How Censia CEO Joanna Riley grew Censia to $10M revenue and 40 customers in 2024.

hello everyone joanna riley is an entrepreneur advocate and mentor in technology and is currently the ceo and co-founder of sensia she has a highly experienced background in building and scaling companies which she attributes to her deep passion of people and building technologies that allow people to live and be their best selves she brings her wide knowledge of the industry to better transform the way enterprise companies hire talent at her current company sensia all right joanna are you ready to take us to the top i am very you bet tell us about the company what do you do and what's your revenue model is it pure play sas yeah it's a sas business um so we started sencio to really change the way that companies hire talent really for for companies to start breaking the bias that has really kind of killed off talent in the end of the day and empower hiring people based on merit and we do that all through using predictive ai um and so delivering the best fit people to companies in a predictive fashion versus having humans to perform hours upon hours of searching on platforms like linkedin or filtering through resumes and so um what i love is when you put math and science to the problem of hiring it tells you that diverse people do jobs that are way different than you might think as as a human doing search with all of our unconscious and conscious bias ai machine learning that's a big statement today and you know people go well is it really or is it just a marketing thing like is it a glorified like database what is it really so give me a real example how do you use marketing intelligence and ai in your software yeah it's a great question um i'm one of those people by the way so the skeptics right here in silicon valley so we i hear a lot of a lot of the buzzwords um we looked at this and were inspired very much our back end is a data platform so we aggregate data from thousands of different sources and create golden records on candidates so that we can look at people as dynamic as multi-dimensional every single technology in the world today when you're finding people when you're looking for people you can only look at them one-dimensionally you can only say i want people that have gone to stanford have worked at google have done this and that but you can't say i want someone who's yes gone to stanford or schools like stanford but they were an athlete at stanford athletes more important than stanford you can't do that and so we were really inspired by trulia um trulia aggregates data from thousands of sources for being able to allow people to search in a vertical fashion in a multi-dimensional fashion for buying homes so being able to look at things like crime rates in school districts we do the same thing where all of a sudden we can look at everybody's hard data but we can also use that hard data where you've gone to school what you do you know what skills you've acquired we can use that to build derived data about you things like career trajectory performance against your peers diversity loyalty competitiveness these are really what allows to determine is somebody able to where do they fit in in the world of of you know where they fit as a career but also the we're able to look at things like do you belong in a startup or do you belong in a large enterprise are you somebody who is a rising star so you're going to start out early but you're showing the patterns that others have shown prior that mean that you're going to end up most likely as a high performer in the future that pattern recognition though is only as strong as the inputs you give it so when a new company signs up for you what access to their internal data are they giving you that allows you to then become predictive for them so we actually don't need them to give us any data we sit today on 500 over 500 million people globally that we've created golden records on we aggregate data from over 2 000 almost 2 500 different sources now and all of that is built to aggregate the information that we need to do we need to use to figure out how you map against the global talent pool um when a company however signs up they are absolutely able to say hey we want to plug in our applicant tracking system you can look at all those records but we as sensia will also update all those records instantly for them and give them the intelligence on top of those records so they can search them in a more dynamic fashion basically say joanna we're using you listen susie she joined us three years ago she's a freaking rock star we need more people right now like with the makeup of susie you're saying you have the ability to do that that's right and our our platform that's the interface actually it says tell us three rock stars it builds a short list of people you were hired no yeah it told a short list of people that are exactly like susie but susie stripped of her gender ethnicity race sexual orientation disability status veteran status so it is literally looking at susie as a number as mathematical equation it feels kind of bad saying that doesn't it but i understand why you have to just say you have to kind of uh de-emotionalize the human right to look at the numbers okay what give me i don't want to go down every customer cohort but on average kind of what's a company pay you and other companies are interested in the space they do all kinds of things like number of matches per year and there's a sas pricing i mean how do you price yeah we have two models both sauce one sas based on seats so anyone can have unlimited search 3 500 bucks a year seat model um typically our clients are going to have over 10 recruiters they're going to can sometimes rise all the way to 50 recruiters they're going to have sourcers as well so we focus on companies that are enterprise size or hyper growth so post series c abc um the the other option or we have our second product which is our premium solution is a sas model based on number of roles and that not only automates the sourcing it automates sourcing the engagement and outreach to candidates and then the coordination of the first interview roles you're hiring for not roll not seats of roles in your company are giving access to sencia too yeah roles that they're the company's hiring for so let's say that you are anthem who's one of our clients they have thousands and thousands of different roles we're going to start with a segment and those range of contracts typically in the beginning are going to be about you know 50 000 in a in a high case 100 000 contracts and then they're going to rise into multi hundred thousand dollar contracts and hopefully in the future you know over a million dollar contracts it sounds like no matter which of those two options you just gave each one kind of first year acv is kind of that 35 to 50 grand kind of range right yeah it's closer to 50. i would say that you know 50 70 is probably going to be closer we um launched platform in july so we're pretty new oh you just launched the sas platform in july we did oh wow when did the company launch september 2017. oh wow okay so fairly new so okay let me break this down because you didn't say founder in your bio which tells me like something happened like yeah no no it just said ceo so okay are you are the founder i am oh very good because what was going through my head was okay what i was trying to trick you no no attention what was going through my head was okay she was an eir to vc firm the original founders like didn't do something so she must have came in with around you you are the founder you found it a year ago yeah yeah i have a great team um i so i get to just actually they are very much telling me what is what they're what we're gonna do and i get to tell you so that's really exciting but great i have an awesome team and bootstrap today or have you raised um we bootstrapped so i was the original investor in the company and then we've just closed our series seed round which is much larger than a normal seed um however uh we're gonna announce that in the next like two weeks joanna i liked you i liked you so much until you tell me now you're not bootstrapped now you go down two points i know i know but i was bootstrapped i was i launched my product got you know from july to today we have 40 enterprise customers we're super stoked we're growing with insane momentum so um it's a great time i would say to raise when that when you're able to put your investors on calls with tons of customers when you're able to show them an awesome product when you know i've i've done this many times before and uh it's very different when you don't have those things that's right no i hear you um give me a general sense the seed round you say larger than average america when i think seed round especially you're based in san fran i mean i'm thinking i see seed runs like pretty frequently in like the two to three million range so when you say big i'm thinking north of three is that generally fair yeah we're north of five okay in terms of what the raise is and now is it clo it's totally closed you're just waiting to announce yeah that's great congrats how long did it take from kind of finding the lead to getting all the follow on and hitting your target um you know it's not my first audio uh i i would say that i think it's totally normal i i don't think many people tell the truth on how long it takes to...