yourself into problem also so we try to balance this in the best way yeah and so monthly recurring revenue today it sounds like it's about 12 500 or about 150 000 a year from one customer yeah roughly like that yeah how did you land the first customer that's a very big first deal to land how did you how did you find the customer 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 we still like really try to use this early success to figure out to discover more market more similar customers what is that use case this first use case you're building yeah it is for uh search engine technology so basically use generatepi to automatically pass different type of uh documents not only text image can be mixed and then combine those information together allow user to interactive 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 did you have to buy a very large data set to feed your initial sort of panel data set to grow your algorithms your ai et cetera where did you get the initial data set to train your models on and the initial data set this is a good thing of generative ai because it can learn any data itself so we use a lot of public data set and you know a lot of generative i train a very public data set like what can you name a few of those data sets like one of these like a coco and imagenet a lot of public publicly said you can find on github yeah interesting very cool okay so nine people full time on the team today uh are you raising capital right now uh no not really yeah okay and so what's the next you just closed last month okay what's so what's the next step uh you have one customer today where do you think you'll get your next customer from uh we are explore different verticals now for the next customer um we we don't know that exactly yet but we are we're actually searching on that which verticals are you exploring or is it all search uh no we uh we are trying to explore different verticals right like financial fintech is one and also digital marketing is another one and and what does exploring those markets look like are you looking for partners in those spaces yeah both both partnership but also um kind of like call cell um and also tech partner um in all forms very cool all right well this is great in terms of um in terms of like team growth are you hiring right now or you're good with nine people um we are we are still actively hiring but roughly where we are at the state we are quite happy with our development power but when we when we get on board the next customers and we are potentially start to get next customer or something we will start hiring again yeah very good doctor okay let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite...