Collective[i] Revenue (2024)

Collective[i] generated an estimated $25.5M in annual revenue in 2024.

Collective[i] crossed $1 million in annual revenue in 2014, roughly two to three years after landing its first paying customer in 2011 or 2012. Stephen Messer confirmed the milestone during the January 2023 interview, placing it approximately eight or nine years prior to the conversation.

Collective[i] serves sales organizations ranging from Fortune 500 companies down to small and medium-sized businesses. The company does not disclose its customer count, instead characterizing its scale by stating that it tracks approximately 5% of the global B2B economy daily. Messer compared this to Amazon's roughly 5% share of B2C commerce, describing it as billions of dollars in transactional data passing through the platform each day.

The first paying customer was signed in 2011 or 2012 and remains a customer as of the interview date. Individual contributors access the platform for free forever. Sales managers and leaders pay approximately $9,000 per seat per year. Average contract values are typically above $100,000. Messer gave an example of a team of seven or eight managers as representative of a $100,000 annual contract. The free tier includes contacts, relationship mapping, activity capture, collaboration tools, daily forecasting, and deal odds, with no time limit on the free access.

Collective[i] operates what Messer calls a data network or community model rather than a traditional SaaS model. Individual sales contributors use the product for free in exchange for contributing anonymized behavioral data to the network. Sales managers and organizational leaders pay on a per-seat basis at approximately $9,000 per seat per year, with average contract values above $100,000. A secondary paid product, Intelligent Writeback, pushes captured activity and contact data back into a customer's CRM.

The platform observes close to one million data features per deal, drawing on signals from email, calendar, CRM, phone, and video conference integrations connected via API. This data is abstracted and anonymized so that no individual contributor's proprietary information is exposed. The network effect drives virality: when a sales professional joins, the platform automatically invites collaborators such as sales engineers, finance, and legal personnel to join for free, expanding the contributor base without a traditional sales motion. A connectors product allows users to identify mutual contacts with target buyers and invite them to join, further extending organic growth.

Profitability was not discussed in the interview. Gross margin, churn, retention, CAC, LTV, burn rate, and runway were not disclosed. Messer declined to share current revenue, stating only that revenue per employee is at least $500,000, which implies annualized revenue of at least $70 million based on 140 employees, though this is a GetLatka estimate and not a confirmed figure.

Collective[i] had approximately 140 full-time employees as of January 2023. Of those, roughly 120 are engineers, reflecting the company's deep learning and neural net focus. The remaining 15 to 20 employees cover marketing, sales, product, finance, and operations.

At the time of the first paying customer in 2011 or 2012, the team was smaller than 140, though Messer did not give a specific headcount for that period. Most engineers are based in the United States, with a smaller number located internationally. Messer noted that deep learning engineering is highly specialized, describing it as the game of kings.