How involve.ai CEO Gaurav Bhattacharya grew to $2.2M revenue and 70 customers in 2023.

as involve.ai is doing 185 000 a month in Revenue today that's up from total revenue last year of 1.5 million in total revenue in 2021 a year before that of just 250k they slugged for four years launched in 2017 to get that first 250k had 16 grand left in the bank almost shut it down and then G recognized oh my gosh Verizon's got a bunch of accounts on our platform 40K people using it they landed a 1.45 million dollar contract with Verizon that spurred them to where they are today right it's a 16 million series a last year out of 64 million post money evaluation they still have the majority of that over 10 million in the bank their Pro they're not profitable yet but only burning 90 grand a month relative to the cash and Bank plenty of Runway there a team of 12 as they scale involve.ai it helps you understand which of your customers are likely to expand or stay flat or even churn or contract helps you deliver a better customer experience hey folks my guest today is groov bharacharya he is or he goes by GE grew up in Delhi lost his father to cancer at a young age and this led to his first Venture a patient experience platform for doctors following its success he moved to the U.S dove into AI his goal revolutionizing workplace product Healthcare pet care and finance with AI he's doing this at involve.ai rob you ready it takes to the top yeah super excited to be here thanks for the opportunity and I like I was telling you Nathan I'm such a big fan of the podcast and it's an honor to be here well okay now tell me all your numbers tell me tell me tell me you know the drill right so tell me a story of a customer that's using to you today and what they use you for yeah sounds good so so we've had a kind of like a roller coaster Journey show kind of start from the top here so when we started involved we started it as a you know our goal was able to start an employee entry in this platform so we would like hey people would go and give back to the community that's what me and my co-founder were really passionate about so we started as the b2c application because and what year was that and this was in 2017. so 2017 with a very long journey now multiple products so 2017 we started this company we raised a little bit of seed money we raised 1.5 million dollars and we got to tons of users spent so we were sending millions of people around the world do community events and volunteering events around them but we could just never find like how to monetize this we were not able to make any money or make it a sustainable business we got to 250 000 in annual revenue so that was kind of like our journey what year was that it took about four years so four years of slogging and and we just couldn't turn on and monetization switch so what year did 250 Grand a year uh that was like year four so that was like 2021 2020 20 20 21 that's spot on okay 2021 actually yeah so so you got it and then so for our our journey Nathan was you know I had two weeks over on the left I had like fifteen thousand dollars in their bank I had nine people in the company and we were like maybe I was actually writing like a goodbye email to all our users and then my co-founder comes to me and he's like no you have all of this data on our system right we've been collecting we had Salesforce we had user data we had snow play for all our users we have AWS data and he was like can we Analyze This to really find out like what what failed like why did we mess up and what kind of led to this like downfall basic rates so we were like okay one laughter ten we're gonna go back and look at all this data and we find out that we have 40 000 users from Verizon uh using Us for free so you're like why are so many users from Verizon using us and until we reached out to one of the hr's leaders and we were like hey you know just want to let you know we're shutting down the platform and she was upset she was like don't shut it down because we rely on this but we go do all these community events we do our corporate social responsibility to this so that was really cool right so that was a really in great impact they actually decided to pay us 1.45 million dollars because that was in their budget of what they were spending or looking for a platform that year in 2021 which gave us enough Runway to survive we did pivot however into the realm of AI oh gee hold on hold on so we can't just skip over you you so 2020 go back you do your research 2021 you convert to ryzen of a 1.45 million that's all money up front in that year 2021 yep that was 2021. okay but you just told me you did 250k of Revenue in 2021 so when did the 1.45 million Revenue come in yeah so that was that was in 2021 um that was November of 2021 where Eisen Pages 1.45 you're not counting his annual revenue because that was just like two service the community platform which we no longer service but that was like the aha moment for us that said hey there's something here we can look at the data that we have and come to some really strong aha moments can we do this for other companies and that's kind of what led to our current platform and what we are up to now basically I see that's I just want to kind of plug that story so uh that's kind of how we started oh so G give us the story so 200 250k of Revenue in 2021 what was Revenue in 2022 so I'm not going to count Verizon off of this so we we went from um so again the 250 000 in Revenue was also from the old product so not pounding any of the old product we went from zero to 1.5 million in ARR from 20 from when we started in 2022 to where we ended 2022 at so that was kind of our Revenue in 2020. okay got it and then where do you think you'll finish this year at so this year we're launching another product so we want to get to about 5 million by the end of the year and how much revenue did you do last month in June so June we are at 2.2 million now oh wow okay so you did about a hundred and eighty thousand dollars in Revenue last month that's correct 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 valuations 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 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 so now tell us a customer story today who is a customer paying you today and how do they use you yeah so I'll think of a customer one of our favorite customers the company called nintek um so nintex is a 100 million 150 million ARR company um they are a company that does like um they have workflow management systems and we plug into their Insight so they have a lot of customer data that they collect so usage pattern usage Trends they also collect data about their sales in Salesforce like who are the Italians do what are they selling how are they selling we are a prediction platform so we call ourselves like an early warning system and that's kind of what we are building for what early warning for what the early warning for predicting customer Health customer churn that's kind of what we have been doing up till now thank you like turn zero and some of these retention tools so we are not a customer success platform so they have a lot of their workflow tools but we would compete you can be compete with churn zero like doing site would be another one right the others as well so what we are focused on are our our specialty is can we look at your data can we apply AI to it and can we help you make meaningful predictions on which customers to focus on which sales opportunities to focus on and then now what we are launching is also like can you now generate generate lead lists or opportunity list or Target list and then have automated follow-ups on your behalf so let AIP follow-ups for you so for nintex as an example they use it for for looking at the data and showing these are a list of our 100 000 customers which 20 000 customers are at risk of churn which 30 000 customers have upsell cost of opportunities and why and then can be craft meaningful automated sequences then someone can go and edit and tweak per customer and then send it off and just have that automated process of predicting which customers to focus on what to do about it and then doing that and taking that next action so this makes tons of sense so so what uh talk to me a little bit about how many customers today how many full-time sorry how many customers are paying you at least something per month right now yeah seven 70 customers right now well okay so you're very much an Enterprise motion I mean you're charging a lot I would say admit mid-market yeah mid-market motion um average contract values are 52 000 I believe right now uh but forty fifty thousand fifty thousand those are like our average deals we are trying to launch like a really self-serve motion it's very new for us uh but we just launched the application in the Chrome Store we call it R2D2 uh from Star Wars and we just launched into the Chrome app we literally launched it 10 days ago Jason uh so it's a great plot for me back out and hopefully by the time this podcast comes out it's much better but it's free to use and we have 500 users just using it in the past 10 days now so getting some tracks in here but which is slow down a little bit I want to break down some of this so so you launched R2D2 join r2d2.com it has 288 users right now on the Chrome Store and 13 reviews did you do something specific to get those 13 reviews so quickly did you ask and if so what copy did you use to get the reviews we did we asked some of our early users we were like hey if you're having value if you're getting value it's actually 500 users Nathan Chrome Store always takes more time to update so I can see the numbers here on our user base it's always like a replay uh that's something that we've noticed and others have too um the reviews were early early users who were using it uh I wrote the first review because I was like hey I really get value out of this and you know I just want to get the ball rolling but we asked them up for early users to say hey can you please give us feedback and and uh if you'd like it then post a review of that yeah I mean that's a key thing about when you launch on the stores you've got to figure out how to get five star reviews quickly so after you posted you got Ryan Laughlin to give it Susie Pang Paul aramball these are all it sounds like active customers on the platform that you asked that's correct yep that's great okay I love this um how many so I guess 70 folks 70 paying customers today you're doing 185 000 a month in Revenue that means the average customer is paying something like 2500 three grand a month for the tool what are ways that you upsell do you upsell a number of customers number of seats feature based upselling how do you do it yeah so we are not great at those things and so I'm not gonna like do a good job at this like for for all our products we've been really bad at hence upsell motion we basically the customers who have bought more have been like have worked completely underpinning us and we really haven't nailed on privacy and just being right here we basically have always been like all you can kind of price change so it's like hey let's get all your users unlimited users now we are moving into a consumption based package so we've come up with this terminology called actions when every company that we work with gets 5000 actions with us and when they will use those accents they will have an upsell motion but it's too early for us so far we've been like pricing super simple it's like you get unlimited users you get everything and we haven't done good privacy and packaging maybe something that I should learn better watch all your other podcasts and do something good here well it's just when I go to your pricing page I see an error it says hello this quiz is unavailable so I'm curious how you're signing up people if your pricing page seems to be broken yeah that's that's a good one it just it just broke yesterday we were trying to implement a new pricing so great catch there I'm gonna go and fix it what were you trying to change or test we were adding the consumption-based pricing and just like open transparent pricing so people could sign up to that motion oh interesting interesting okay very cool um you keep saying we you mentioned a co-founder at the start did you I just split it 50 50. yeah that is correct yeah 50 50. that's awesome and how many folks are full-time today small can you get 12 people right now that's amazing so 12 people doing 185 Grand a month in Revenue that's good Revenue per employee what's the team look like how many engineers yeah so we have 70 of us as Engineers so my co-founder is product so she does product design and then we have one designer rest of them are full stack engineers and then we have a couple of people in sales and marketing three people in sales and marketing and customer successful and have you raised any more since the 1.7 pre-seed round in 2017. we did we actually got a series a with sapphire Adventures so they let our series day in 2022 and we raised uh 16 million entries and we haven't used a lot of that money we still have that cash and we just want to find like deep product Market trade before we start like expanding between growing into three men adding to it it's a very focused on building a great product first that has good unit economics and then we want to go to market and you said one six million 16 million that is good yep interesting what that can I ask what valuation you raise that at or arrange yeah it was 48 pre so 64 posts interesting and and help me understand how you you negotiated that valuation did it feel fair at the time yeah they were really nice you know this was like the first big round that we had ever done and I'm not a good fundraiser so we asked them what's fair and what's market and they were like this is this looks good we were like great let's do it so if we didn't go through negotiations or I I'm not I wasn't a good founder but I was like no we should be 100 million but I feel we did the right thing because there's a lot of you know CEOs that that I listened to that place that really high valuations 100 200 300 400 500 million in early early days and it's really hard now right with the markets where they are it's really hard to live up to those valuations so um we were lucky that we got a fair number it's still high from where we were and where we are but I feel we can catch up to it and if we get to the next stage and how much going back to your 1.7 pre-seed round in 2017 did you sell about 20 or 25 of the company back then we did 25 back then and then we did like close to 10 28 in the next round okay got it so that first round cap was something like six million seven million something like that okay interesting six billion pretty six free yeah yeah really good match great match Nathan you know my name so I mean how do you how old how old are you today G I'm 29. and so when you look at sort of what you're learning right you've sold sort called 20 25 of your company twice now right so you're diluted down to probably something like 25 26 yourself um how do you think about managing dilution yeah so for now Nathan I what we have learned about and the markets have changed a lot right I'm sure you guys that you guys are looking at that too now from now on we really don't think capital is a big lever at all and maybe especially with AI I'm a big believer that with artificial intelligence people will be able to do just so much more right everything that does not require deep humans would have been like us talking and sharing ideas can be done better factor and keeper with AI so we're doing a lot of work for in our product but we're doing 70 of our coding is now done with AI we are big users of Bard and GPT and some of the GPT Engineers some open source models we use it like religiously we use it for copywriting we use it for sales we do we use our own product to be able to find leads to create personalized email send it out to customers send it out to new prospects I feel more and more the times are going to be back to like the early days of like when Instagram was sold for a billion dollars with just 13 people when WhatsApp was 20 billion dollars which is 40 people I feel that's the times we're going back to and AI is going to help us do that and capital is not going to be a massive leverage it's going to be a leverage without if you can get it without dilution like how you guys are also working on the fun that you guys are working on I feel that's the new way of doing it so for us right now we're so focused on product and adding customers organically we don't think we would need to raise another round at least in the near future to keep growing and we feel we can get to 10 million even 20 million in ARR very quickly without even raising extra Capital how much of a 16 million series a do you still have in the bank today um 75 of it so 10 million plus now I have to check I have to check okay that's great and and what is what are your like in terms of monthly are you burning Capital today each month or no very little sorry gross is like 2.5 million a year and then we're we're not breaking even but we're close to break even we'll just look at the numbers if we just look at the numbers from like last month so if you did 185 000 of top line revenue in June and your total expenses were 300K your net burn would have been like 100k or something that's exactly what the network is yeah I think it's 90k a month right now on average yeah that's great yeah plenty you have plenty of run right G well we're we're rooting for you but we're out of time for today let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite book oh you know I would say How to Win Friends and Influence People by Bill Carnegie always a classic I really enjoyed rereading it all the time especially as an engineer I love going back to it number two is there a CEO you're following or studying oh I love you Elon Musk you know he's polarizing but I love following him I feel like guys brilliant you know beautiful product so I I hope you win you know I hope Twitter wins number three what's your favorite online tool for building involved oh big question I think GitHub is amazing you know we live and read through it they have so many free tools for coding now like the co-pilot is free for everyone um there's always a paid version but that's that's my favorite number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night oh I try to average at six you know I feel like anything more I feel guilty that I'm not working hard enough you know I feel like I'm a hard worker I love working Chevy uh but if any less I'm not productive at all so six six and a half is beautiful for me and you mentioned you're 29 today okay and what's your situation married single kiddos single no kids you know my startup's my baby I love that I have a couple of farts a couple of dogs and that's that that's all last question G something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh I just believe in yourself you know I've always doubted myself a lot I feel like especially as an immigrant founder coming to the US of had a difficult time do believing that I'm good enough that I can be good to you I can be a good founder or I could just be a good salesperson or a good engineer I think that imposter syndrome so if I can go back and just say hey believe in yourself more believe in your Gathering intuition I wish I did that earlier guys involve.ai is doing 185 000 a month in Revenue today that's up from total revenue last year of 1.5 million in total revenue in 2021 a year before that up just 250k they slugged for four years launched in 2017 to get that first 250k had 16 grand left in the bank almost shut it down and then G recognized oh my gosh Verizon's got a bunch of accounts on our platform 40K people using it they landed a 1.45 million dollar contract with Verizon that spurred them to where they are today right he's a 16 million series a last year out of 64 million post money evaluation they still have the majority of that over 10 million in the bank they're Pro they're not profitable yet but only burning 90 grand a month relative to the cash and make plenty of Runway there a team of 12 as they scale involve.ai it helps you understand what of your customers are likely to expand or stay flat or even churn or contract helps you deliver a better customer experience gee thanks for taking us to the top 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 expenses their revenue our poo CAC LTV you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every Thursday 1 pm 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 SAS World whether it's an acquisition a big fundraise a big sale a big profitability statement or something else I don't want you to miss it additionally if you want to take this conversation deeper and further we 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