How Datanchor CEO Harihara Indukuri grew Datanchor to $1.5M revenue and 33 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is emory coxell he's the founder of data anchor and a professor at ohio state university he received his phd from mit and has published more than 100 papers on top venues along with having eight patents issued he's testified to the congress and among his awards include the nsf career award and hp innovation research award now award now building anchormydata.com which enables data to protect itself i'm ready to take to the top perfect thanks for having me you bet okay so talk to me a little bit when a customer starts paying you or starts using you what are they getting what do you help them with so it is a kind of a move away from the traditional parameter centric model which is basically about building castles fortresses around your network which we used to presume the activity around data is right but in today's world the activity is everywhere data is everywhere you're accessing your data from home from your mobile devices not just from the network also it's in the cloud iots and so on and so forth so what they get is uh you know data security in the form of zero trust integrated down to each file so once you integrate security into data itself as opposed to activity around data what you get is basically security traveling with the data you don't care where you your users your collaborators are accessing the data it is secure anywhere and you know as a result it simplifies your workflows it simplifies collaboration and helps you become efficient without sacrificing uh from the security side i see and when when customers sign up for this help me understand your pricing what are they paying on average per month to use your technology so our msrp is just like any sas product it's based on a perceived so they're paying 16 per seat per a a month right now to to get everything so it's unlimited data it doesn't limit the amount of data they protect they can protect from you know one file all the way to the entire drivers or all their data we don't care the amount of data but it's a user-based model and emery on average when a team signs up for you are they signing up one person or cto or a hundred people what's the average number of seats oh it it so we have customers with a few thousand users we have customers with 10 users so it's a highly variable the value is basically again as i said integrating the security to the data but right now the fastest growing customer vertical is small to mid-size businesses because it's easy for them you just switch it on within a matter of 90 minutes including the user training so i would say our you know the largest customer segment is small to mid-sized businesses okay but help put put a seat i understand you have a small one at 10 seats and a big one at thousands of seats but your sweet spot is what 200 300 seats on average that's correct it's i would say 100 to 200 seats 100 to 200 seats is sort of your sweet spot okay got it that makes sense let's put all this on a timeline when did you launch the business what year so the business foundation of the business was to 2019 it took us two years to get the product to be very simple you know transparent fully transparent and integrable to any kind of platform so we have literally kicked off our poc program i would say last year so we have been around distributing the product signing partnership signing customers about for a year right now oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so attraction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founderpath and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview okay for a year that's fantastic how did you fund the business when you were pre-revenue for two years did you raise yes i did we had a pre-seed round there was quite a bit of interest in fact there were like four major vcs that funded our pre-seed round and then we switched to ac plus what we called a c plus how much how much was the precede the precede was uh close to one and a half million dollars and that was in 2020 that was in yeah 2019 that was in 2019 okay okay and sorry i cut you off go ahead and keep going no that that's supported our product development and getting the product to a level where it is so simple that it becomes a no-brainer to deploy and after two years we have uh raised the seat plus round which is a little north of three million dollars and we are currently on that round on that spawning ground and we are we have the detraction yeah go ahead okay got it so you've raised 1.5 back in 2019 you currently have an open seed round uh or seed plus round that's around three million that's correct yeah we we haven't exceeded already we have still opening for a few small checks how how much would you raise at the current valuation obviously you're managing dilution here so how much room do you have left correct so we have uh you know 250 000 more left okay so you're basically and the three million's already wired as a done deal right yes oh i see so you leave a little bit open for maybe some strategic angels who come along or something like that but it's pretty much done absolutely yeah that's that's where we are okay this makes sense so about four point you know 4.5 million raised today another 250k left on the current round that's how you funded growth to date um talk to me a little bit more about the team this sounds like it should be very heavy heavy engineering how many folks are full-time today we have 15 folks full time today and growing so again as you have mentioned heavy on engineering and development i'm coming from a technical background myself which helps build the team like i mean you know train even the team from my academic background you know most of my students uh either become professors or get positions in silicon valley but a few of them we based on their skills we you know they're both into our strategy and our you know uh targets and they they stay here at the heartland and contribute directly to us so majority of the team is on the development side technical side but we are also growing on the business side and we have made some very key hires lately on the business development and go to market side lately emery how many of the 15 are engineers uh so um i would say uh 11 of them are engineers and four of them on the rest of the business and growth and customer support site i see now talk us back to the special moment you know you start selling in 2021 you get your 19 you know 20 20 20 21 you get your first customer how did you land that first customer where did you find them oh it was great so it it is one of the largest basically electric car charging organizations in the world and you know they we got the connection and it became clear that the need that they have is in alignment with our value prop so we had a few meetings with them and you know like we have integrated to the platform that they're using the cloud platform that they're using and they have started using it if kind of minor customizations and then boom they...