How Fathom.ai CEO Richard White grew to $30M revenue and 8 customers in 2025.

He Gave His AI Away for Free and Hit $30M Revenue - YouTube

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(00:00) There is a multi-billion dollar war happening in the world of AI note-takers. I'm sure you've seen them in your Zoom meetings. Fireflies did a tender offer at $1 billion last year in 2025 and says they've been profitable since 2023. And Otter says it ended 2025 at a $100 million run rate. Zoom, Google, and Microsoft are also launching their own AI native note-takers. (00:23) And then there's Richard White. He's building Fathom. >> We basically went zero to one, one to 10, and 10 to 30 in the first three years of monetization. He is by far the most capital efficient of all the note-taker CEOs, having raised just $30 million to grow well past $30 million of annual revenue. (00:40) But how does he manage his cash? Yeah, probably never more than a million in the bank. Yeah, 1.5 to two, one to two million constantly. But how did he grow so quickly when he raised such a small amount? Well, he gave the product away for free, which was shocking because of this. >> That gave us the confidence to say, we can give this away for free and actually lose a lot of money. (00:57) We were losing like $50 a user per month in the first, you know, couple of years of Fathom. Then he hired sales people before there was anything to sell. Why would he do this? I had hired three of my best sales people from UserVoice, and I said, "I've got nothing for you to sell today, but one day I will. (01:12) " If you're building an AI tool and you want to beat your VC-backed competitors, this episode is for you. Watch until the end and you'll learn three things. Number one, how to use your data as a moat. I'm talking integrations, CLI, MCPs, you name it. >> So, we're actually going to have first-class direct integrations with Claude and ChatGPT, and MCP server for anything else you might use. (01:31) And we're also looking at adding in kind of like support for like people running kind of local bots as well, local agents. Number two, the six-part retention playbook Richard used to extend the lifetime value of his customers despite a very competitive market. >> I'm a big fan of kind of like attacking metrics in order of risk. (01:48) So, I think a lot of people like they launch and they're trying to monetize and get acquisition and prove retention. And I'm a big fan of like, okay, let's take those five kind of metrics and take them one at a time. >> And number three, the top growth channel Richard and Fathom used to grow from 1 million to 30 million of revenue very quickly. Let's jump in. (02:04) Hey folks, my guest today is Richard White. He's the founder and CEO of Fathom, an AI meeting assistant he launched in 2020 after running UserVoice for over a decade. He's raised about 17 million bucks including a recent Series A, scaled to millions of revenue and built one of the fastest growing AI productivity tools with thousands of companies using it daily. (02:21) Richard, you ready to take us to the top? Let's do it. All right. I was just thinking like what could I share on my screen so that people see how a bit of a power user I am, but there's a bunch of customer information that I probably can't share. But you you can look in your database. We are a daily user of Fathom at FounderPath. (02:36) And I think to give the audience context on why I wanted Richard on. Guys, there's a lot of noise in this space right now. He has competitors that are sort of very loud and out there. He sort of built this in a very sort of a way that we like to teach on the podcast, which is capital efficient, distribution oriented, and user-focused. (02:51) So Richard, on that note, I mean maybe that's a good place to start. You one of your recent rounds here. First off, let me just take a step back. For people that don't know what the product is, why don't you give the product pitch? Sure. Yeah, so Fathom is a free AI meeting assistant. (03:05) Uh you know, we take notes on your Zoom, Google Meet, uh you know, Microsoft Teams calls. Uh as you mentioned, we've been around a couple years. Uh you know, I think we are not the loudest person in our space, but we really pride ourselves on two things. One is like the quality of the output, highest quality transcript, the highest quality summaries. (03:22) Uh and now we pride ourselves a lot on being the thing that plugs in to all the other tools you're using. So we're about to launch an MCP server. We have our API. And all that stuff is available for free. And so we really hang our hat on quality and giving a lot away for free, frankly. (03:37) That's part of our distribution kind of story, if you will. Mhm. Well, so let's jump into that. I mean, I think one of the early investors you brought in was was Zoom's fund. I mean, clearly trying to go deeper on an integration there. Does that turn off all the other providers in terms of them wanting to give you access when they know Zoom's in your sort of cap table? No, I think you know, I think for the most part the interesting thing about building these businesses they're not really APIs. (03:57) They're all kind of undocumented. Like you know, historically we captured stuff with with bots and I think we'll talk about how we were going to have some not bot options here coming up soon. But they're kind of undocumented APIs. So it's not really much any of the platforms can do. And candidly I think Zoom for a while has been the leader in this space. (04:12) It's certainly for the people we're going after which are customer facing teams and organizations. You know, a lot of them are Zoom first, right? So no, it's not you know, I think something we did earlier on in this journey and it really paid dividends being, you know, we were one of the first apps on the Zoom app marketplace. (04:28) You know, Zoom invested, Zoom heavily promoted us and they've been a fantastic partner. Yeah, I found an example guys just so you can see why we ended up I'll actually I'll give this analogy. We use cuz there's everyone's using different call recorders, right? We use Fathom. Fathom is like our favorite pair of jeans, right? We wear them six times a week. (04:44) It's a pretty much always open. We use it the most. A tool like you know, Grain obviously also in the space. We use them as like if we want to put on and do like a very special sort of thing. It's like a think of it like a SWAT thing. We put on our army uniform. We maybe do it once a month and like we'll we'll do that, right? So no bot in the experience. (05:01) It's off to the side. It's a transcript happening. Then there's the others which I would describe like Addio for example, ATTI IO start off as a CRM. I would view them as sort of like socks, right? You sort of have to have them, but they're not making any sort of style statements like my jeans would. (05:15) And you know, they record the calls, but when you go into the CRM, they don't have like I'm going to show you guys here what what Fathom does. Guys, I found a call I can actually share here uh cuz there's no information. Like they just make it so easy inside of here to get the key takeaways, topics instantly. Like the second the call stops, this basically pops out which is valuable. (05:32) So very tight feedback loop. The transcript is very easy to copy and paste which Richard, I don't know if you can track how much your users do this, but all these foundation models where you can upload project files to teach it a brain, so much of that is us copying. It's me interviewing my here my database team and putting it into Claude project and saying help me understand how to code on GitLab using conductor based off what my engineering team taught me on fathom. (05:56) Are you seeing that as a use case a ton? 100%. So we're we're kind of we're about to do this really big launch next week and part of it is a whole new redesign desktop experience. Part of that is making this process so much easier. So we're actually going to have first class direct integrations with Claude and chat GPT and MC piece over for anything else you might use. (06:16) And we're also looking at you adding in kind of like support for people running kind of local bots as well, local agents, where we're going to start admitting all of your meeting data, like the summary you see here, the transcript, directly to your file system. So that you can just immediately you know, you don't have to make any API calls sort of thing. (06:30) So yeah, we see that a lot and we want we want to encourage that. We want to make that as easy as possible. We want Fathom to be the easiest, you know, meeting platform to get your data out of it cuz it's your data. But that's not what you just said is not standard. I mean Otter.ai doesn't even have a copy transcript button in their interface. (06:47) It drives me insane, so I don't use them because it's like it's a walled garden, it's an Apple approach. In this space, why did you make the decision that the best way to win is to be the opposite of a walled garden? I mean I think it's a little contrarian. I think you know, going back to kind of the fundraising strategy, I think a lot of our competitors have now raised a lot of money and I think it's forcing them to monetize at the individual level. (07:07) We have kind of two products. We have a product that we were kind of giving away for free to individuals and then we have another product that sits on top of that for people that are running teams that helps them kind of understand what's happening across all these meetings their team is having. (07:17) And we kind of can monetize there which allows us to be really generous to individuals even if you never join a team. And that's kind of our strategy and so frankly I look at this as like we're happy to give away the data because we're always upstream from any use case there and so like over time there's always things we can first party in, right? I'm not you know, I want to support the sales person that's building their own CRM in Claude code today because we can learn a lot from that person about what things we can build into the into the product in the (07:39) future, right? Mhm. Mhm. This makes a lot of sense. I want to get the growth story. Before I do that though, I don't even know what we pay you guys, but it's never come up because I just know we get so much more value relative to what we're paying. But what is the average customer paying you today? >> Average customer, so we price pretty aggressively. (07:56) Like we I tell our team we never want to lose on price. We price ourselves even on parity with people that we think have much lower quality transcription and summaries. But the average user is about $25 if you look across all our plans but $25 per seat. And then we probably average I think around 8 to 10 seats is our average. (08:13) Interesting. Interesting. Okay, so I mean can I take what is that 8 * 25 means the average company on your platform might be like what is that? 200 bucks a month something like that. Yeah, something like that. That's right. Interesting. And is that do you see yourself trending more towards how do we go get the enterprise with a thousand seats or no, let's go get every new Vibe coder using a $25 one seat plan on on Favro? I mean we we generally yeah, so we generally monetize kind of you know, teams and individuals. You know, I don't (08:41) think we're at the place where we're seeing enterprise. We certainly see that you know, it's a wide distribution. If that average is 10, you know, it ranges from two seats up to 200 seats sort of thing. I think the enterprise itself you know, I'd hesitate to say I don't think we do much with the enterprise today by the more traditional definition of like thousands and thousands of employee companies. (09:01) I don't think those companies in general are like yet digesting tools like this, right? I think there's there's still a lot that they're still figuring out their AI strategies. They're still still figuring out their data governance strategies around this. But what we have seen consistently over the last three years is like every year we keep seeing larger and larger companies. (09:16) You know, three years ago I saw nothing but 10 person companies, 20 person companies. Two years ago, you know, 50 person companies. We just see this kind of melt up. And I think that works really well because I think one of the biggest risks to doing a startup is like you try to jump to enterprise and you abandon what's working which with kind of small and medium sized businesses. (09:33) The enterprise need as you know, like they need a ton of features that that lower smaller companies don't do not. And I think it's easy to sometimes commit yourself like if I add this one feature, we'll be enterprise ready. And it's like, no, no, no, there's 50 other things after you add that one thing. So, we've done a really good I've really proud of our discipline on this of like not chasing those big deals, but consistently getting better and better about servicing large companies every week. (09:51) >> Interesting. Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So, sign up at founderpath. (10:09) com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, "Nathan, I found you through YouTube." and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Tell me more about the backstory here in terms of your own journey. I know you are you This is a long Anytime I see someone 18 years at a startup, I go respect. (10:27) This is a guy or a gal that doesn't that does not quit. What was UserVoice and was this bootstrapped? Did you raise? What did you learn there? Yeah, so the backstory of my journey like so my background's computer science. I was an engineer by trade. Early in my career, I kind of said, "Hey, okay coder, but I'm actually a better designer. (10:41) " And I actually found a way to kind of like push myself onto a team that happened to be in the first batch of Y Combinator, which at the time didn't mean anything. Now obviously means. And so I worked with Justin Kahn and Emmett Shear, who went on to do Twitch, on this thing that was basically Google Calendar before Google Calendar. (10:51) And one of our big challenges there was like gathering customer feedback at scale. Kiko started in the same room as Reddit. So, UserVoice you could think of it really as Reddit for customer feedback. And so we were trying to use crowdsourcing basically to like organize feedback at scale. And it was a fun business. (11:04) It was like, you know, I call it my finishing school for startups cuz I was there for about 12 years. It started off as like a PLG company before we, you know, called things PLG. It ended up as like an enterprise business that we were selling to like Yahoo and Microsoft and Netflix and Meta and stuff like that. (11:16) And honestly, Fathom then kind of came out of some things like every startup I've done it's come out of problems I ran into with the previous one. And so, UserVoice came out of my challenge of getting feedback at Kiko. And Fathom came out of my challenges of just taking notes and doing user research at UserVoice. And so it was like early 2020 on a ton of Zoom calls like a lot of us were at that point. (11:31) I was actually researching some other products and I was just like, gosh, I went back-to-back meetings and me trying to talk to people and be a stenographer at the same time and peck out some notes and clean up this mess afterwards. Like, this is an insane way to live. And so, we really kind of in 2020 developed the core hypothesis that like, why doesn't this exist today? Why isn't there a note-taker for everyone? And tools like Gong existed at that point, which were like sales-specific versions of this that were very expensive and we were (11:53) like, why is it only for sales? Well, the answer in 2020 was transcription was exceptionally expensive and there was an AI, it's hard to remember this, but like the first generation of AI tools was really mediocre. And so, we kind of bet Fathom on two things happening. One, we thought transcription costs was going to zero and we thought it was kind of a commodity. (12:07) And that gave us the confidence to say, we can give this away for free and actually lose a lot of money. We were losing like $50 a user per month in the first, you know, couple years of Fathom. >> I have to drill deeper on that now. What was the biggest month of losses? Do you remember in the early years? Are we talking like a million net burn in one month? >> No. (12:21) No, thankfully it was one of those things where like we were still small enough that like, you know, it never was, you know, it's kind of funny, transcription costs dropped to near zero right around the time, if they didn't, we would've been screwed. It was one of these things where like we were directionally correct. If transcription engines or like Whisper and things come out a year later, we're probably dead. (12:35) And so, yeah, so it was like this fun little game of chicken we were playing, right? >> And back to go deep on Fathom, but close the user voice story first. What was the best year of revenue when you were there and how did you transition out? There's a lot of founders right now in a business where they raised 9 million of capital like you did going, I really want to go to this other thing, but I don't know how to tell my investors. (12:52) I don't know how to tell my team. How do I transition out? Yeah, we got to about 10 million in revenue at that company. It was pretty steady growth over the, you know, I think we didn't monetize it for about 2 years. So, over 10 years to that 10 million dollar amount. I ask my myself two questions at the end of every year. (13:07) One is, am I uniquely qualified to run this business? And is this business uniquely qualified to teach me something? And in 2019 for the first time I said no to both of those questions. And once I kind of had that clarity, I was ready to move on. What I actually did was I kind of took a group of people in the org and I started working on other projects. (13:21) Like, I kind of moved myself into a quasi PM position, because that's kind of my role. I elevated who I was planning to be CEO to like a president position. And we didn't say this is the transition yet, but kind of like giving you the keys to the core business and I'm going to help you by trying to build like a new business on the side. (13:33) And really it's a way for me to like kind of slowly transition, you know, still be here without kind of looming over your shoulder, if you will. And so we had kind of like a 9-month overlap period. And then it was like, "Great, you got this car. I I'll get off at the next stop." And so it worked pretty seamlessly, to be honest. (13:46) Okay, now going into Fathom, walk me through how you how you got your first 10 customers. When was the first line of code written for Fathom and when How did you get your first 10 customers? First line of code was like fall 2020. You know, I didn't customers didn't come for a long time. I'm a big fan of kind of like attacking metrics in order of risk. (14:00) I think a lot of people like they launch and they're trying to monetize and get acquisition and prove retention. And I'm a big fan of like, okay, let's take those five kind of metrics and take them one at a time. And so we first focused on free user retention. Once we felt like we had that, then we focused on onboarding activation. (14:13) Then we focused on acquisition. Then we focused on referral. And the last thing we're going to focus on monetization. But I think to answer the spirit of your question, you know, we spent probably the first year me just hustling trying to get people to use the product. And I was like, "I'm going to make, you know, cuz it's something that's to show me the failure modes for this thing, right? It's an undocumented API, it's joining meetings, it's building these bots. (14:30) " And so I remember I would kind of like every week get 30 people to like volunteer to try my product. And you know, I'd handhold them through the setup process and then see if they stuck with it. And I think we went through about, you know, 800 people before we got to a cohort where I put 50 people in it and I got 30 people, you know, 3 weeks later, right? So what month or year was launch? >> Launch was almost exactly a year after first line of code. (14:49) So it was August of 2021. And we managed to Zoom launch a marketplace and we were one of their launch partners. We were one of like 50 apps that launched on that marketplace. So that was what was driving kind of our like, "Okay, we have to launch at this point," if you will. Forcing function. When was your first dollar of revenue? Was it within a month of launch or later? >> Things happens in August for us. (15:07) So a year later we got our first drop of revenue. And frankly, if I had been up to me, it probably would have been 2 years. We actually really wanted to focus more on just the free user experience and referral loops and stuff like that. We had been doing a funny thing where like we actually raised about 30 million to date. (15:20) We didn't really ever talk about the first 10 million we raised. We raised during 2020 and 2021. It was like a very heady time where it was very easy to raise. We were raising money every 6 months. We never had more than 12 months of runway for the first 2 or 3 years of the company. >> So 2021 to 2022 just to be clear there you'd raise about 10 million bucks from super super angel rounds that kind of thing. (15:37) No, at that point we'd only raised probably about three or four. So we raised we're raising basically like two two and a half a year sort of the fund this if you will. >> Okay, take me into 2023. What what happens? >> 2023 so you know we kind of put some of our growth projects on hold. We said you know early 2022 we got to figure out this we always knew how we'd want to monetize with like a team product not by charging individuals. (15:56) We said great we got to go run at this. About a year before that I had hired three of my best sales people from UserVoice and I said I've got nothing for you to sell today but one day I will. And I went I want you to join now and I want you to become a real expert in the product and get to know our customers and just you know kind of be a customer success person. (16:10) And then one day I'm going to tell you like all right it's time to sell and you're going to hit the ground running. And like I said at least in this moment it was like okay it's time to sell and they're like what are we selling? I was like well here's the 10 features we're going to sell. (16:19) And they're like how many of those exist today? I was like one of them. And so we literally built out a pitch deck and they're like cool we're selling kind of the road map here right? And so literally have this product called team you know fathom for teams and you know it was a pitch deck for the most part and thankfully you know we had so many users and they've been using this completely for free there's so much good will there that a lot of people were like look I don't know if you ever built these features but we love the product so much we want to stick around. (16:39) We will pay this price. >> How many are we talking Richard? How many free users in 2022? Tens of thousands. Wow okay but not 100,000 between 10 and 100,000. Yeah yeah yeah like in the thousands. And so yeah so we kind of ran at them and so and first month we got to 100k in MRR and then >> In August you had your first ARR revenue and by by September >> 100k sorry 100k ARR sorry sorry sorry. (16:59) Oh god I was going to say holy mackerel you hit the ground running. Yeah no we but overall we basically went in the first year we went zero to a million. Took me about a year to get to a million in ARR. It was a pretty steady ramp but that was kind of a slog cuz we were still you know and then we kind of at the end of that we got close to a million that unlocked kind of like the last kind of seed round that we raised. (17:17) That was how we kind of bridged the gap that we had created by not fundraising a lot in 2020. What was that 2023 lap quote last seed round? You're talking 3, 4 million? >> It's about three, yeah, exactly. >> Three, interesting. Now, take me into something you do something very unique. I want to give you the chance to sort of shine here and explain your strategy because most founders don't do this. (17:33) I mean, you people would say, "Oh, I want to go raise from Andreessen or someone." And you're like, "Screw that. I want as many customers to participate in our fundraise as possible. It's maybe a good retention strategy. We're going to go up on WeFunder or Kings Crowd." What was the strategy here? >> We I think from the from the get-go we always had kind of a contrarian fundraising philosophy. (17:50) I mean, even before we got to these like WeFunder things, we had a you know, we raised that 10 million dollars, the first 10 million we raised up until the seed round. Like I said, we did it over like seven, eight different rounds or tranches, if you will. Like we did it all on safe notes for the most part. One part was priced. (18:03) And we did it from a lot of people. We had like 100 people on the cap table for that 10 million. And so it was kind of intentional. I actually, you know, I've I've done this game before. I felt very confident in my abilities in the like, you know, kind of formation phase of the company. And I said, "Look, I don't want to just go get one institutional investor that'll do the whole round. (18:17) I actually really want to hear from like a bunch of different voices." And so it gave us flexibility. We used fundraising almost as a currency to build a coalition. So like early on, I raised money from Zoom. And anyone who had anything to do with Zoom. Like I raised money from from Jim of Maven Ventures who who named Zoom. (18:32) Like I I was like, "Cool, we need to get in Zoom. We're going to raise money from everyone we need." Oh, at some point we realized we're going to sell to Sales. And so I raised money from everyone who had anything to do with sales software. And then this was kind of a natural extension of that where, you know, at some point we were actually we gave equity to like our first 100 users. (18:45) Actually I think it's maybe like 200, 250. Like borrowing kind of a page out of the crypto playbook. So it's like, "If you were an early power user, we gave you a small bit of equity in Fathom." >> .01% like give me a cent a range. >> It's small, right? Like it's thousands of dollars worth like today. (18:57) It's not like millions of dollars worth today. But it's something. And And at some point it's like, you know, our investor is like, "What are you doing?" I was like, "No, no, no, this is going to work." And I was like, "Well, I want to keep doing this, but maybe we should stop giving away for free at this point. Like we have a real business. (19:07) " And so we kind of set up this principle where every time we raised a round, we reserved 15% of it to for our users to invest. And we did that at our seed round and at our series A. You know, worldwide fundraising I think is a little crazy these days. Trying to find this from kind of non-typical investors. You know, whose money would I rather have rather have? Someone where we're one of only two investments they do in a year or someone where they've invested in 15 things this month, right? And so, in general I was looking for That's also (19:29) why I liked having 100 angels. I feel like in general a lot of these angels it was they had more skin in the game. They're more willing to make that call for me to that company that where we needed it in or something like that. So, yeah. You gamified, you viral coefficiented your fundraising process, which is great. (19:44) All right, and is everything else here pretty accurate? You had raised this at a 73 million valuation. It looks like Is this right? You're doing about 7.7 million of ARR then? Is that right? >> I think when we raised our series A, we were doing actually around like I guess by the time it got announced maybe I think when we first papered it it was like 3 and 1/2 million, but we were ramping pretty quickly. (20:00) We basically went zero to one, one to 10, and 10 to 30 in the first three years of monetization. >> Wow. Okay, so 2025 you broke 30 million of revenue ARR. Wow. Are you comfortable sharing where you're at today or what your plan is for 2026, the stretch goal? We are still competitive enough. I mentioned this I like kind of laying low. (20:16) So, I'm not going to tell people where we are today. I'll tell you where we were last year sort of thing. But I like our strategy is just to be kind of like we're we're under the radar. We're one of the top three people by usage in the space, but we're not even I think in the top five or 10 by fundraising amount. So, I'm happy with that position. (20:31) No, no, I didn't because I know your personality a bit I had to ask. I didn't expect an answer though, but I know the growth is impressive. It doesn't surprise me because of how addicted I am to the product. So, it makes a lot of good sense there. I want to end on two questions. One, comfortable sharing how many customers today? And two, what AI features are you thinking about sort of you know, the next one, two months that might be coming out? >> So, as I said, we've got a big launch coming out. (20:51) We're rolling out the ability to capture meetings in any different kind of modality. Like today we've got video capture. My new favorite mode is audio capture with just the audio not the video cuz I really like being able to get the notes and click on them and hear that part of the conversation. We've also got transcript only, which you know, some of our top competitors have. (21:06) So, we're watching those two new modes. You can capture without a bot in the meeting, which you're increasingly seeing is something people would like to see, right? Especially in these more sensitive meetings or internal meetings where we don't want as many bots as people. So, we're moving directly away from the bot. We're also as I mentioned, we're rolling out this stuff to make it really easy to work with AI. (21:21) The feature I'm really excited about is something we call Ask Fathom. It sits on top of all of your team's meetings. And it's now a thing where you can ask it any question. And you you referenced some of these like, you know, AI CRMs and stuff like that. And it's funny because I I've seen some of these ads about like, oh, you can just ask AI anything. (21:35) You can ask us that, too. You can ask Fathom now, "What are the trends in competitors mentioned over the last 3 weeks? What are the features that are coming up that we don't have good answers for?" You can also set up alerts on these things. Tell me anytime there's a pricing...