How D-ID Raised $24M, Reached Dozens of Customers and Powered MyHeritage's Deep Nostalgia (Interview with CEO Gil Perry)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hello everyone, my guest today is Gil Perry. He's the CEO and co founder of D-ID, which he established in 2017 with his friends and fellow co founders, COO and CTO. He's brought experience as a manager and developer in corporate startups and environments. Gil has commanding experience in a special forces unit of the Israeli Defense Forces. He holds a BSc degree in computer science from Tel Aviv University where he focuses on computer vision and image processing. Gil, you ready to take us to the top?

Gil Perry

00:26>> Yes. Great to be here.

Nathan Latka

00:29Yeah. I'm excited for this. So talk to us, for folks that haven't heard about D-ID, what does the business do?

What D-ID Does and Its Origins

Gil Perry

00:35>> So, D-ID, as you said, we founded the company four years ago, myself, together with my co founders, Eliran Kuta and Sella Blondheim, 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. Basically, we launched recently our new offering, which is the AI face platform, and

01:28>> it is the one stop shop for the creation of synthetic videos, both for privacy and for media and entertainment.

Nathan Latka

01:36So this is sort of like when you have, like, these folks that are 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 be a thing, deep fakes are going be a thing. We can either help prevent them or we can sort of lean in and help people create them a marketing perspective. You decided to

01:54lean in and really let people pay you to help create these videos.

Gil Perry

01:58>> Exactly. Basically, we've realized that there is going to be a big disruption in the media and entertainment market, and this disruption is going to be around how media is being created. This is using AI, and that there is a big stain on this synthetic media landscape, which is around the bad potential of this technology, we realize that one, we have the capabilities and expertise to lead this disruption, and two, we have the experience and the responsibility

02:33>> to make sure that this technology will go to the right place.

Nathan Latka

02:39So 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?

Gil Perry

02:49>> I didn't understand that.

Nathan Latka

02:51Yeah, what's a company paying you on average to use the technology?

Pricing Model and MyHeritage API Calls

Gil Perry

02:56>> It. So basically, there is an annual license that we are being paid, and then we are being paid for every call to our API. Okay, so we are a SaaS company, for example, you probably heard about Deep Nostalgia product that we sold to MyHeritage. So they are using our API, and we are being paid for every call, every animation that is being made, we are being paid. So until today, in the past two months, for example,

03:32>> with this customer, there were 80,000,000

Nathan Latka

03:36calls to the API. So, just ignoring the API call model for a second, on average, what are companies paying you for your yearly contract?

Gil Perry

03:47>> So I can't specify exactly the number?

Nathan Latka

03:51I'm looking for an average, just so you can understand if you're mid market enterprise, SMB, etc.

Gil Perry

04:00>> So it's... We are talking about hundreds of thousands, but it really depends on the scale. There can be a customer that is small, it's a startup, and it can be... Now we are launching soon with the big social network, so it's huge.

Nathan Latka

04:16I understand that, but you also under... 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, Waleed, so it's fair to say your average is probably somewhere in that $100,000 per year range, something

Gil Perry

04:26>> More than that. We can't specify the exact number.

Nathan Latka

04:31Okay. Then you're definitely in an enterprise sort of motion. You have an inside sales team selling this?

Gil Perry

04:37>> Yeah. We have inside sales, but recently, most of our traction and our customers are coming actually from basically

04:48>> companies calling us because of the great PR and the exposure we had with Deep Nostalgia.

Nathan Latka

04:55But 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?

First Customer: BlackRock and the Accelerator

Gil Perry

05:08>> Yeah, so back then it was a totally different business. We were selling our privacy solution. If I'm not mistaken, the first customer was BlackRock,

05:22>> a non Fortune 100 company,

05:27>> 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 met the CTO pretty fast. They wanted our product to process.

Nathan Latka

05:46So 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 deepfakes.

Gil Perry

06:00>> Basically, protection from face recognition. Yes.

Nathan Latka

06:03Got 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 finding them through their webcam or what?

Gil Perry

06:11>> Everything. 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.

Nathan Latka

06:28I see. Okay. So BlackRock was first customer back in 2017, and then fast forward today, how many customers are you working with?

Current Customer Count

Gil Perry

06:36>> So quite a few customers. It's now growing very fast. Again, can't mention the specific number, because we are a private company, but I can tell you that in the past months we are closing quite a few deals, and we have hundreds of calls, companies that are interested in the product, mainly from the media and entertainment market.

Nathan Latka

07:06Can we put a range on the number customers? Are we talking 10 customers, 100 or 1,000 customers?

Gil Perry

07:14>> We are talking about dozens of customers.

Nathan Latka

07:18Okay, between ten and one hundred customers, highly focused on a core set of customers and focus is expanding ACV with them versus trying to go sign up thousands of new low ARPU customers?

Gil Perry

07:31>> Well, we are focusing on the big companies more.

Nathan Latka

07:35Okay, got it, which makes sense. Your first customer was BlackRock. Now, you come from a Fortune 500 sort of background, or did you launch this right Israeli of defenses?

Gil Perry

07:45>> So, no, the three founders we were in the IDF for a long time, and after that each one worked at a startup. So, for example, Eliran, the CTO, and myself, before D-ID, we worked at Meerkat, which later became Houseparty. So we developed the iOS and Android for Meerkat and Houseparty.

Nathan Latka

08:08Yep. Talk to me about the rest of your team. How many folks full time today?

Team Size and Engineering Headcount

Gil Perry

08:13>> So we are 24, mainly deep learning and computer vision experts.

Nathan Latka

08:20How many of them are engineers?

08:23So,

Gil Perry

08:25>> thirteen, fourteen are engineers.

Nathan Latka

08:28Heavy tech, yeah.

Gil Perry

08:29>> 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.

Nathan Latka

08:40What 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 somehow quantify. What does growing fast mean to you?

Gil Perry

08:50>> Growing fast means that basically there is bigger demand,

08:58>> and we need to build teams for customer support, customer success, sales.

Nathan Latka

09:05What does the sales team look like? Mean, are there any quota carrying reps today?

Gil Perry

09:10>> Yeah, so we basically have a salesperson, biz dev, and several marketers.

Nathan Latka

09:17But only one? One salesperson right now? Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay. So that's something where you will invest more time and energy and money over the next year, scaling out that AE to build out a team?

Gil Perry

09:28>> Yeah. It's very simple to sell and integrate our solution because it's a very simple SaaS API, but still, because of the demand, need to grow.

Nathan Latka

09:39Gil, have you have you done all this bootstrapped?

09:43Again? Have you bootstrapped the company or raised?

Funding History and Total Raised

Gil Perry

09:46>> No. We've raised 24,000,000.

Nathan Latka

09:49Come 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 ACVs. I'm like, this is impressive. And now you tell me you raised a bunch of money. Alright. So you raised money. Why'd you... When was the last round and why'd you raise it?

Last Round and Future Fundraising Plans

Gil Perry

10:05>> 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 thinking there are also requests now from investors, so we are looking maybe in the near future to do another round. If you

Nathan Latka

10:35do another round this year, how much would you potentially raise?

Gil Perry

10:40>> So we didn't decide yet, but it's going to be a bigger round, probably a few dozens of millions.

Nathan Latka

10:48What was the round that you raised last year? How much?

Gil Perry

10:52>> Last year was almost 14.

Nathan Latka

10:55Okay. And how how would you grade yourself on allocating that capital? Where did you spend it over the past twelve months?

Gil Perry

11:01>> So, mainly on improving the tech, mainly on the new offering that we have built, the AI face platform.

Nathan Latka

11:14So hiring engineers? Yeah. 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 a competitive round this year?

Gil Perry

11:28>> So we are good now if want to raise the round that we want.

Nathan Latka

11:36Anyone can say that, but raising capital, in my opinion, is not something to be celebrated. You're diluting yourself and you're becoming more of an employee for your VCs and the board that you're building. So, the question really is, again, much dilution are you willing to give up relative to how fast you've grown the company, faster growth, less dilution?

Gil Perry

11:57>> Yeah, so, you know, we can always progress and sell more, but today, the amount that we've sold and the amount that we are willing to dilute is enough. We are ready for another round.

Nathan Latka

12:13So what percent of the company are you willing to sell in your next round? I mean, are you trying to target like 10%, 20% more or less?

Gil Perry

12:22>> So, yeah, we're not giving these details, of course, but it really depends on the partner. Right? It's not if it's 10 or 20 or something 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 money and the dilution, it's more about top tier one VC.

Nathan Latka

12:49Yep. What has growth been over the past twelve months?

Gil Perry

12:54>> Again, sorry?

Nathan Latka

12:55How fast did you guys grow over the past twelve months? Were you above 100% year over year?

Revenue Growth and New Product Performance

Gil Perry

13:01>> So we have, in the past twelve months, we changed totally. Basically, we entered a new market. So I'm calculating it from zero to

Nathan Latka

13:12very fast growth. Come on. Going from $1 to $3 of revenue is 300% month over month or year over year growth. That's ridiculous. Your investors that already put in 24,000,000, I don't think are saying the businesses were zero, right, eight months ago, nine months ago. How do you validate that with the board?

Gil Perry

13:33>> Basically, you know that everyone understands that we are now selling new offerings, and just from one of the customers, let's talk about Deep Nostalgia for a second.

Nathan Latka

13:49Sure.

Deep Nostalgia Success with MyHeritage

Gil Perry

13:50>> For a minute. In two months, with one customer, we got 80,000,000 animations.

14:01>> This is dozens of new 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, MyHeritage app, because of our technology, was first placed in the App Store, in the free apps, in 22 countries, above Facebook, TikTok,

Nathan Latka

14:31Instagram... But this your business. This is someone else's business and they're your customer. Correct?

Gil Perry

14:36>> I don't know. It's it's our business because we are receiving payments for the API calls.

Nathan Latka

14:41Yeah. But you don't own that company. They're just... They pay you for the API calls. There are no... That's like me saying, Tesla is a customer and they're 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.

Gil Perry

14:56>> Right, but basically I'm happy when my customers are happy.

Nathan Latka

15:01Well, of course, every founder is, but it'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 helped them rank so high? Right? You're getting more API calls.

Gil Perry

15:12>> Of course. Yeah. This this... All this success, it's not that, you know, Tesla are succeeding anyway. Right? But MyHeritage, this success is because of the use of our technology. So, and these are API calls to using our technology.

Nathan Latka

15:32And that's the main way you're capturing that value, is you just, you have a rate that you charge per number of calls and you upsell.

Gil Perry

15:38>> 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.

Revenue From the New Platform and the Legacy Product

Nathan Latka

15:55So if you're starting off

15:55at 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?

Gil Perry

16:02>> Ah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:03You can do that this year? Yeah. We are. Did

16:09actually take the historical product to zero revenue or is there still lingering revenue from that that you're supporting?

Gil Perry

16:16>> No, we still have revenue 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, basically, very fast.

Nathan Latka

16:32I'm surprised you have demand to go raise, you cost it a couple of dozens of millions, 24, 30, I'm surprised you have demand from VCs, I want to plan another 24 to 36,000,000 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 I didn't tell like how

Gil Perry

16:50>> much we sold until today.

Nathan Latka

16:53I

Gil Perry

16:54>> didn't specify how much we sold until today.

Nathan Latka

16:57Well, said on the new product, can you break a million dollars in revenue this year and you said yes.

Gil Perry

17:03>> 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 the new product.

Famous Five: Books, Mentors and Tools

Nathan Latka

17:11Okay. Very well, Gil, look, I'm rooting for you. I hope it goes well. With that in mind, let's wrap up here the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book?

Gil Perry

17:21>> No Rules Rules, the book about the Netflix culture. Number two, is

Nathan Latka

17:26there a CEO you're following or studying?

Gil Perry

17:29>> 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.

Nathan Latka

17:39Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building D-ID? Streamlit,

Gil Perry

17:44>> for building apps in Python for quick prototyping.

Nathan Latka

17:48Number four, how many hours of sleep are you getting every night?

Gil Perry

17:52>> I'm trying six hours, but usually it's much less.

Nathan Latka

17:59Your situation? Married, single, kiddos?

Gil Perry

18:02>> I'm single. I'm married to the startup, basically.

Nathan Latka

18:06Fair enough. Alright, and how old are you?

Gil Perry

18:08>> I'm 34.

Nathan Latka

18:0934. Last question. What's something you wish you knew when you were 20?

Gil Perry

18:16>> Basically, 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,

18:30>> and I wished I would have done much more than that.

Nathan Latka

18:35Well, 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 D-ID, face recognition technology, launched back in 2017. They've raised $24,000,000 today to scale the business. They're serving dozens of customers. They have ACVs that are on average above 6 figures, so above $100,000 as they have an enterprise sales motion. 24 folks on the team, 14

18:56engineers, one sales rep as Gil looks to scale with his two co founders. Gil, thanks for taking us to the top.

Gil Perry

19:02>> Thanks, Nathan. Have a good day.

Nathan Latka

19:06One more thing before you go. We have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. 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 alive. It is fun to watch every Thursday, one

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