How D-ID CEO Gil Perry grew to $33.6M revenue and 36 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is gil perry he's the ceo and co-founder of did which he established in 2017 with his friends and fellow co-founders he's brought experience as a manager and developer in corporate startups and environments he's command he has gail has commanding experience in a special forces unit of the israeli defense forces yields a bsc compute degree in computer science from tel aviv university where he focuses on computer vision and image processing gil you ready to take to the top yes great to be here yeah i'm excited for this so talk to us for folks that haven't heard about did what does the business do so the idea as you said we founded the company four years ago myself together with my co-founders eliran kutta and sela brundheim and basically we started from protecting privacy protecting against face recognition that's how the company started and recently after gaining lots of expertise and core competency around the face space deep learning and computer vision we've entered into the media and entertainment market using and basically we launched recently our new offering which is the ai face platform and it is the one-stop shop for the creation of synthetic videos both for privacy and for media and entertainment so this is sort of like when you have like these folks that are building building ad blockers back in the day you're either on the ad blocker side and you want to block ads or you're not you're sort of like okay synthetic videos are going to be a thing deep fakes are going to be a thing we can either help sort of prevent them or we can sort of lean in and help people create them from uh for a marketing perspective you decided to lean in and really let people pay you to help create these videos exactly basically we've realized that there is going to be a big disruption in the median entertainment market and this disruption is going to be around how media is being created this is using ai and there is a big stain on this synthetic media landscape which is around the bad potential of this technology we realized that one we have the capabilities and expertise to lead this disruption into we have the experience and the responsibility to make sure that this technology will go to the right place so what are firms paying you to use the technology on average again what are firms paying you to use the technology on average per month or per year i didn't understand it yeah what's a company paying you on average to use the technology got it so basically it is uh there is an annual license that we have we are being paid and then we are being paid for every call to our api okay so we are a sas company for example you probably heard about the deep nostalgia a product that we sold to my heritage so they are using our api and we are being paid for every call every animation that is that is being made and we are being paid so until today in the past two months for example with this customer there were 80 million calls to the api yep so just ignoring the api call model for a second on average what are companies paying you for your yearly contract so i can't specify exactly the the number what the heck i'm looking for an average just did you get understand if you're mid-market enterprise smb et cetera so it's we are talking about uh hundreds of thousands but it really depends on the scale there can be a customer that is small it's a startup and there can be now we are launching soon with the big social network so it's huge i understand that but you also unders i mean average is math you take all your revenue divided by all your customers you get an average i'm just trying to understand it so it's fair to say your average is probably somewhere that hundred thousand dollar per year range something like that more than that but we can't if i can't specify the exact number okay so but okay then you're definitely an enterprise sort of motion you have an inside sales team selling this yeah we have inside sales but recently most of our attraction and our customers are are coming actually from a basically companies calling us because of the great pr and the exposure we had with the deep nostalgia but let's go back real quick before we talk more about deep nostalgia day one so it's 2017 you're getting into the business it's launching where did you get your first customer from do you remember can you tell us that story yeah so uh back then it was totally different business we were selling uh our privacy solution if i'm not mistaken the first customer was a blackrock uh not fortunate 100 company um and we met them basically we were in new york together with the 8200 eisp accelerator and they are sponsors of the accelerator we met them and they met the cto pretty fast they wanted our product to proceed so they they were your first customer you met them through your accelerator in new york and blackrock was paying back then for basically your tool to help prevent and make sure that no blackrock executives were their faces were being used in any deep fakes basically protection from face recognition yes got it what does that mean from face recognition like as they're walking around downtown new york or as they're on their computer someone's spying on them through their webcam or what everything they they have the photos of their employees so if the photos are leaked some of the photos are actually out there shown on the website so no one will be able to use it to identify this employee once he's walking outside in the streets i see okay so blackrock was first customer back in 2017 and then fast forward today how many customers are you working with so a quite a few customers it's now growing very fast again can't mention the sorry the specific number because we you know we're a private company but i can tell you that in the past months we are closing a quite a few deals and we have hundreds of basically calls companies that are interested in the product mainly from the media and entertainment market so you know can we put a range on the more customers i mean are we talking 10 customers 100 or a thousand customers so we are we are talking about the uh dozens of customers okay guys but between 10 and 100 customers so so highly focused on on a on a course at a customers and and focus is expanding acv with them versus trying to go sign up thousands of new low rpoo customers well we are we are focusing on the big companies more okay got it got it uh which makes sense your first customer was blackrock now did you come from a fortune 500 sort of background or did you launch this right of the right of the israeli defenses so no the the three founders we were in the idf for a long time and the after that each each one worked at the startup so for example iran the cto and myself before the id we worked at the meerkat which later became house party yes with the ios and android for meerkat and house party yep talk to me about the rest of your team how many folks full-time today so we are 24 okay mainly deep learning and computer vision experts how many of them are engineers so 13 14 or engineers habitat yeah yeah and now we are growing fast so basically we are building a bigger sales team in the us and israel so we are now growing fast what do you keep saying you're growing fast and you're getting lots of calls and all this stuff but it doesn't really mean much to me if we can't sort of like somehow quantify what does growing fast mean to you growing fast means that the basically there is bigger demand and we need to build teams for customer support customer success sales what is the sales team look i mean is there any are there any quota carrying reps today yeah so we basically have a sales person bisdev and there's several only one one one sales person right now yeah oh interesting okay so that that's something where you will invest more time and energy over and money over the next year scaling out that ae to build a team yeah it's very simple to to like sell and integrate our solution because it's just it's a very simple sas api but still because the demand we need to grow that joe have you guys have you done all this bootstrapped again have you bootstrapped the company or raised no we've raised the 24 million come on man i was liking the story so much i'm like this is great he's bootstrapped this he's got dozens of customers 200 000 acbs i'm like this is impressive and now you told me you raised a bunch of money all right so you've raised money uh why'd you when was the last round and why'd you raise it so the last round was about a year ago and there was a demand there were requests from investors so we wanted to grow faster so we raised the round we are we are thinking there are also a requests now from from investors so we are looking maybe in the near future to do another round if you do another round this year how much would you potentially raise so we we didn't decide yet but it's going to be a big around probably a few dozens of millions what was the round that you raised last year how much last year was uh almost 14 okay and how would you grade yourself on allocating that capital where did you spend it over the past 12 months so mainly on improving the the tech on the mainly on the new offering that we've built the ai-face platform so hiring engineers yeah yep what do you think your year-over-year growth rate what do you think that has to be in terms of revenue what does that have to be for you to go out and raise in a competitive round this year so we are good now if we if we want to raise the the round that we that we want we don't need any anyone can say that but you you've got raising capitals in my opinion it's not something to be celebrated you're deluding yourself uh and you're becoming more of essentially an employee right for your vcs and the board that you're building so so the question really is you know again how much dilution are you willing to give up relative to how fast you've grown the company faster growth less dilution yeah so you know the we can always progress and sell more but today the amount that we've sold and the amount that we are willing to delude is is enough we are ready for for another round what percent of company are you willing to sell in your next round i mean are you trying to target like 10 20 more or less so yeah we're not giving a these details of course but it really depends on the partner right it's not if it's a 10 or 20 or something in in between it depends if we're looking for a good strong partner to join the team not just an investor and it's not about the the money and the delusion it's more about top tier one vc yeah what what what has growth in over the past 12 months again so are you how fast did you guys go over the past 12 months were you above 100 year-over-year so we have in the past 12 months we changed totally basically we entered a new market so i'm calculating it from zero to very fast uh growth well come on going from one dollar to three dollars of revenue is 300 month over month or year over year growth that's ridiculous you went you your investors that already put in 24 million i don't think are saying the business is worth zero right eight months ago nine months ago how do you validate that with the board basically you know that everyone understands that we are now selling new offerings and just from uh one of the customers let's talk about the deep nostalgia for for a second sure for a minute in two months with one customer we got 80 million animations this is dozens of new uh dozens of basically millions of new customers that have joined this myheritage because of our product this is a lot of success just for one of our customers their app my my heritage app because of our technology was first place in the app store in the free apps in 22 countries above facebook tick tock instagram this isn't your business this is someone else's business and they're your customer correct i don't know it's it's our business because we are receiving uh payments for the api calls yeah but you don't own that company they're just they pay you for the api calls they're enough that's like me saying uh elon tesla is a customer and they're the the highest value he's worth billions of dollars so we're worth billions of dollars it's a great thing you don't own that equity over there right but basically i'm happy when my customers uh are happy well of course every founder is but that's not your company right so the question is how much is that utility value worth to that customer are you making more money because you help them rank so high right you're getting more api calls of course yeah this this all this success it's not you know tesla are succeeding uh anyway right but my heritage this success is because of the use of our technology so and these are api equals to using our technology and that's the main way you're capturing that value is you're just you have a rate that you charge per number yeah exactly so imagine like imagine this is one customer so for example now soon we are going to sign with the big social network so imagine how many api calls is that so we are happy with with our current stuff so if you're starting off at zero just recently i mean when do you think you can break a million dollar run rate on this new product can you do that this year or do you need more time oh yeah yeah yeah you can do that this year yeah yeah did you actually take the historical product to zero revenue or are there still lingering revenue from that that you're supporting no it's still uh we still have revenue from from that product but we are focusing on the new one because the differences here are higher than what you mentioned basically yeah we've crossed our goals for this year in the first uh basically very fast i'm surprised you have demand to go raise you cost at a couple dozens of millions so 24 30 i'm surprised you have demand from vcs right only to plan another 24 36 million on top of the 24 you've already raised if you started from zero and haven't broken a million on this new product line yet so uh how much we sold until today i didn't specify how much we sold until today but why i said on a new product can you break a million dollars in revenue this year and you said yes we might have crossed it already so i don't want to get into the details of the specific numbers but it's going well with a new product okay very well look i'm rooting for you i hope it goes well with that in mind let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh no rules rules the book about the netflix culture number two is their ceo you're following or studying so maybe it's a bit corny but elon musk but i think i've been following him way before people most of the people heard this name number three what's your favorite online tool for building the idea streamlit for building apps in python for quick prototyping number four how many hours of sleep are you getting every night i'm trying six hours but usually it's much less okay and uh what's your skill what's your situation married single kiddos i'm single okay i'm married to the starter basically fair enough all right and how old are you i'm 34 34. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20. basically that there are things that if you if you don't do them on time you might not do them at all for example traveling after the army i traveled for nine months and i wished i i would have done much more than that well listen our thoughts are with you i know you're in israel last night was a rough night so sending you good energy thanks for making time for me guys you just learned about did face recognition technology launched back in 2017 they raised 24 million bucks today to scale the business uh they're serving dozens of customers they have acv's that are on average above six figures so above 100 000 bucks as they have an enterprise sales motion 24 folks on the team 14 engineers one sales rep as gil looks to scale with his two co-founders gil thanks for taking us to the top thanks nathan have a good day one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the sas world whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else i don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas founders you want to get in there we've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing you can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying sign up for that at nathan lacka dot com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 minutes feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode if you enjoyed it click the thumbs up we get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive i am on these shows but i do it so that we can all learn we have to counter those people we got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys support all right i'll be in the comments see ya