HBox Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

[00:00] Hey guys, recording this here on what is it? Friday the nineteenth. Maybe you're seeing this on Monday at the latest, but wanna let you know we are almost sold out for Foundercomp Sorry, Founder500 in Austin, Texas here in about a week. It's gonna be an amazing event. 500 B2B SaaS founders. I'm looking at the attendee list. There's almost 60 founders with more than $67,000,000 in ARR. It's an incredible group of group. There's over 150 [00:27] with more than 1,000,000, more than a million revenue. It's an incredible group. You don't wanna miss it. Grab your hotel, grab your flight, grab a ticket right now. I'll put the link in the bio in the description here on YouTube. And I think there's only about three tickets left. Okay, about three tickets left. I'd love to see you guys there. Don't be bashful. Grab your ticket now. Hey, folks. My guest today is Banu Prasad. He's a [00:49] serial entrepreneur, currently the Founder and CEO of hbox, a virtual first care platform company that helps customers in eight US states and is growing quickly. They've participated aggressively in the Indian investment ecosystem both as a venture partner in O'Reilly Ventures and as an angel investor. Banu, you ready to take us to the top? [01:06] >> Yeah. Sure. So it's basically my background is I'm a [01:10] Well, Banu let me let me me let me lead here. Okay. Let me let me set you up for success with my audience. So, first off, if you wanna follow along, the the link is hbox.ai. And so, Banu, start with the start with the platform. Right? So when you say building virtual first care platform, what does that mean? [01:25] >> So we are we are an end to end platform and services company, and we serve clinics across eight states in US where we not only provide the hardware and software technology, but we also provide end to end care delivery services like clinical care coaches with billing infrastructure and so on. So the basically, we do is we work with clinics, mostly specialty clinics like pulmonologist, cardiologist. What do you mean? [01:58] Sorry, Banu, you keep using the word clinics. I don't understand. [02:01] >> So they are outpatient healthcare providers. Like if you, these are individual clean practices or group of physicians come together and create a legal entity that work with the hospital systems. So basically, those are healthcare clinics which specializes in three specialty areas which is pulmonology, cardiology and nephrology. We work with these [02:30] >> physicians to create a virtual clinic inside their clinic. So, what does that really mean is we provide the required hardware and software for their patients and work with them to help them to monitor and manage their chronic condition. [02:48] Understood. So you're selling to physicians that work with hospital chains, you're selling directly to those clinics. When you say hardware and software plus services, if you look at your total revenue from last year, what percent would you say was hardware sales? [03:00] >> So we don't the hardware is not sold as hardware. It's an integrated subscription model. So we lease those hardware to the patients. So our revenue is all subscription revenue. So we don't sell the hardware as a separate. [03:15] So when you say the hardware is leased, what does the hardware, do you have, by way, can we see the hardware? Do you have it there near your desk? Can you hold it up? [03:21] >> No, unfortunately, I don't have it right now, but it essentially consists of a 10 inch display tablet, which we call as health pod that comes with different medical devices that gets attached to that tablet depending upon the chronic condition that we are managing for the patient. So, in case of pulmonologist, it can be as simple as pulse oximeter plus a spiro meter. In case of cardiologist, it would be a blood pressure monitor and in case of [03:57] >> it can be a weighing scale. It can be a blood sugar monitor. And depending upon the chronic condition I see. The common element is that yeah. [04:05] Go ahead. [04:06] Please. Sorry. I wanna stay focused on on the hardware for a second. Okay? So the hbox smart kit I see on your website, which it looks like there's an iPad thing. There's a little thermometer gauge thing. There's a little finger thing to get your your blood pressure, I think, and a couple other tools. What does that hbox smart kit that I'm looking on your website, what does that cost you to purchase from the manufacturers? [04:24] >> So we for us landed, it comes to close to $200 landed in. So we do these are customized. Even though they are standardized product, it's branded hbox and we work with certain, know, so volume commitment and so on. So the total cost for us is around $200 landed. [04:45] And what volume did you have to commit to with the manufacturer to get your price down to 200 landed? [04:50] >> So anything between it depends on the iPad volume, such medical devices. It's somewhere around 3,000 units. [04:59] 3,000 units. [05:00] >> Okay. Time for manufacturing. [05:03] Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 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 Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect [05:26] your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time. You can see what it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're gonna [05:51] get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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 [06:13] not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round 3.7 raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna 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 [06:38] going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. 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 [07:00] if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. 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. Alright. Let's jump back into [07:26] the interview. And and how is it $200 landed? Mean, there's an iPad I see in this package. I know iPads just by themselves are $500, $600, $700. [07:35] >> Yeah. So these are it looks like an iPad. Those are Android tablets, which are customized for hbox, so they come with our built in software. So they are not an iOS platform, are an Android. [07:49] Okay, same question though, an Android tablet is going to cost just by itself more than $200. [07:55] >> Correct. That's where I meant that we tap into the, my previous venture was in the same space, so we work with contract manufacturers in China to bring down the cost. [08:08] So you can get if you purchase three just talk about Android tablets for a second. If you purchase 3,000 units and commit to 3,000 units, you can get your cost for those Android tablets under, you know, 150 a unit. [08:18] >> Correct. That's right. [08:19] Oh, wow. Okay. Got it. Okay. [08:21] So your hardware's 200 landed. [08:22] That makes a lot of sense. And then what do you lease? You mentioned you lease it back to your customers, the physicians What's and [08:29] the monthly lease payment? [08:30] >> So we don't let me give you walk you through our business model. Right? We don't lease hardware separately. What we do is we charge per patient on a per month basis anywhere between depending on the volume of the clinic, anywhere between 60 to $79 per patient per month. Okay. [08:50] And and what does that per patient? Is that number of patients in the system? Is that just the patients that visited that month? [08:56] >> No. Those are the patients that whom we have delivered this service with which includes the hardware. [09:05] Okay. My question is a physician or clinic over a five year period might see a thousand patients. [09:11] >> Correct. [09:11] But last month, maybe they only saw 10 patients. Are you billing against the 10 patients or the thousand patients? [09:16] >> No. 10 patients, but all those 10 patients would have been given this hardware that they can carry to the patient's home, and this is a subscription that patient, the physician prescribes to the patient for a twelve month period. So we So [09:33] if I'm physician running a clinic in Kansas here in The US, and I go this month in August and I visit 20 clients in person at their house using your hardware kit, I will pay you for 20 [09:48] >> No. No. No. Nathan, you got it wrong. It is that when the patient visit the physician, the the patient gets this kit to take it home. [09:59] >> It's not the physician using using it. And when the patient takes their gets the kit to take it home and then they take use the kit on a daily basis and they are remotely monitored. And then we have our care coaches who help them to manage the chronic condition. [10:16] I see. So the clinic in Kansas, me, I'm a physician, I might see 20 patients in a month. I'm gonna wanna give each of these 20 patients take to their house this tool that you gave me, the hbox smart kit. And then you're gonna bill me $60 per me as the clinic, 60 to $80 per month per per package or client that I visited the 20. [10:38] >> Correct. Correct. [10:39] I see. [10:39] >> I see. And the reason why you would do as a physician is because Medicare reimburses for these services. So Medicare reimburses anywhere between 140 to $200 per patient per month for you as a physician, and we help that process as well. We make the claims. We get the reimbursement for you as a physician. And then we charge yeah. [11:01] So last month, how many physicians are paying you at least a dollar? [11:07] >> So we today on our platform, we have close to 100 providers, what we call physicians, and we are generating our ARR right now is 1,400,000. [11:19] And so what does that mean? Those 100 physicians, how many clients? Like, many kits have they handed out? [11:23] >> So totally, it's around 1,800 right now. [11:28] >> Sorry. [11:29] So one thousand eight hundred. [11:30] >> Yeah. [11:31] Okay. And so just to be clear, 1,800, you pay you pay $200 a pop. So that's $360,000 for those kids. Where did you get that money to buy make the initial hardware purchase? [11:43] >> Are initially the seed there is a two round of funding we have done. One is a seed round, which is a small safe note that we raised capital last year, August. And then right now, we did a pre series a safe note as well. So the my equity is through safe note. So when you [12:01] did when you did the round last year, how much was that for? [12:05] >> That was a safe note. So the valuation cap was 5,000,000, and this year, it is 30,000,000. [12:10] How much did you raise, though, last year? [12:13] >> It was 750 k. [12:15] So you raised 750,000 on a safe note pre seed round at a 5,000,000 cap, and then you raised your traditional seed round this year? [12:22] >> Yes. That's also on safe note and 30,000,000 valuation cap, and we have raised another 800 k. [12:29] 800 k. Okay. That makes sense. Got it. And so if you're doing 1,400,000 in ARR today, what were you doing exactly a year ago? Do you remember? [12:38] >> Yeah. It was around 100 k. We just started. So the company the first commercial launch with a clinic was happened last year, April. [12:49] I see. So 1,400,000 run rate today is means you're doing about 115,000 a month in revenue. One year ago today, you were only doing, like, 5 or 10,000 a month in revenue. [12:59] >> Correct. [13:00] >> Correct. [13:00] I see. That's right. [13:01] Wow. So nice growth. How have you signed up? How have you found a 100 physicians in The US to sell to? [13:07] >> Sure. That's an interesting story in itself. So what we have done is we have worked with the initial customers that we acquired through our Connect to make sure that they generate revenue through the Medicare reimbursement process that has led us a strong bond. So all of the 100 providers that we have on our platform is through referrals from existing our customers. So we don't have a single sales person or a team that is going after. [13:34] Okay. But but, Banu, that's not so how did you get the first customer? [13:39] >> That first customer was through a connect of our my previous venture, and we had first three customer was through our network. And after that, those customers have referred other customers, and those customers have referred other composite customers because the value and the business model for in from our perspective drives that kind of referral program. Mhmm. [14:04] And if there's 1,800 in the wild today, you know, kits, devices, again, you charge 60 to 80 per month there. Where do you where's most of your revenue growth coming from? Is it is it one physician getting more clients or is it adding new physicians altogether? [14:21] >> It's a combination of the both. So what happens is once we add what I call as clinic can consist of multiple physicians within a clinic, right? So once we add a clinic onto our platform and a provider or a physician onto our platform, takes at least continues to grow the patient because as you said, in your Kansas example, there are 10 patients visited this month, next day, next 10 patients visit next month. So that's an engine [14:49] >> that gets kick started. And then we add other clinics. So it's a combination of clinics and providers on our platform, which will continue to grow as well as adding new clinics and new providers. So we have a strong pipeline, as I said, the referral network kicks in and they refer more and that adds on to our top line. [15:11] One way to ask this question is to look at your net dollar retention. So what is your net dollar retention in the past twelve months? [15:18] >> It is pretty much we haven't lost a single client so far because it's it's very simple because our model is I would say still we are early on in the innings because it's it we are in business only for last twelve months, and so it's very hard to compute those numbers yet, but based on our retention so far, we haven't lost a single customer yet. [15:45] Yeah, Banu. So net dollar retention is really asking, it's a combination of have you lost any, but also how much have you upsold? Right? So when you look at the customers that you're working with exactly one year ago, what percent have they expanded by? [15:56] >> Oh, sure. So that's been phenomenal, right? So it's been like, typically the way we measure our business is if you sign up a physician and if they have a thousand patients in their EMR system for last one year and it takes close to a year for us to grow their, to enroll their patients, 26% of that. So it's roughly, we add from, it takes for a thousand patients, two sixty patients have been added in the last [16:27] >> nine months. [16:29] Okay, but that doesn't make sense because if all 100 physicians you're working with have added two sixty right, patients, that's way more than 1,800. [16:38] >> Yeah. That's a great question. Right? So most of these patients we have added is in the last three months. [16:44] I see. So how many patients how how many clinics how many clinics were you working with exactly one year ago? [16:50] >> It's only three. [16:51] Three. Okay. Got it. Cool. What when those clients signed up, those three clinics a year ago, how many patients did they start with? What was the first order they purchased? [17:02] >> The first month was, like, 20 people. [17:05] And And what have they expanded to now today? [17:07] 260? [17:08] >> Yeah. Around 200 to 300. Very simple. [17:11] Yeah. Tell me more about the team. How many are full time today? [17:15] >> We are around 30 people. [17:17] Three zero? [17:18] >> Three zero. [17:19] And And how many engineers? [17:21] >> Around, nine people. All are in India. Our r and d team is in India, but the rest of the team, what we call as a customer success and care coaches, which are medical clinical staff, are all based out of US. [17:35] Yeah. Very cool. And do you have CAC? Are you paying or or doing any paid spend to get customers? [17:41] >> No. This is so far, we have been lucky. As I said, we are going through referral programs and which is basically the existing customer referring other physicians to get onto our platform. [17:53] And what dollar volume of Medicaid or Medicare reimbursements have you processed personally through the system? [18:00] >> So, so far, right now, as I said, for us to generate a 120 k per month, so we are processing close to 300, 350 k per month of claims. [18:15] Okay. Are you are you are all those $350,000 and claims monthly getting accepted and reimbursed? [18:20] >> Yes. Yes. That's the reason why we get close to half of it from as our invoice. [18:29] Okay. Got it. Very interesting. What's the total opportunity here? How many, you know, patients are at home where, you know, clinics and physicians have to give them this hardware device? [18:39] >> Sure. So that's another great question, right? So with the 100 providers, we can potentially reach close to 180,000 patients. That's just our installed clinics and providers. But if you look at the overall market size, in Medicare, there are close to forty million patients with chronic condition that can be prescribed this solution. [19:04] And are you guys profitable today? Are you burning cash? [19:06] >> We are burning cash predominantly because of the upfront growth that we are seeing in investing in the hardware and so on. [19:13] Yeah. How much are you burning per month? [19:16] >> We are burning close to not much. It's around 30 k. [19:20] Does that make you nervous? [19:22] >> Yeah. And it is nervous because of two reasons. Right? One is whether when to raise significant amount of equity that would help to continue to the growth versus kind of managing our equity very smartly. And that's the challenge because our business, the best part of our business is that we are generating cash from day one and this is a and the subscription model is very consistent for twelve months because this is backed by Medicare reimbursement and [19:59] >> there's a chronic condition that needs to be managed. So there is not so much volatility in the patient population pool. So all those gives a good view into our revenue stream being stable. But having said that, how do we, the equity part, the challenge to answer your question, the challenge for us is how much to rise through equity versus the growth and which would give us the optimal return for us as the founders in the long [20:25] >> run. [20:26] Do you still have a 100% of the $800,000 seed round cash in the bank? [20:30] >> We have close to 600. [20:33] Okay. So do you I mean, how many does you I mean, that that would mean your runway, what is about twenty months. Are you okay with that amount of runway today? [20:41] >> It's actually yeah. I'm okay as long as we are happy with the growth. The problem we are trying to solve is to increase the growth, and there was a huge problem possibility to increase the growth. And hence, we are now internally debating whether we should raise equity capital or through some other debt financing and other routes because the [21:02] If you raise debt, how much would you try and raise? [21:05] >> Close to and it needs to be paced out. So we are looking at anywhere between 1 to 1,500,000 to cover our hardware cost. The real challenge for us is to if we right now, we are adding 300 patients a month. And as I said, we have added lot of new providers onto our platform who have not started the engine. Once they start the engine, that 300 patients per month will go to thousand patients per month in [21:35] >> next three to four months, which drastically increases our working capital need. Yep. That's the challenge we are trying to resolve whether equity is the only way. We are in talks with some series a health tech VCs as well, but considering the valuations and those kind of things, that is where we are internally figuring out what is the right capital structure for us to optimize as we move forward. [22:01] Shocked if you can get a series a investor today in the compressed market to give you evaluation higher than your last round or your last round cap of 30,000,000. I mean, that's almost a 25 x multiple. You're just not seeing those today anymore. I'd I'd be shocked. [22:13] >> Yeah. But we when we raised the 5,000,000, we didn't have any yeah. [22:19] Wait. You raised 5,000,000? [22:20] >> No. Not raised 5,000,000. When the valuation cap in the previous year was 5,000,000, that Yeah. [22:26] But you just said you raised it 30,000,000. Right? You say you raised 800,000 and 30,000,000 cap. [22:29] >> 30,000,000. Correct. [22:31] Yeah. It's a 21 x multiple and 1,400,000 in ARR. I'd be shocked if you find a VC today to lead your series a that's willing to pay higher than a 21 x multiple considering the compressed market. [22:40] >> Yeah. But the the current we will be reaching close to 3,000,000 ARR by end of this year. So it's next another 4 to 4 to 5 months because Yeah. [22:52] I it's incredible growth, but even that to beat a 30,000,000 valuation with 3,000,000 ARR means you got to get someone to pay higher than a 10 x. I'm seeing fast growth companies today not be able to get 10 x multiples like they used to eight months ago. So we'll see what happens. But the nice thing is you've got nice growth and you got twenty months of runway. On that note, Banu, let's wrap up here with the [23:09] famous five. Number one, favorite business book. [23:13] >> How to make elephants dance. [23:16] >> Okay. [23:17] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [23:20] >> Elon Musk. [23:21] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building hbox? [23:26] >> Metabase. Metabase. [23:28] Number four. How many hours of sleep do you get every night? [23:31] >> Close to six hours. [23:33] That's good. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids? [23:36] >> I'm married, and I have one eleventh grade daughter. [23:41] Oh, amazing. And how old are you? [23:43] >> I'm 45. [23:44] >> 45. [23:45] Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. [23:49] >> Yeah. The start the entrepreneurial journey little bit earlier than where I started. I started around ten years back, so 35. I wish I did it a little bit earlier. That was one meme. [24:03] Hbox was doing $10,000 a month in revenue a year ago, now doing a $120,000 a month for a 1,400,000 run rate. They're giving iPads and temperature monitors and finger pulse monitors to physicians. A 100 physicians use their setup hardware, which they then give out. Sell out though they give out basically to patients who have to stay at home, right? So they can do home monitoring. Currently across these 100 physicians, they've got 1,800 devices out in the wild. They [24:31] charge a physician between $60 $80 per month per hardware step they've given out. The nice thing is they also help the physicians get Medicaid and Medicare reimbursement for the tool. It's still net positive for them. They're scaling nicely, raised an $800,000 seed on a safe with a 30,000,000 cap recently, deciding now if they raise more equity or debt to fund an additional tranche of hardware purchases. We'll see what happens. Banu, thanks for taking us to the [24:52] top. [24:53] >> Thanks, Nathan. [24:56] One 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 live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM [25:21] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM 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 SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [25:43] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you wanna take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS 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 [26:05] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode and 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 [26:24] got to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.