How Celitech Inc. CEO Ahmad Fares grew Celitech Inc. to $1.3M revenue and 8 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is al ferris he's the co-previously co-founder of acsys.com over 10 million bucks in ar now the founder and ceo of celetec and esim platform helping travel companies al you ready to take to the top sure all right what does esim mean so esim is an embedded sim card inside the recent devices starting with the iphone xrxs in 2018 it helps you know users uh you know smartphone users who connect to wireless networks using qr codes i see so who so who's paying for the technology who's paying you so you you have it you have it like bluetooth as a built-in feature inside your phone and that feature will enable you to um to get wireless plans from from service providers using qr codes so you pay for the plan you you buy but instead of going to a shop to get a sim card now you get the the wireless plan as a qr code by email or online or through an app so your consumers are paying you it's not a b2b business no we're the b2b business we uh who's the business that's paying you yeah so we we we um so i was just talking about ecm as a as a technology as a okay you know as a feature but uh yeah at celitac we're uh with a b2b platform helping um travel companies like expedia and jtb to offer their travelers co-branded international cellular data plans using one-click e-sim technology the basic idea is while you're booking your flight or hotel online you'll be able to bundle esim at checkout with one click mark you add an asymptote to your slide or a trip and then you get it as a qr code by email i see so what would expect what's the average customer pay you per month to use the cellotech technology so on on average the um the plan the issem cost per trip is around 15 to 20 dollars but our partners pay us you know for that ism on top of a subscription fee because we help them brand the esem so in case you want to have your brand as a network name to enable your you know to keep you your brand on the mind of your traveler in destination we we do that under the subscription model so of your last 12 months revenue owl how much came from the sas model versus expedia paying you a percentage of the 20 per trip uh we at at the moment um we we we don't have um you know we don't have we don't share this data because i mean we just introduced the subscription model last month so it started it's starting now actually oh got it okay you're just you're just now well so are you just now turning on revenue or did you have the per trip pricing last year so we within this year we had um some customers we managed to double our revenue in q3 and now we're expecting to quadruple it um and probably in q4 in q1 we we should be doubling maybe every month uh but come on i'm not i'm not i'm not a i'm not an idiot here i mean it's easy to double from a dollar to three dollars and caught 300 growth don't try that on me what what what is what is what when did you launch the company what year so i we i launched the company i started static in 2018 but we launched the api last year late last year okay so we basically took it live in jan and uh you know definitely um we were affected by covet because we'd focus on international travel but given now the us is opening up in next month we started seeing uh you know traction um going back on on on track okay okay so so uh no you had no revenue than in 2020 during covet yeah we had no revenue in 2020. we were building the platform obviously it's a very technical platform it's a patented platform so we pioneered the concept of a programmable e-sim that can be programmed to fit any trip so we have iep in the us europe and china and we built it all on a serverless cloud so we're totally serverless we we don't have any hardware even in our back end it's totally cloud-based totally serverless and and tell me more about the um the like how you funded this it sounds expensive did you bootstrap or raise some capital so i i invested around 500 000 in the business and i raised another 400 000 from few friends angels so it's i mean it's it's bootstrap but we're currently raising a seed round of 1.5 million and we're also shortlisted for a major uh grant by the national science foundation seed fund sorry you're raising 2 million right now yeah 1.5 million 1.5 and what sort of valuation do you think you'll target so um uh pre of uh 7 million post 8.5 why is that the right amount well because we we uh we we've built um a platform we have customers we have two major uh you know we we have signed the you know otas that are ready to go live in q1 and uh one of them can take us to 20 million arr we've we've proven the model with many smaller players we're we're live with many apps you can find how many customers today al so we have now around eight customers between apps and otas and these are like expedia people like that jtb you know another ota from japan a big one and we have the smaller players we have fintech players like a digital wallet called ariba in the middle east we're currently live in 50 countries and we're adding another 100 by the year end so we should be in around 150 countries in in q1 um how many children but but that's all like you could be in 150 countries and no one uses you right so like in september how many how many trips did you upsell like how many esim trips got paid for using your technology at the moment we don't share this uh information but i can tell you it's it's growing fast well of course because you're going from nothing to something uh can you give me a range are we talking like five trips or like 5 000 yeah i mean not five and not five thousand probably a couple maybe a thousand probably okay got it hundreds then you're in the hundreds yep and and what enables you to grow that really fast is it expanding with the same eight partners or adding new partners all together um so so first of all having having the countries is important because if you're an international travel platform you want you want more countries right to be able to to cover all your routes and to be able to focus on the routes that are recovering faster than others because you know in asia now it's uh it's recovering the international travel is recovering the us now is opening up europe is also opening up so so that helped with the with the with the growth but uh but in general uh we what we've built is exactly um you know tailored towards the ota so we we have we have in our pipeline all the major otas that control probably over 80 percent of the market booking.com is one of them so um you know within next year we expect to sign more of these otas and and and even even hotel groups we also have big names uh in the pipeline uh so part of loyalty programs for example we can have the essence as a perk so so are you going into this were you sole founder you funded it with your own money do you know 100 today i mean the for the time being i'm 100 percent owner i have a co-founder who is a cto and and he has um you know he has an amount invested in the company as a as a convertible uh note uh all my my investors on a fully diluted basis i'm talking fully diluted how much would you own i would be probably at 75 percent okay and then your co-founder your cto owns 20 well you have investors too right yeah so probably 10 plus 15 i see i see okay cool um owns 10 there got it and then so you're raising now so 1.5 on sit on uh 5.5 pre or sorry 7 free 8.5 post do you think you can get that valuation in the market oh yeah at least i mean uh i mean people i i you know people why do you say that so confidently though i mean you're under your i mean from what i can tell you're under you know twenty thousand dollars a month in revenue what gives you the confidence you can go raise at a seven eight million dollar evaluation yeah because i you know i i have in the pipeline the the the the whatever the 100k arr or mrr why not go close it then why not close that first why not fund with your customers well because i you know we we we expect you know international travel to fully recover next year so i still need some you know runway to be able to get to that point uh if if we didn't have the if we didn't have covet i would be at series a probably serious b at the moment um but yeah covet was a gave us lemon and we're making some lemonade out of it did you what happened to asus did you sell it access access so i exited access in in 2017 i you know we we had i i had an exit from a publicly listed company in europe called dormacaba we my partners prefer not to sell because they didn't like the valuation at that point in time but wait is this for access yeah this is for access so i i exited partially so you know got some some money out of that and i said how much did you make how much did you make from that uh i had a total of probably a couple millions okay so then that's how you had the 500 grand to invest in this business yeah i see i see okay cool um talk to me about your team today...