Breezometer Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2021)

launched the company uh back a few years ago and in 2014 now has 23 team members based there mainly in Israel Over 30 paying customers they did over a million dollar in Revenue last year with the goal to hit $10 million in ARR hopefully by the end of this year less than 1% monthly churn in fact it's less than 5% annually so super low there and it's too early on the ca stuff still they're still working on figuring that out as they scale and grow with $5 million raised this is episode 718 coming up tomorrow morning you'll learn from Steven Goss and the big question is does question-based advertising build the future well he sold 40 million bucks and sales don't lie but first here's today's episode this is the top where I interview entrepreneurs who are number one or number two in their industry in terms of Revenue or customer base you'll learn how much revenue they're making what their marketing funnel looks like and how many customers they have I'm now at $20,000 per talk 5 and6 million he is held bent on global domination we just broke our 100,000 unit sold Mark and I'm your host Nathan lka hello everyone my guest today is ran corber he is the CEO and founder of a company called breeo meter and his ambition is to improve the health and quality of life for billions of people across the globe by providing accurate and actionable air quality data again he's the co-founder of the company and he's really truly the leading air quality analytic company and one of Israel's top 10 promising startups in 2015 with millions of daily users we're going to jump into it all right now ran are you ready to take us to the top yes thank you Nathan what a great introduction did you like that am I hired you are hired definitely all right give us a give us an overview what's the company do and you mentioned you know the number of millions of viewers we'll jump into that in a second but how do you make money great that's a great question so in a Nell we help companies that have iot products to increase user engagement to increase sales and impact their users daily routine and we do that by providing highly accurate realtime location based air quality data okay and we already helped our customers leading companies like GE Dyson Cisco Motorola to increase their sales by more than one billion US dollar last year to increase their sales yes how does how does your product help them increase sales that's yeah so I will I will get into that so we make the invisible visible by providing highly accurate location based air quality which also include pollen data which can be integrated into any device or technology such as smart home apps mobile apps and so forth and for example Dyson the famous iot company which is famous for their vacuum cleaner but they also have humidifier and an air purifier is using bisomet air quality data and using our data the Dyson air purifier turn on whenever the air quality outside is substandard okay and the user also get realtime notification on the Dyson link mobile app and he knows that somebody is protecting his health and so Rand let me just let me summarize that for a second just to make sure so you Dyson is a customer they pay you and what they're paying you for is to is to basically tell their buyers of their vacuums that today there's a lot of pollen in the air so if they're vacuuming they should turn on their thing that decreases the pollen count in their house yeah so it's not for the vacuum cleaner it's for their air purifier oh air pu okay is an air purifier yes yes yes exactly and it's not only telling them but the air purifier is an iot device so it's turned on automatic Ally and then you know the user has this clean effect he knows that the product that he's bought in his own money is doing his job and then he share it with his friends and he tell that everyone and then Dyson and other companies that have solution to protect ourself and protect our loved ones from the air pollution outside uh increase their sales increase user engagement increase user satisfaction so how again how do you make money are you selling an application one time is it a recurring business what how do you make money yeah so we provide license to our API that have the and we provide uh air pollution data Real Time air pollution data historical air quality data pollen data is an API to our customers and they pay us on a recurrent monthly basis so you would consider this a SAS business exactly it's you know SAS it's very it's very close to SAS but actually it's D dat is a service yep yep okay good so so what is the average customer like Dyson paying you per month yeah so all of our customers are Enterprises B corporates I mentioned Cisco G I can also mention L'Oreal acuweather big big companies and also they using are using our data in very big volumes they have millions of users that use our data every hour H uh but I cannot share the the to pricing but you can don't give me the total pricing I'm just looking for an average I mean are we talking 10,000 bucks per month 100,000 per month a th000 per month on average what are you seeing higher higher than the the last number that you mentioned higher than a million dollars per month no higher than than $1,000 per month I I can say on on you know I just read a book by Jason leming the founder of SAR so he mentioned that you know the company goes from the impossible to inventable and the impossible is $1 million in AR and the inventable is $10 million in AR and we are somewhere in between okay got it so right now as of what is it April May 2017 you're doing somewhere between a million and 10 million do in annual occurring Revenue did you did you break a Million last year in sales or will this will okay got it will you break 10 million this year I hopefully you think so yeah you know we are we are entrepreneurs we always optimistic y but yeah okay great all right let's get more into the backstory here so what year did you launch the company in so the Story begins in 2012 before that I have to say that I am environmental engineer and this is also also half of of our R&D our environmental Engineers this is what makes us unique and in 2012 I was searching a house to buy for my family and my wife has asthma and she was pregnant with our first child and as environmental engineer I knew how shortterm exposure to air pollution can have severe health effects to her and our child and it's have the same severe health effects almost like smoking it's like it's like smoking and and even for a short-term exposure of only one hour uh to air pollution that can also that might create an asthma attack and increase the risk for premature birth so I thought to myself how can I protect her and you know every one of us at the end we want to protect our our families so I I approached the ministry of Environmental Protection in Israel H to ask them you know where is the cleanest place to live and even them they couldn't provide me with a will time hyper local air quality data that I can use in order to make this decision so together with my colleagues Z lman and EM Fisher bromet co-founders we decided to build this app to show you what you are with in time what year did you found the company in ah in 2014 okay so 2014 and have you got what's the team size today so currently we are 23 employees all based there in uh in Israel 21 in Israel and two in the US ah very good and then what is the did you guys decide to bootstrap this or if you raise capital and if so how much we currently raise more than five million US dollars in two rounds okay and when was the last one the last one was in July 2016 3 million in July 2016 and was the one before that the 2 million was that a convertible note or something h no it was Sid Sid it seed okay so you did your seed 2 million and then July of last year about 12 months ago uh in July again 2016 you did a $3 million series a priced round yeah pretty much you know there are several convertible loans along the way but yeah pretty much okay and and when you say convertible loans what do you mean by that you had like Bridge rounds or or describe to us how that worked ah con CLA is convertible loan agreement between rounds sometimes you have an investors that is willing to invest with the right terms and it's a fit for the company in terms of the vision and Prestige and but you are not ready to go around yet H so he's joining in the middle and and how do you make sure that the terms you give that investor doesn't piss off all your other investors so again you know in a company it's always a discussion you speak with your investors we we are very lucky that all of our investors are are approachable they share the same vision of the company which is to improve the health of billions of people and I can approach them and discuss them and we make those decision together got it now let's fast forward to today so uh you mentioned some of your customers at are public but how many total customers are working with you today um so in terms of users it's million of users but it comes from about 30 companies and again each one of them are Enterprise got it so about 30 companies like Dyson you mentioned acuweather and and then obviously they have millions of users each and that's how you get your million users number walk us through like how this actually works so if someone listening right now wants to go see how this works with Dyson what would they go do okay so the so the Dyson use case as I mentioned Dyson have an air purifier called Dyson pure cool link okay so my my listener would have to go to wherever and buy that Dyson air pure link and then what and actually you know they can also download Dyson link app and and when they download it they will see the outdoor air quality data and the outdoor air quality data this H app provide is breter but if you want to protect yourself well R real quick do people actually see though your brand in there or or has acuweather and Dyson they brand it as their own thing so every time a company use our data they provide a attribution to bromer powered by breter and all on in the about us and similar yeah okay got it so you are building a brand you're not kind of behind the scenes here people know about breezometer yeah yeah exactly all right good and then um so you mentioned you mentioned you had about 30 customers and you said that they are paying it's a data as a service platform so are they paying per API call or per seat for the users they sign up or what what's the model so so it's a it's a combination of which features they use uh for example there are polling counts a forecast historical and also how much what is the volume of API calls okay and where do you make more money based off people buying features or based off people paying for amount of data calls features definitely features oh really I thought for sure you were going to say data data calls um interesting so help me understand more like what that looks like so like if if I don't want the forecasting data but I want the pollen data and I want it historically and kind of daily how do you price that so I can I can as I mentioned I can disclose the pricing but in one plan you will have H uh in one plan you will have the Poland uh counts uh without the forecast in the next plan you will have all the other features that you mentioned why do you keep why do you keep your pricing I mean most people put pricing on their website why do you keep yours why do you hold it so close to your vest so because we all of our customers are Enterprises and we fit according to their demand and we let me let me translate let me translate that some people it's a one-on-one negotiation so if you think you can make more money from One customer for the same feature set you're going to negotiate like hell and increase that versus somebody else you might charge you know way less for the pollen count feature am I reading that right no because come on he's smiling I nailed it always smil you can admit it you can admit it I get it you want to make more money that's a good thing yeah by the way you know making more money is a great goal also be if it's you know if it help you set your you know fulfill your mission to improve people he it'ss even better but it's also because we're working with different Industries so the the you know the features that an air purifier would want is different features than a advertisement company would like or a you know a a real estate company would like got it so it's it's we fit those features we fit those pricelists for different industry to provide them with the best value what does it cost you to to land a new customer what's your customer acquisition cost so again it's Enterprise sale so it's you know many meetings H you need to make sure that many many what meetings me many meetings oh many meetings yeah yeah but I mean what's the number I mean are we talking like 50 Grand to acquire the customer cuz it's three you know air travel and two inperson meetings and or paid ad spend what's the number that's a great question and you know the the the one thing I learned which is the best answer sometimes when especially when you're speaking with investors is I don't know but we are checking it so that's the same answer for it this is something that but you can't you can't raise those $3 million ran without having a gut check of what it is I'm not I mean this is CAC is never written in stone it's always changing but when you look at your historical data what has it cost you to acquire a customer no it's it's it's not definite enough so I can give you a number so you don't you you don't know what you have to pay in order to acquire a new customer you don't know how many inside sales reps you need on an account you don't know how many inperson meetings you don't know what it costs uh we know how many we know how much meetings but we don't know how we didn't calculate really the cost uh you know to provide like even like a number that you mentioned okay so so when you go raise $3 million in your series a uh how do you know what you're raised huh when I raised it yeah yeah when you raised it so how do you how do you know what I mean what are you going to use that money on if you don't know what it costs you to acquire a new customer H so we raised it so we we raised it in order to expand the team which we did which also help us to increase our revenues uh but we didn't have with this parameter but you know it's a great feedback yeah definitely something that we're working on so how does that I mean maybe that's a better question how does the team growth which you just said that's what you raised for correlate to revenue growth in other words do you have to hire one new salesperson to get two new customers per quarter or or what's what's the ratio so it's it's it's very similar to most us companies like uh every sales rep give you between $500 to $1 million in annual Revenue okay and how many sales how many sales reps are you out of your team of 23 do you have uh So currently we have four and also of course one of the founders also helping with sales so five total uh yeah got it and their goal your goal for them as you ramp them up and teach them about the product lines and your customers is for each of them to you know get to the point where they're bringing in 500 to a million in AR per year is that right exactly and it's interesting year by year yeah very cool what about churn have you had any customers sign up and then leave and if so why yeah wow that's a we have great questions by the way so yeah so of course we had Sean it's uh it's little but R Define that what's little I mean are we talking 5% yeah less less than 5% per month or per year per year per year okay got and and and the main reason was because some of the companies that we are working with have medical devices and bromo provide really highly accurate you know air quality data we publish the accuracy we are the only company in the world probably the the only Authority in the world that publish its accuracy on and a very clear you can download accuracy reports in a website so there are several medical devices companies that use our data on their trials and you know the trials were very successful but as you know medical devices they have a you know it's a long cycle until the product is is been launched to to to to the General market so it was only for the trials got it very good well before we wrap up here with the easy questions I always say easy for the the end right that's the way to do it with the famous 5 I want to try I I still am curious about like what an average Enterprise sale looks like so I'm just going to do math and you can tell me if my math is wrong so you mentioned you you did you broke a million obviously last year which means you got to be doing over about 90 grand per month right and if I divide your 30 customers into 90 grand per month I get that they have to at least at a minimum they're probably paying way more because you said you're probably going to hit you'd love to hit 10 million this year but they're probably playing way more but at a minimum they're paying you know call it three grand per month that's a coordination of both the feature set and the kind of data and API calls uh is that generally correct for at least a minimum yeah okay top tribe I have to tell you many people go Nathan you came out of nowhere your website's growing so fast how' you do it the answer is simple so I use host gat I know if you guys know that but I use HostGator and the reason I do they have like about 4500 free templates I can use cuz I don't code they've got a great e-commerce plugin and guys I bug the heck out of their support they've got 247 support which I love so what I've done is I've worked with them you guys know I make great deals if you go to hostgator.com Nathan you can sign up get your own domain for 30% off and a 45 day money back guarantee okay again I make great deals for you guys go to hostgator.com for Nathan to grab that now perfect awesome let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite Business book H Peter till definitely zero to one you know actually one of our in in one you know in every for every new hire the in I think the first slide you see about the company is is famous H quote that you know every company is around a secret and there for every company is actually a conspiracy to change the world with this cigarette and I really like those quote and what you actually means is that you have a secret and you know that and your strategy is to make sure that other people knows that and in our case the the secret is that air pollution is something that can hurt your health definitely and the solution is very simple if you know the air pollution around you you can take informed decisions such as turn on the air purifier and protect yourself but ran how is that a secret everybody knows air pollution makes you sick yeah so there are many Secrets actually that's like saying Nathan that's like saying Nathan I have a secret for you the sky is blue yeah so so what so the secrets around air pollution is like that so everybody knows that it can hurt your health okay maybe many people know that it have immediate effect on your health like I mentioned you know one hour of exposure to air pollution can increase the risk for asthma attack and and and you know premature birth uh for pregnant women what people are not aware and this is the main challenge of wizometer is that air pollution change more often than weather and it is hyper local so air pollution change between Street to street so and because it Chang a lot of the time you know by making inform decisions such as deciding where you should go outside when is the right time you you can be outside you can actually protect your health and your family health another thing about air pollution is that this a long ass secret that's many secret there's so what you're saying is you have like the generic thing but there are secrets embedded into the actual side effects if you understand them correctly and you want to solve that right exactly number two one word answer here is there a CEO you're following or studying right now uh definitely L mosque like uh the rest uh also the the CE of ways I really like the his blogs and you know we are a part our our investors entry Capital launch Launchpad digital he of really amazing uh companies entry you know also invested in Snapchat so in the portfolio there are many cosos that I can learn can learn from on a daily basis number three is their favorite online tool you have like host skater um we use we use slack a lot hop spot um great number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night so I have two young children three two two young children so I sleep two hours then wake up sleep another two hours then wake up so average per night average per night how many hours H average for a night I think be somewhere in six but it's not like off and on yeah and so you're so are you married or single married okay so married with two kiddos and how old are you 34 all right last question Ryan take us back 14 years what do you wish your 20-year-old self knew um so about actually I think you know there there is nothing that I could have known then you know 1 years ago that can help me more now because actually the way to found wizometer was very natural it was the perfect sorry this is hey Ran this isn't about like a regret you have or anything you would change it's very simply you've learned over the past 14 years what's a lesson you would tell your your 20-year-old self so you know I you know most of the time you think about you think about this question and the answer is never give up there is always great but remember that I'm Israeli when I I was 20 I was the commander of 5050 people so I knew those fans you know I always joke around that we have that the team is amazing we have you know 23 employees but actually you know all already when and this is unique for Israeli people especially that you know were commanders in the Army you know so we learned a lot in the age of 20 so of course I would like like to to learn more about about startups and stuff but yeah I think there is nothing you know I tell him you know keep your good keep going you're doing well Awesome by the way would I survive in the Israeli Army would I would I win or would those guys beat the hell out of me and girls H you will definitely win but it will be very hard it will be very hard why do you say I would definitely win H every you know eventually this is the great thing about the Israeli Army you know you you were never born for that and there are people that are skinny and you know and you don't think that they will be uh Are Soldiers or you know combat soldiers but the way that the training goes and how people support each other and this is exactly one of the what is making Israeli the isra the know startup nation that we know how to support each other uh eventually you will you become a soldier I love that so yeah many my many my many of my Israeli friends that have gone through the same path tell me the same thing because uh because there's a real belief and there's a real feeling that really the world is against you at sometimes or in your history the world has been all against you so you have to come together no matter what your body shape intellect size drive and just make it worked make it work do you agree with that what I agree is that you need to make sure that you have the abilities to protect yourself y That's like with air pollution yeah you need to take control of your life that is that was very smooth ran there you guys have it from ran the founder of Bree meter he would have just kept going and kept on pursuing even at the age of 20 again launched the company uh back a few years ago and in 2014 now has 23 team members based there mainly in Israel Over 30 paying customers they did over a million dollar in Revenue last year with the goal to hit $10 million in ARR hopefully by the end of this year less than 1% monthly churn in fact it's less than 5% annually so super low there and it's too early on the ca stuff still they're still working on figuring that out as they scale and grow with $5 million raised ran thank you for taking us to the top thank you if you enjoyed Rand today go back and listen to Amilia yesterday and she breaks down why moving her team to Brazil was totally genius