How involve.ai Grew to $2.2M ARR and 70 Customers with a Team of 12 (Interview with CEO Gaurav Bhattacharya)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00As involve dot ai is doing $185,000 a month in revenue today, that's up from total revenue last year of 1,500,000 and total revenue in 2021 year before that up just $250k. They slugged for four years launched in 2017 to get that first $250k had $16,000 left in the bank, almost shut it down. And then GE recognized, oh my gosh, Verizon's got a bunch of accounts on our platform, 40 ks people using it.

00:23They landed a 1,450,000 contract with Verizon that spurred them to where they are today, raised a 16,000,000 series A last year at a 64,000,000 post money valuation. They still have the majority of that over 10,000,000 in the bank. They're not profitable yet, but only burning $90,000 a month relative to the cash in the 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

00:45expand or stay flat or even churn or contract helps you deliver a better customer experience. Hey folks, my guest today is Gaurav Bhattacharya. 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 US, dove into AI. His goal revolutionizing workplace, product, healthcare, pet care and finance with AI.

01:12He's doing this at involve.ai. Grab, you ready to take us to the top?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

01:17>> Yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. And like I was telling you, I'm such a big fan of the podcast and it's an honor to be here.

Nathan Latka

01:25Well, okay. Now tell me all your numbers. Tell me, tell, tell me, you know the drill, right? So tell me a story of a customer that's using you today and what they use you for.

Origin Story: Employee Experience Platform and Early Struggles

Gaurav Bhattacharya

01:35>> Yeah, sounds good. So, so we've had a kind of like a roller coaster journey. So I'll kind of start from the top here. So when we started involve, we started it as a you know, our our goal was, hey, we'll start an employee experience platform. So we were like, hey, people would go and give back to the community. That's what me and my cofounder were really passionate about. So we started at the b two c application.

01:56>> We got And what year was downloads. And this was in 2017. 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 $1,500,000 and we got to tons of user spend. So we were sending millions of people around the world to community events and volunteering events around them, but we could just never find, like, how to monetize this. We were not able to

02:23>> make any money or make it a sustainable business. We got to $250,000 in annual revenue, so that was kinda like our journey

Nathan Latka

02:29of What year was that?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

02:31>> It took about four years. So four years of slogging, and and we just couldn't turn on a monetization switch.

Nathan Latka

02:37So what year did do $250k a year?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

02:41>> That was, like, year four. So that was So, like, 2021? 2020. 2021.

Nathan Latka

02:44That's spot on. Okay.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

02:45>> 2021, actually. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:47So so you got it.

Near Shutdown: $16,000 in the Bank

Gaurav Bhattacharya

02:48>> And then so for our our journey, Nathan, was, you know, I had two weeks of runway left. I had like $16,000 in the 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

03:03>> to me and he's like, Hey, you all of this data on our system, right? We've been collecting, we had Salesforce, we had user data, we had Snowflake for all our users, we have AWS data. And he was like, Can we analyze this to really find out what failed? Like, why did we mess up and what kind of led to this downfall, basically? So we were like, Okay, one last attempt, we're going to go back and look

Verizon Discovery and $1.45M Contract

Gaurav Bhattacharya

03:26>> at all the data. And we find out that we have 40,000 users from Verizon using us for free. So we're like, why are so many users from Verizon using us? And so we reached out to one of the HR 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. Like we go do

03:47>> all this community events. We do our corporate social responsibility through this. So that was really cool, right? So that was a really great insight. They actually decided to pay us $1,450,000 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.

Nathan Latka

04:09But, gee, hold on. Hold on. Hold Hold on. So we can't just skip over. You you so 2020, go back. You do your research. 2021, you convinced Verizon to pay 1,450,000. That's all money upfront in that year, 2021?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

04:23>> That is correct. Yep. That was 2021.

Nathan Latka

04:25Okay. But you just told me you did $250k of revenue in 2021. So when did the 1,450,000 revenue Yeah. Come

Gaurav Bhattacharya

04:33>> So that was that was in 2021. That was November 2021, where Verizon paid us 1.45. We're not accounting for the annual revenue because that was just like to service the community platform, which we no longer service. But that was like the 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 moments. Can we do this for other companies? And that's kind of what

05:00>> led to our current platform and what we are up to now, basically.

Nathan Latka

05:03I see. I just wanted to kind of plug that story. So that's kind of how we started.

05:08Well, gee, give us the story. So $250k of revenue in 2021. What was revenue in 2022?

Revenue Growth: 2022 ARR and 2023 Run Rate

Gaurav Bhattacharya

05:15>> So I'm not gonna count Verizon of of this. So we we went from so, again, the $250,000 in revenue was also from the old product. So not counting any of the old product. We went from zero to 1,500,000 in ARR from '20 from when we started in 2022 to where we ended 2022 at. So that was kinda our revenue in 2022.

Nathan Latka

05:39Okay. Got it. And then where do you think you'll finish this year at?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

05:43>> So this year we're launching another product. So we want to get to about 5,000,000 by the end of the year.

Nathan Latka

05:48And how much revenue did you do last month in June?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

05:53>> So June, we are at 2,200,000 now.

Nathan Latka

05:57Oh, wow. Okay. So you did about a $180,000 in revenue last month.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

06:02>> Mhmm. That's correct.

Nathan Latka

06:04Oh, 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

06:27your 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

06:52get 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

07:13not 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

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08:01if 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

08:27the interview. So now tell us a customer story today. Who is a customer paying you today and how do they use you?

Customer Story: Nintex and Early Warning for Churn

Gaurav Bhattacharya

08:35>> Yeah. So I'll think of a customer. One of our favorite customers is a company called Nintex. So Nintex is a 100,000,000, 150,000,000 ARR company. They are a company that does like, they have workflow management systems, and we plug into their insights. So they have a lot of customer data that they collect. So usage patterns, usage trends. They also collect data about the sales in Salesforce, like, who are they selling to, what are they selling, how are

09:06>> 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.

Nathan Latka

09:13For what? Early warning for what? So

Gaurav Bhattacharya

09:16>> early warning for predicting customer health, customer churn, that's kind of what we have been doing up till now. You can do

Nathan Latka

09:22like ChurnZero and some of these retention tools?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

09:26>> So we are not a customer success platform, so they have a lot of their workflow tools, but we would compete you could say we compete with ChurnZero, like Gainsight would be another one, right, the others as well.

Nathan Latka

09:37I see.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

09:37>> But what we are focused on, 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 list or opportunity list or target list and then have automated follow ups on your behalf? So like AI do follow ups

10:02>> for you. So see. For Nintex as an example, they use it for for looking at their data and saying, these are a list of our 100,000 customers. Which 20,000 customers are at risk of churn? Which 30,000 customers have upsell cross sell opportunities and why? And then can we 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

10:28>> focus on, what to do about it, and then doing that and taking that next action.

Nathan Latka

10:33You make

Gaurav Bhattacharya

10:34>> a whole sense.

70 Paying Customers, $52K ACV and the R2D2 Chrome Extension

Nathan Latka

10:36So, so what, talk to me a little bit about how many customers today, how many full time, sorry, how many customers are paying at least something per month right now?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

10:44>> Yeah. Seven, seventy customers right now.

Nathan Latka

10:46Well, okay. So you're very much an enterprise motion. I mean, you're, you're charging a lot.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

10:49>> I would say mid, mid market. Yeah. Mid market motion, average contract values are $52,000 I believe, right now. But $40,000, 50,000, 60,000, those are like our average deals. We are trying to launch like a really self serve motion. It's very new for us, but we just launched the application in the Chrome store. We call it R2D2 from Star Wars. And we just launched the Chrome app. We literally launched it ten days ago, Nathan. So it's a great

11:17>> plug for me. 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 ten days now. So getting some traction here, but we're So, G, hold on. Slow Slow down. Slow down a little bit. Wanna break down some of this.

Nathan Latka

11:34So so you launched R2D2, join r2d2.com. It has two eighty eight users right now in the and Chrome 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?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

11:49>> 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 week too late. That's something that we have noticed and others have too. The reviews were early users who were using it. I wrote the first review because I was like,

12:11>> hey, really get value out of this. And, you know, I just wanna get the ball rolling. But we ask them for early users to sort can you please give us feedback? And and if you'd like it, then post the review there.

Nathan Latka

12:21Yeah. Mean, that's a key thing about when you launch on those stories, you've gotta figure out how to five star reviews quickly. So after you posted, got Ryan Laughlin to give it, Susie Peng, Paul Arambault. These are all, it sounds like active customers on the platform that you asked.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

12:33>> That's correct. Yep.

Nathan Latka

12:34That's great. Okay. I love this. 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 $22,500, $3 a month for the tool. What are ways that you upsell? Do you upsell on number of customers, number of seats, feature based upselling? How do you do it?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

12:55>> Yeah. So we are not great at this Nathan, so I'm not gonna like do a good job at this. Like for all our products, we've been really bad at upsell motion. We basically, the customers who have bought more have been like, have worked completely underpaying us. And we haven't nailed on pricing, just being very clear here. We basically have always been like all you can kind of pricing. So it's like, hey, let's get all your users,

13:21>> unlimited users. Now we are moving into a consumption based package. So we have come up with this terminology called actions, when every company that we work with gets 5,000 actions with us. And when they will use those actions, they will have an upsell motion, but it's too early for us. So far we have been like, pricing is super simple. It's like you get unlimited users, you get everything, and we haven't done good pricing and packaging. Maybe

13:46>> something that I should learn better, watch all your other podcasts and do something good here.

Nathan Latka

13:51Well, 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.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

14:00>> Yeah. That's a that's a good one. It just it just broke yesterday. We were trying to implement a new pricing. Big catch there. I'm going go and fix it.

Nathan Latka

14:07What were you trying to change or test?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

14:10>> We were adding the consumption based pricing and just like open transparent pricing so people could sign up to that motion.

Team Composition and Co-Founder Split

Nathan Latka

14:16Oh, interesting. Interesting. Okay, very cool. You keep saying we, you mentioned a co founder at the start, did you just split it fiftyfifty?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

14:24>> Yeah, that is correct. We have fiftyfifty.

Nathan Latka

14:26That's awesome. And how many folks are full time today?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

14:30>> Small team, we have 12 people right now.

Nathan Latka

14:33That's amazing. So 12 people doing $185,000 a month in revenue. That's good revenue per employee. What's the team look like? How many engineers?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

14:41>> Yeah. So we have 70% of us are 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 couple of people in sales and marketing. Three people in sales and marketing and customer success.

Nathan Latka

14:59And have you raised any more since the 1.7 pre seed round in 2017?

Series A Raise with Sapphire Ventures

Gaurav Bhattacharya

15:04>> We did. We actually got a series a with Sapphire Ventures. So they led our Series A in 2022 and we raised 16,000,000 in Series A. 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 fit before we start like expanding the team, growing the team and adding to it. So very focused on building a great product first that has good unit economics, and

15:27>> then you wanna go to market with it.

Nathan Latka

15:29And you said $16,000,000, 16,000,000?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

15:32>> That is correct. Yep.

Nathan Latka

15:33Interesting. What value can I ask what valuation you raised that out or a range?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

15:38>> Yeah, was 48 pre, so 64 course.

Nathan Latka

15:40Interesting. And, and help me understand how you negotiated that valuation. Did it feel fair at the time?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

15:47>> 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 we didn't go through negotiations or I'm not I wasn't a good founder where I was like, no, we should be 100,000,000. But I feel we did the right

16:06>> thing because there's a lot of, you know, CEOs that I listen to that raise that really high valuations, $100, 200, 300, 400, 500,000,000 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 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 at

16:28>> least get to the next stage.

Nathan Latka

16:30And how much, like going back to your 1.7 pre seed round in 2017, did you sell about 20 or 25% of the company back then?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

16:39>> We did 25% back then, and then we did like, close to then 20 ish percent in the next round.

Nathan Latka

16:45Okay. Got it. So that first round cap was something like 6,000,000, 7,000,000, something like that.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

16:51>> Okay. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

16:52Interesting.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

16:53>> 6,000,000 pre.

Nathan Latka

16:546 pre.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

16:55>> Yeah. That's really good match. It's a great match, Nathan. Know my

Nathan Latka

17:01know my style. So,

Age, Dilution and Why Capital Is Not the Lever

Nathan Latka

17:04I mean, how do you how old are you today, G?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

17:08>> I'm 29.

Nathan Latka

17:09And so when you look at sort of what you're learning, right? You've sold sort of call it 25% of your company twice now, right? So you're diluted down to probably something like 25, 26% to yourself. How do you think about managing dilution?

AI as a Lever: Path to $10M to $20M ARR Without Raising

Gaurav Bhattacharya

17:23>> Yeah. So for now, Nathan, what we have learned now, and the markets have changed a lot, right? I'm sure you guys are looking at that too. Now, from now on, we really don't think capital is a big lever at all in booties, especially with AI. I'm a big believer that with artificial intelligence, people will be able to do just so much more. Everything that does not require deep human connection, us talking and sharing ideas, can be

17:50>> done better, faster and cheaper with AI. So we're doing a lot of work in our products, 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, open source models. We use it like religiously. We use it for copywriting. We use it for sales. We use our own product to be able to find leads, to create personalized emails, send it out to

18:14>> customers, send it out to new prospects. I feel more and more, the times are gonna be back to like the early days of like when Instagram was sold for $1,000,000,000 with just 13 people, when WhatsApp was $20,000,000,000 with just 40 people. I feel that's the times we're going back to, and AI is gonna help us do that. And capital is not gonna be a massive leverage. It's gonna be a leverage without if you can get it

18:38>> without dilution, like how you guys are also working on the fund 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 10,000,000, even 20,000,000 in ARR very quickly without even raising extra capital.

Cash Position and Monthly Burn

Nathan Latka

19:01How much of the 16,000,000 series a do you still have in the bank today?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

19:06>> 75% of it. So 10,000,000 plus now.

Nathan Latka

19:08Oh, wow.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

19:09>> Have to check I have to check how much is that.

Nathan Latka

19:12Okay. That's great. And, and what is, what are your, like, terms of monthly, are you burning capital today each month or no?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

19:19>> Very little. So our gross is like 2,500,000 a year. And then we're, we're not breaking even, but we're close to break even.

Nathan Latka

19:27Well, looking 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 300 ks, your net burn would have been like a 100 k or something.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

19:40>> That's exactly what the net burn is. Yeah. I think it's 90 ks a month right now on average.

Famous Five: Books, Tools, and Lessons Learned

Nathan Latka

19:44Yeah, that's great. Have plenty. You have plenty of run rate, 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?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

19:53>> Oh, you know, I would say How to Win Friends and Influence People by Bill Carnegie. Always a classic. I really enjoy rereading it all the time, especially as an engineer. I love going back to it.

Nathan Latka

20:03Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

20:07>> Oh, I love Elon Musk, you know, he's polarizing, but I love following him. I feel the guy's brilliant, you know, beautiful product. So I hope he wins, you know, I hope for the win.

Nathan Latka

20:17Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building involve?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

20:21>> Oh, great question. I think GitHub is amazing. You know, we live and breathe through it. They have so many free tools for coding now, like the Copilot is free for everyone. There's always a paid version, but that's, that's my favorite.

Nathan Latka

20:33Number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

20:37>> 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 seven days a week. But if any less, I'm not productive at all. So six, six and a half is beautiful for me.

Nathan Latka

20:52And you mentioned you're 29 today?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

20:54>> That is correct. Yep.

Nathan Latka

20:56Okay. And then what's your situation? Married, single, kiddos?

Gaurav Bhattacharya

21:00>> Single, no kids, you know, my startups, my baby. I love that. I have a couple of puppies, a couple of dogs, that's all.

Nathan Latka

21:07Last question, G. Something you wish you knew when you were 20.

Gaurav Bhattacharya

21:11>> Oh, just believe in yourself. You know, I've always valued myself a lot. I feel like, especially as an immigrant founder coming to The US, I've had a difficult time believing that I'm good enough, that I can be a good CEO, I can be a good founder, or I could just be a good salesperson or a good engineer. I think that's imposter syndrome. So if I can go back and just say, hey, believe in yourself more, believe

21:32>> in your gut and intuition, I I wish I did that earlier.

Nathan Latka

21:35Guys involve dot ai is doing $185,000 a month in revenue today. That's up from total revenue last year of 1,500,000 and 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 $16,000 left in the bank, almost shut it down. And then GE recognized, oh my gosh, Verizon's got a bunch of accounts on our platform, 40 ks people using it. They

21:58landed a $1,450,000 contract with Verizon that spurred them to where they are today. Raised a 16,000,000 series A last year at a 64,000,000 post money valuation. They still have the majority of that over 10,000,000 in the bank. They're not profitable yet, but only burning $90,000 a month relative to cash in the 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

22:21stay 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 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

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