How Buzz Solutions CEO Vik Chaudhry grew Buzz Solutions to $2M revenue and 3 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is vic chaudry he's the co-founder chief technology officer and ceo at buzz solutions which is helping uh it's an ai based software platform for power line inspections vic you're ready to take us to the top yes sir thank you nathan for having me i'm excited to be here you bet how did you get into the power line industry is this a family thing or are you just passion project or what no so actually i'm originally from india new delhi india power has been when i was growing up power was was a big big problem we had constant power outages on a regular basis so uh what i did in my you know college days was i got involved with a lot of environmental engineering projects and that's what i pursued for my for my undergrad as well and then uh i came to to the us in 2015 for my grad school at stanford university and that's where i got involved in much more power projects i was working on a project where we were using drones to inspect uh wind turbines and that was sponsored by pg e and that kind of segued uh into the power utilities and helping them prevent you know wildfires and blackouts and those kind of uh you know disasters oh fascinating okay so who's your customer today who's paying you yeah so our customers are power utilities and power companies so our major utilities uh in the us and canada and also recently we started working with a few utilities in australia so we are we are growing our customer base and this is a this is a big need in terms of great infrastructure improvement and transformation and modernization a lot of the components electrical components on that grid is you know as you can see 75 years old uh which is off their shelf life so so very much needed right now there's a lot of worry right now about hackers and right products you know these sorts of things are you doing any anti-terrorism related stuff or you know can you help ukraine's you know make sure russia's not taking down telephone wires i mean can you do stuff like this yet yeah not yet but we do uh provide a lot of security on uh the data that is collected around grid infrastructure so we provide cyber security for that and that is critical of everything that is digital we be our software digital ai company uh we provide cyber security on top of that so hopefully in the future we we can provide uh you know some risk assessment with risk mitigation around you know cyber attacks and and uh even uh entire anti-terrorism initiatives but for now we are just focused on modernizing the grid and i'm sure you have a huge range but what's the average power company pay you today per month or per year to use your technology yeah so it varies according to the project the power company is using or the you know the how big the power company is and how much mileage of lines the power lines they have but we have seen a range we have seen somewhere uh in the range from 200 000 us dollars uh arr which is annual recurring revenue to even 1.5 million dollars so we recently won a contract of 1.5 million dollars with a major utility in the us and it's a multi-year contract got it so 1.5 million over how many years that's five years five years wow and how many lines how many miles of lines will they manage with you about so that's around 2500 uh miles of transmission high voltage lines wow interesting okay so you have a nice usage based upsell here which is mileage of lines managed that's correct yes very interesting okay and again range is cheapest customers 200k a year most biggest one is 1.5 over five years it can go excuse me it can go even higher than that for a lot of big companies especially pg e which is one of the biggest utility in the us we're trying to work with them as well uh they're california based they have around 19 000 miles of power lines so so it can even go above that for someone paying you your sort of your your lower range 200 000 a year about how many miles of power lines are they probably managing so on a regular basis uh they would you know somewhere around you know less than thousand miles of lines uh but they they do have you know other sites on there like substations and uh uh critical towers that they want to manage as well so so it varies we have also we've done projects ranging from you know 200 miles of line inspections to even as i was saying 2500 miles and it can go even above that 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 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the interview but is this like a one time you inspect it once and they churn or are they they're paying 200 grand a year for many many years yeah so it is a constant process power utilities are kind of mandated to inspect their lines on a frequent basis so they on a you know monthly basis they would go out and inspect a certain subsection of the line and that's what they complete in a year and then they have to repeat that again because because of a lot of factors environmental factors all these electrical components are out in like heat snow you know storms high winds so they get damaged pretty quickly and as climate change is becoming much more uh a big factor over here and weather conditions are becoming much more extreme these these components are having much more pressure on them so there's constant need for inspection as well and so how many customers individual power companies are you working with today so we're working with three major ones in u.s and canada and uh we just are starting to work with a few in australia as well now can i take three times an average of two hundred thousand dollars an acv you're doing what something like fifty thousand dollars a month right now in mrr somewhere around that yeah okay and if you're doing that today where were you exactly a year ago do you remember yeah so last year um so those those revenue numbers are you know again a little bit confidential we did um we did started generating revenue last year uh and those were from our initial customers and this year i mean we have seen uh be projecting a big ramp up in our in our revenue uh i mean can you break a million dollar run right this year you think we are we are aiming for that yes yeah very interesting okay got it but just to be clear uh uh so no revenue before last year last year was your first dollar and this year you're somewhere sorry 40 50 60 000 a month right now yeah so somewhere around that range uh so 2020 was when we were doing a lot of uh proof of concepts with utilities a lot of free pocs and then last year we started doing paid pilots and uh some initial full uh you know full projects and then this year we are scaling up to more utilities and when did you launch the business first line of code was written in what year yeah so we launched in uh 2017 but uh the first two years we were working on building uh proprietary data sets for the machine...