How Gellify CEO Fabio Nalucci grew Gellify to $65M revenue and 75 customers in 2024.

jellified.com launched in 2017 they broke a million in Revenue the first year today doing 50 million in Revenue across 75 customers that's up from 25 million back in 2020 50 percent of the revenue in the SAS 50 is Consulting soda's first company for all cash is what ifrc to Accenture for call it somewhere between 50 and 100 million bucks now on round two here as he looks to continue to scale his race about 30 million bucks total after one was a series a of 15 million in 2019 and a 79 million post money valuation hey folks my guest today is Fabio naluichi he's been an entrepreneur investor and founded a company called jellify in 2017 which helps supports corporate Innovation specifically it's an innovation platform helping corporates innovate through B2B SAS products before jailba he sold i4c analytics to Accenture becoming sales Global lead for analytics software in 2020 he launched fndx Ventures a VC advisory company with 500 million AUM including its investment vehicle Fabio are you ready to take us to the top yeah thank you all right so real quick what did you learn selling i4c analytics to Accenture I put 2014 actually in U.S it was a very exciting experience I learned so much from from that experience in the past and uh it was the starting point of my investment career because it was very let's say liquid after that deal so that's great what was the sale price on that deal voice is still uh undisclosed because as you can imagine they are listed but I I can say that was more on the 100 million figure than on the 50 million figures just to uh so between 50 and 100 million closer to 100 million was a bunch of that stock or was it mostly cash for you no uh exclusively cash because as you can imagine they are listed so they don't do Equity swap in any case then they give you some shares but uh after you stay and any sort of bonus uh when you stay and Fabio was i-4c boots Raptor had you raised capital no I actually was uh the former way of doing and you know on Ventures because I started like in 20 in 2007 and so no Capital raised and completely bootstrapped so I was let's say the main shareholder wow that's very cool we have to get you to come speak to one of our events and tell us that story we love a bootstrapper you know exiting that's great let's fast forward now on to jellify what is gel-fi doing and is it a pure Place ass company is not completely pure SAS company because actually what we do is supporting uh clients large corporate mainly in doing corporate Innovation and uh we have an internal platform which is basically the typical SAS platform but at the same time we do some a bunch of services uh we're going to close 50 million this year in revenues but 0 million yes exactly and what was Revenue last year uh it was roughly 25 okay and how much of the 25 was SAS versus Consulting uh you can say roughly 50 percent is uh is something uh reasonable as a 12.5 million was SAS 12.5 Consulting yeah exactly interesting and so yeah and so I I mean uh this is something uh very interesting for uh because it's already uh a platform uh for Innovation which is uh uh already acting in three different GEOS Italy Spain and uh and Middle East uh uh I I choose that that areas because in that GEOS because uh honestly I think that uh teaching how to do innovation in us and UK is too aggressive and so I decided to stay in niche market but anyway very rewarding in terms of potential market share uh so that was the choice and we are now planning to um open up in a new GEOS in Europe and uh and then maybe in the future us as well so Fabio on just the SAS side what's the average company paying for your software or consider that um it really depends on on the vertical Market because uh we are much more aggressive in pricing for uh Banks uh just to make an example uh and and large Corp uh in the passive sector uh while we are less aggressive when it comes to uh what's the average if I force you into an average what would you say 100 Grand a year 10 grand a year it's more in a a 100K a year 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 the 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 evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder 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 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they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna 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 valuation 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 and how many customers today are you working with okay uh it's uh roughly uh you can count uh uh 25 large Corp clients which are my preferred one uh then we have uh roughly 50 in SME small medium Enterprises it means uh from 500 billion to 2 billion in revenues and honestly in in these clients the size of our platform is actually less than surprising I mean so Fabio if you do 25 million dollars in Revenue last year across about 75 customers that means the average customer paid something around 330 000 uh for the year is that about right yeah correct on average obviously you have some spike and you have some uh outlier in the uh what's the largest customer pay you per year any million dollar customers uh we we have a bank a large Banker for which we have uh uh roughly three million a year contracts multi-year so just to make an example this is what I Define as Pica or an outlier of our clients yeah this is great I mean obviously you can't build a 100 million dollar Revenue Business Without A couple that pay you more than a million per year did they start off at three million dollars a year or did you expand them and if so teach us how you drove the expansion uh it's a typical letter expander and uh and when we enter it was more like a 500K but then in a three years time we were able to grow that business till uh this three million uh multi-year for the next three years but what we are doing is actually uh having an Implement of internal users uh to expand to uh to a different level even because one of our strategy on platform is having some let's say a plug-in from our salsa portfolio because we also invest in startups that are useful to create uh more attraction into our platform so what we can have is or to Define meta platform so our proprietary platform with plugins coming from uh different enabling Technologies of our startups very cool now how many folks are full-time at the company today uh roughly 300 300 how many are engineers 85 oh wow okay maybe like 230 or so or Engineers yeah yeah absolutely we we have 10 small corporate functions some marketing as you can imagine Administration stuff and and a bunch of sales guys but most of the sales are driven by our let's say the network of our managing Partners now I guess walk me through the sales reps how many of them carry a quota uh we have uh what we we call a client success tribe uh that it is composed by 16 people nowaday okay interesting and I guess funding history you bootstrapped i4c before you solder Accenture are you boot dropping gel fire or have you raised no I raised uh till now 30 million okay take me to the last round what year was it 15. in 2015. no no it was sorry I said the 15 was the money race as the last round that was in 2019. 2019 you raised one five million dollars would you consider that your series A H probably I consider that this series a yes now we have some because we are profitable which is uh very important nowadays because as you can imagine in the last 12 months uh the The Works of VC change completely and uh we have some peace uh uh fund uh let's say asking to enter in the company with much much bigger round because there is a lot of interest for uh profitable companies now in 2019 we needed that round most folks in our series A's are selling 10 of the company were you also selling about 10 of the business uh it was slightly more than 10 percent okay uh but but yes I think uh is reasonable so something like a hundred million dollar post money valuation maybe you sold 15 yeah it's like slight slightly slightly less okay so it was in a 80s uh 79 to be seven to be 79. that's most money uh this was the pre-money free money okay cool that's very good so call it 99 posts that's great um any money raised before that or no yes yes we raised another 15 so the total race was 30 uh in three previous round and this was the last one and 15. and when so before 29. before 2019 when did you raise the other 15 million 2017 the first let's say seed rounder that was actually for uh for uh starting the company because I have a let's say a very good network of people saying okay if you start something else uh we give you the money directly and then another one in 2018 uh in the second half and then in the second half of 2019. so again in 2018 how much did you raise in that round that's what I was looking for so five million seed around 15 million or maybe five million pre-seed 10 million seed 15 million series a 30 million total race today many people are gonna go wait why do they give up a bunch of the company he's already rich doesn't he want to keep Equity why didn't he just fund it with his own money I think it's pretty common nowadays I I see a lot of uh let's say rich people anyway raising money from others I think that is part of of the reason is having uh some uh partners that are uh good enough to have an influence in the in the story just to make an example in the last round uh a very big Bank enter into the company and and so uh and that helps uh uh for example closing that that contract with the the bank I was mentioning before so um I I rather prefer to have some Partners in the in the journey that helps in in growing the company so that's something two other Revenue benchmarks I want to grab from you before we wrap up when did you cross 10 million in Revenue what year uh it was two years after launch of the company after the starting of the company now 2019 2019 and we started the company in November in November 2017 and so late 2019 was was around 10 million that's great and when did you that's before coffee yeah when did you pass a million in Revenue do you remember uh the first year okay wow yeah and that was just a big a big customer or people you'd already worked with no I already work with that I mean I it's not the thing you do when you are uh let's say a 23 years uh you know Founders I mean uh I'm a 47 so it was easy because a lot of clients trust me and so it was the first meeting was like uh asking for uh okay guys we start something new please sign here yeah yeah that's great stop you on that no let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book the book of Nike the story of Nike shoe dog is a good one number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh I I think uh that actually I don't want to be let's say very easy in the in the but Elon Musk is something I really follow and study uh for many different reasons number three what's your favorite online tool for building the company sorry you said uh your favorite online tool oh this is a very good one um I never thought about that honestly uh uh and um I I don't know uh what did you use this morning uh this morning I actually used my car because I was racing in mizano city so if no Fabio an online tool that you used figma Google Calendar or G Suite uh there's HubSpot honestly mainly email so uh I do 95 of my time using uh Outlook I mean it's all right I'm not a little too son okay number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night no I I typically sleep uh seven hours I go to bed at 10 at 10 pm and I wake up at five and situation married single kids uh you can imagine I have uh I have a wonderful wife and one daughter one so this is the reason why I go to sleep very yeah and you said you're 47 years old right yes last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. um uh I think um having better idea on how the VC works guys there I have it jellified.com launched in 2017 they broke a million in Revenue the first year today doing 50 million in Revenue across 75 customers that's up from 25 million back in 2020 50 of the revenue the SAS 50 is Consulting soda's first company for all cash is what i4c to Accenture or call it somewhere between 50 and 100 million bucks now on round two here as he looks to continue to scale his race about 30 million bucks total after one was a series a of 15 million in 2019 and a 79 million post money valuation Fabio thank you for taking us to the top thank you very much one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 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