How Cercle X CEO Vishnu Vardhaan grew Cercle X to $16.8M revenue and 1K customers in 2024.

guys circlex.com his application processed in December 20 so last month over 9 000 metric tons of waste at an average value of 500 bucks per metric ton that's 4.5 million dollars of GMB throwing through his application he takes between one and five percent of that so fifty thousand to two hundred thousand dollars per month comes from that part of the business his other part of business is pure SAS which is in even more impressive hey folks my guest today is vishnuvardhan he is leading Circle x one of the world's first web3 based waste management companies that enable Brands to manage their industrial and post-consumer waste quicker and with 100 traceability and transparency all through their Suite of blockchainabled SAS Solutions visually ready to take us to the top uh thank you so much Nathan I've uh I've been a big follower of yours for a long long time oh good uh so it's it's an honor to be a part of this podcast all right well I don't want to lose anybody when people hear Waste Management I think about the trash they throw out of their house I don't think this is what that is what you're building so tell us what do you mean by Waste Management uh this race is predominantly the waste of uh Brands uh so brands have a lot of ways that they generated their factories and uh they need to send that out because they are under various Norms like um the environmental social governance norms and so on and in every legislation there's a lot of rules and regulations for managing that ways properly that is one thing that we are handling and yes secondly a lot of brands are under extended producer responsibility responsibility rules and regulations so they have to mandatorily take back waste from consumers like you and me and send it for recycling so that is something that we help them do as well so this would be like you know Walmart for example creates you know 10 000 cardboard boxes every week in the back of their you know the back of the Walmart building they might use your tool for what's called iwm Industrial Waste Management it helps them send pickup requests with a single swipe track vehicles that are coming to pick up the boxes meet ESG requirements things like that exactly exactly so we're like a uber for waste so you can just swipe up and uh raise a pickup request and within 30 to 45 minutes one of our Executives will come and pick up your waste and uh take it and these Brands like Walmart pay you directly a SAS fee yes they pay for the software uh on top of that they also pay something for the service that they Avail so I mean like I see I look at your model look at the website did you just stick web 3 in your name to increase your valuation no no uh actually uh web3 is uh not something that we stuck uh to increase our valuation first thing for the first two years the company we spent um just building the network because ultimately Waze needs to go for recycling to be able to build a circular economy and I can't build software on top of a network which is not present so first two years we focused on building this network and then because brands are increasingly under the hold on hold on hold on while you're building the network is this the scrap Market concept is that how you sort of creatively built the network to start yes exactly so uh waste is a lot of value to a lot of people and uh the people who handle waste are uh people that we call as kabdiwalas in India rat Pickers Traders aggregators and um the network of recyclers as well so I built this network and then on top of that we plugged in blockchain and web3 because it will give us 100 traceability and transparency over the complete journey of the waste so yeah that was that we did it that's interesting okay so we I guess put us on a timeline for me when did you launch or sorry when did you write the first line of code for the platform uh 2020 September was when we uh wrote the first line of code okay and we launched software in 2021 and I guess in 2021 how many people downloaded this app right for the scrap scrap Market um over the last uh two years from 2021 to to date we have over 45 000 people um from um uh download this app and use them use it 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 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 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 traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of 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 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 what it what does use mean I mean that's a very it can mean a lot of things uh the you they use it to uh showcase what uh scrap they have uh they can buy and sell scrap on the same platform they can bid for Waste which it which is coming from Brands so as soon as a pickup request is raised from a brand uh the request goes to a set of recyclers or Traders closest to the brand and they can bid for the waste and uh and then if the bid gets accepted they can go and pick up the race so how is this different than like Facebook Marketplace you know everyone just lists their on Facebook Marketplace it's basically their waste you know it's their old couch and then people can go bid on the couch and then go pick up the couch if they want it I mean isn't this very similar except it's like you know pipe cuttings and you know copper cathodes things like that Brands produce a lot of waste um in fact brands in their own factories or under their APR produce uh millions of kgs of waste so that is what we focus on not the uh yeah the Standalone ways that you may have in your pure B2B it's only waste from companies yes only okay how many people the 45 000 downloads actually bought or sold a scrapped via the app over the all time uh uh over 25 000 of them have done at least one transaction that's actually pretty good activation rate it is it is it is and a lot of the other people come basically to check the market prices of scrap on a daily basis it's like uh it's also a commodity so it keeps changing across India so that is what they do and by the way it's very late where you are you're it's like 3 A.M isn't it yes yes yes it's uh yeah thank you for being either up early or up late with us we appreciate it thank you thank you so much Nathan I mean a big fan so it's a lease that we could do well I appreciate that okay so this is impressive so over 50 of all time downloads have actually done a transaction on the app and I guess quantify that for us Vishnu in terms of dollar or you know dollars right or currency what was the total volume last year uh last year was close to uh six thousand metric tons per month on a monthly basis so we channelize uh a lot of this waste across India and uh this year uh this year we are closing at uh close to 9000 metric tons uh on a monthly basis that's that's nine thousand metric tons bought or sold through your your scrap market app yes yes yes interesting and what's the average dollar value of those 9 000...