How Celigo CEO Jan Arendtsz grew to $92M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

but then like there's there's Dark Horse out there and I love dark horses when I find one I want to get them on stage right and so there's this other company that maybe you've heard of uh called cigo and it's run by a gentleman uh named Yan aren and what he's done is he's built a company that's well over 100 million bucks of Revenue but hasn't had to go out and raise 400 million bucks of Revenue and directly competes with the likes of moft we're going to dive into it all today please give Mr Yan a warm Round of Applause welcome to the stage [Applause] wow we didn't uh we didn't go through that intro together but I'm I'm pretty that's pretty close right you got something wrong but we talk about okay do you know work ao's Revenue um but I'm I'm not here to talk about that okay but we're not quite at 100 million yet okay small dire is it's a fair statement to say though you are way more Capital efficient than oh for sure right I think we've raised a total of 72 million in primary Capital mhm to get to roughly about 92 million yep in AR right now so that's a ratio that I look that's about 1.6 right for every dollar of AR how much have you invested uh in terms of um raise Capital when I study your story and not just what you say on interviews but what you've actually done in form def filings and multiples and how you've done it uh you have way way more discipline around valuation than everyone else I've seen in the space even way I mean everyone else have interviewed in the space so I'm really excited to dive into that so here's the V visual in terms of Revenue growth so you guys all have it again four or five years to get to that first five million bucks of Revenue right early slog yeah and that's an interesting story in of itself because we were bootstrapped from 2011 to end of 2015 by the way we converted from a consulting company prior to that I didn't know that okay so hence why we were able to fund the company company and we got to 2015 early 2015 at that time I think we were about 4 million in ARR and my CTU and I had a conversation and we knew the product that we had didn't really meet mustard because everything was changing we we connect these various apps together uh the way companies acquired SAS apps the way they wanted to connect them together all of that was changing rapidly and the product that we had was ARA was not the right user experience so unfunded we decided we're going to go build a new product so in 2015 took a few Engineers while still continuing business to go build a new product hence why we only showed the revenue starting in in 2016 and and that coincided with raising our series a around uh last day of 2015 and uh we entered 2016 still without a product we came out with it I think in March mhm but but that's for all practical purposes the company was really founded in 2015 and that is what that shot looks like in 2016 right at series a time so you can see the product Dro down to the top smart connectors productivity apps integrators for those of you trying to get your bearings in terms of what world we're talking right now think of where this is the iPath space right integration platform as a service one of the leading players in the iPass space we named some of the other people in the space earlier but very hot space it's effectively it's effective the tunneling of the internet basically uh yeah we sometimes I use the term it's the plumbing right in any given company you've got all this applications you've got data sources you've got a data warehouse with the plumbing that connects these together ingest data into a data warehouse yes API management uh connecting with your trading partners we do all of that it's an automation platform so what I want you guys to focus on here is that that that last number in the headline on this screenshot because that multiple is one that is way lower than what others were raising in the space at the same time and again you have a discipline around here I want you to elaborate on a second on that but I want to establish the pattern more here first so this was it was about 8.3 on about a 30 post right right around that uh that's correct yep that's correct yeah so pushing that forward in 2016 you then did like an extension or something right in 2017 what was this yeah in 2017 we just did an extension of the series a round another 4 million correct also disciplined held the 4X again I want to I'm going to ask deeper about that here in a second but pushing forward we're now in 2017 2018 I assume this new growth from 10 million to 16 million is the new product starting to get some traction correct and and look the when we came out with the product in 2016 it was pretty nent it was missing fabit of functionality for us to go compete with some of the other bigger players uh we didn't have the biggest R&D team we we we're still kind of in silent stealth mode building uh the the various featur as we needed because look in the end doing integration connecting these apps automating business processes it's just a lot of work right there's there's so much functionality for us to go build so we we took small steps we found little uh segments of the market that we could monetize at that time while we continue to build the platform so the next slide talks about this idea that anyone can I mean look you can go raise a billion dollars and if you you know the fastest way to make a 100 million bucks is to raise a billion and then you know burn 900 million on fire right and you're left with 100 million and there are people that are really good at that um so I know you don't want to talk about these and I built this deck we're going to talk about it anyway because I want to give you credit I think maybe the most Capital efficient and sort of the Enterprise you know Plumbing for the Internet space and you see the data to back that up here on the screen when you look at the deal that Salesforce did to buy moft at the time one of the highest multiples pay 21x multiple and so when I'm studying this data you know pulling from my records from podcast interviews and get lack of preparing for this I'm going this is so wild because Yan's raising at a 4X and no joke like a couple years later and then you actually did around right after this we'll talk about in a second the 21x multiple mu sof but you did it at 4X question is why you had a good growth story you know workato seems to just be you know like light just raising as much as they can you see these headlines of a 5.7 billion valuation but they only have got you know 150 170 million bucks of AR so the multiple there also just feels like how do they go under that valuation obviously zappier bootstrap different story do you have a backstory where you a Founder in the past that got burned on too high valuation why do you have so much discipline here short answer is no I'm a first-time founder and look you you look at what's in front of you right where you are where you're trying to head why you're raising money how much you want to raise at that particular time and what is the right multiple at that time I I think the by the way it was not a 4X it was almost a 5x in our series a round okay at that time we were unproven because we were building a new product didn't have it in market yet and it was a risk for our series a investor to come in and uh invest in a company that still didn't have the the future product of the company so so that's why in the end we we ended up at at that multiple MH but in our series B round series C round right there were other extenda factors I think every round was different in this round what was the extenuating factor I imagine you had term sheets on the table for much higher than a 6.3x multiple but you took this deal for a particular reason related to terms yeah so this one's pretty simple look I we had multiple term sheets I'd been speaking to maybe 25 30 investors at the time uh likely got term Shades from about 5 to 10 it really came down to the firm and the person who is going to sit on the board uh board Dynamics are super important for me and we went with the investor that we thought you know looking beyond the multiple like who's going to partner with you over the next five 7 10 years to build a sustainable business uh do they have the same philosophy in terms of where you can take this business are they looking for a quick exit so on and so forth right right so when you take all of that and and look multiples count as well you I think the series B really came down to who we thought was the best firm to take us forward I mean I don't know if you guys see this and think the same things I think but you see the subtext in this header right this these aren't like different years this is the exact you were doing this thinking and saying a good partner and a good board seat is way more viable and we can actually quantify that because mule sof just exited for 21x right so like you had that in your quiver to use in your negotiations if you wanted to Anchor that you didn't you chose to take a much lower valuation it really was just a better person on the board and a better partnership there were no economic secondary well it's building a company we we always believe that this is a big space massive time and this company as a standalone entity could be worth a lot someday and and so you really try to find the right partner to be able to take you there I mean it's it's really that simple yeah valuation goes up obviously a little bit you keep growing series C 48540 and 2021 product has expanded at this point right you can see that First Column a lot of business processes you call out couple different verticals at this point software and SAS you want to elaborate on those quickly yeah so so at this point in 2021 we went from being more of a a niche player maybe 5 years back gradually building out the platform where we could say we are a true horizontal platform you have any set of apps in the Enterprise that has an API flat files uh database what have you we can go and connect any of that irrespective of the vertical irrespective of the apps that you have respective of company size and it took us a while to be able to build out the the product uh to get there so so that was a big transformation from our series B round to our series C round I would say in terms of the product and the scope of what we could do and at this point 2021 I mean you're 10 years into the business I imagine you had some early employees that maybe had some options that were around maybe some early Angels had you created any sort of secondary liquidity options up to this point and did you in this round very little and even though we had the opportunity for uh some key employees to really maybe get some secondary everyone was pretty excited in terms of what we were doing and uh we didn't really end up doing that so there there wasn't secondary as part of this there was there was a little bit of secondary but uh I think in the grand scheme of things I would say fairly uh minute mhm um the form defiling shows about 7.9 million uh was allocated to sort of use of proceeds for like internal purposes did that whole chunk end up going towards early employees secondary uh a combination there was some other early um uh debt providers and and so on and so forth so okay tell me more about that you had to pay off debt providers um it was a very small I think we raised about uh a million and a half in debt I think um in what year 2015 maybe oh wow so that I was wrong your first outside Capital was not that Equity raise it was debt uh yeah and yeah so so there was a warrant there um okay but that was that was it yeah yeah okay so business keeps growing you're doing these great deals you're creating some liquidity for the debt providers maybe some other folks Revenue continues to grow this is where you're at today in 2024 where do you guys think you'll finish at end of this year so the goal is to be roughly around 100 million by the end of this is how you're positioning yourself today correct uh a lot has changed right so we we've really gone beyond being a CO iass I think most people think of an iPass as connecting various apps in the Enterprise together but we are a lot more than that we've moved into adjacent spaces we have uh full API management capabilities if you want to build a apis and govern them with all the security and compliance we do that if you want to connect with your trading partners using some Mar technology called EDI in case some of you are familiar with that we we built an awesome uh new product on top of our platform to allow companies to be able to connect with their supply chain with big box retailers and be able to do uh business and then we uh fairly soon coming out with a new product for ingesting data into a data warehouse so just imagine any of your operational SAS systems you want to be able to easily ingest it into your data warehouse of choice such as a snowflake red shift uh so on and so forth we can you can do that in a few click so these are some of the innovations that we've really invested post serious C round we used a fabit of that money to funnel that into R&D so that we can really take it to the next level and go from being just a pure pass to the automation platform of theer prise guys I love that start off as a consulting company really got going in 2011 little pivot you know 2014 2015 new product starts to take off remains conservative in valuations which I love because it means he has full optionality today he could take a $400 million $500 million offer and everyone makes money because he hasn't you know driven the value through the roof he's not going to do that because he's very excited about what he's building yeah just one thing on that series C round uh we had the option of raising at a much High multiple with some structure high like without getting any numbers right uh we decided to take out all preferences and structure uh out in that series C round no liquidity so uh there's there's one ex preference but in in the end ultimately it boils down to a common share is pretty much the same as a as a preferred share and that was uh one of the smartest things that we did uh without being greedy and and try to get into like look ma we raised that uh this multiple it it sounds great right but then we knew things were going to come down and uh I'm proud to say right that if you look at our employes stock options it's not underwater and All proba Above Water yeah yeah guys when I find stories like this through little Clues I want to celebrate them I want to get on stage I can't get everything out of him in 10 minutes so please find him I mean and the fact that you're able to do seriously at that level and have them basically be treated the same way as common shares is incredible and a huge Testament to what you're doing for your employees just managing the company for long-term sustainability so guys give it up for Yan from cigo thank you you enjoy that you have fun yes all right thank you so much appreciate it