Keito Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2024)

hey folks my guest today is a model ps he's a former infosys and edgeverve product manager he's been part of the leadership of two small sized businesses enabled scale during his tenure with over 200 increase in revenue and better visibility he's now a pro athlete passionate about fitness new ideas and designs and is building tech to connect people and new age technologies at keto dot works all right i'm all you ready to take to the top yeah sure nathan happy to be here thank you professional athlete huh which sport uh kickboxing and uh fitness yeah javelin all right tell us what you're selling at keto works it's k-e-i-t-o dot works what's the business um so we are having an awkward automation platform uh primary focused on data automation and workflow automation for enterprise businesses and what are these businesses paying on average per month to use the technology so they pay on transaction uh per month it would be around five thousand dollars to ten thousand dollars for usage okay and that's pretty expensive for a no code tool you're targeting the enterprise what enables you to sell at such a high price point uh it would be the kind of uh return which we can bring to the enterprises mostly focused on the productivity accuracy and the lowest exception rate which you could see in the market the lowest what rate exception rates so most of the most of the enterprise automation tools have a very high exception rates which are hidden in the system which means that even after implementing you would have to spend quite a lot of money on managing your exceptions right whatever does not work in automation so called you'll have to handle with humans in between which means it's no longer a true automation solution so we look at having a real automation case for our businesses i think that what ensures us to have a high price in the market okay interesting and then tell me about some of your customers right uh are these like you know enterprise accounts i mean you have thomas cookless on your site you have the government of india united states mortgage service what are they using you for uh so they are looking using primarily for the information extraction and information automation side uh so we have the product dealing with information in two layers one is with respect to fetching information from different sources right whether it is your textual or document or image sources we are able to fetch information second is to ideally process those information and pass it on to any of the business ops right whether it is processing your loans or whether it is validating the kyc or whether it is you have to perform certain number of action based on the data that is available i think all of these actions could be triggered within our platform are you selling mostly to fintech firms you mentioned kyc processing yeah fintech is definitely one of our customers uh bfsi sector yeah that's your largest sector is fintech not largest but yeah primarily this is one of the growing sectors i would say and it shows quite promising and we are also launching a new vertical sas application in the same sector interesting okay so we'll get more of your backstory here in a second but how many customers are you serving today more than 10 enterprise customers okay and so can we take the 10 times 5 000 bucks a month minimum you're doing like 50 60 000 a month in revenue right now uh no we are slightly above that so we do have a lot of production contracts in place right now so we have completed a lot of pocs paid pocs with the customers enterprise customers as you have as you already know right enterprise customers takes good amount of lead time to ideally start implementing because of the kind of security measures and the kind of contracting process it is involved so ours is not a conventional sas solution it is more or less an enterprise licensing model is also involved in place right your contracting process is slightly lengthier than an average business understood but in terms of average like actually onboarded licenses you you're doing what 70 80 000 a month right now in revenue uh so we have crossed around uh 200k plus uh in a year that's what uh where we stand now okay that doesn't answer my question though so in november in terms of recurring revenue how much did you last month in total revenue uh so we crossed uh 15 to 15 000 dollars across five yes okay got it so so you're doing about fifteen thousand dollars a month in revenue and if you're doing that today where were you exactly a year ago uh a year ago uh we would be slightly around zero near to zero did you have any revenue a year ago no uh we were having a very near to zero revenue right thousand thousand two thousand dollars is where we are standing okay got it so you you're a thousand bucks a month a year ago now fifteen thousand dollars a month so you're scaling here now if you're doing fifteen thousand dollars a month and you have ten enterprise customers they're not paying five or ten grand a month each they're paying like a thousand a month each or two thousand a month each correct so we we do have two kinds of customers a couple of the customers who have converted from a paid poc to productions a couple of customers who are in production so so we are at a stage where we have closed a lot of customers moved from the poc stage the proof of concept stage to the production stage that's where we are in i think in the coming two years we would cross a million dollar arr right so that's that's where we could see well i understand where you could go but in terms of where you are right now again customers are paying on average like 1500 a month for 15 000 a month in total revenue correct uh not every customer nathan so we have couple of customers two or three customers who are paying the total license fees so other customers have just moved from a poc to the production environment yeah so they are in the process of ideally uh on boarding into us in terms of uh full scale amount averages we're just dividing two numbers if you're doing fifteen thousand dollars a month in revenue which is what you just said and you have ten customers we can divide right so each customers on average is about fifteen hundred dollars per month yeah so that would become the average uh size of the customer uh who is paying today but it consists of two kind of uh revenue numbers right one is from the license fee second is from your paid poc cost so paid poc cost uh drastically drops down the average billing of a customer uh and how much how much are the paid pocs typically uh it costs from around two thousand to five thousand dollars one time or monthly it's a one-time cost uh nathan i see and and and how what enables you to move someone from paying three thousand bucks one time to four or five thousand dollars per month after the poc uh so uh during the poc customer validates whether the platform could handle the workflow uh it could handle the information extraction that's what the customer looks at once that is stable uh the customers looks at moving a large volume of data right so here during the poc it might be a minimal size of data so there is one mortgage customer where we have made them live uh where they are processing around 100 000 plus documents transacted every month right so that means the volume increases and your license cost also increases so the license cost is directly proportional to the volume of data processed in the platform i see make sense tell me more about how you fund the business are you guys bootstrapped have you raised so we were bootstrapped in the early ages uh later we had a couple of angel rounds uh we raised around four hundred thousand dollars until then another year uh 1920 so two years back to back and and 400 000 on a safe i assume uh 400 000 on equity on a 20 million valuation uh no not 20 million uh valuation either so currently we are in the process of raising another round so that would become our first institutional round sorry yeah when you raise the 400 000 what valuation did you raise that yeah so i i won't be able to comment on the valuation as current rounds are not quite either well anyone that's looking at your current round is going to ask for a cap table and they're going to see what the valuation was in your seed round yeah it was at 4.3 million okay got it so you sold about 10 of the business yes uh no not uh 10 i did i think over a period 20 of the business so we had two rounds in the past so the most recent round was at 4.3 million dollar free money okay so you've sold to right now investors own 20 of the business correct nathan and how much do you still own uh i own almost 70 of the business okay so you're you're the major shareholder here so why why go raise more capital obviously you get diluted where do you think you'll invest that to drive growth uh so first i think we were trying to identify the product market uh fit and where we need to spend the money so so today we know where we can spend the money and that's when we started raising our institutional capital now how much are you looking to raise uh 1.2 ml and half of that is already subscribed oh great what valuation uh so we would be racing at around 10 mil valuation that feel high or low to you uh no it's it's actually a emotional feeling right it's not uh something bound to what do we feel uh i think collectively we feel fine with the valuation and it's completely a win-win for both of us and if investors currently own twenty percent and you own seventy percent where's the other ten percent so we have esop's uh employee shares uh a lot of their employees early employees on uh could chunk of the company i see i see tell me more about that what's the team size today so we have uh 14 people in the team uh we have six interns working full time so that's the total team i see and how many engineers am all uh primary engineers and nine people are engineering oh wow are you an engineer yeah i am an engineer very cool where's the team based uh team is based out of pune india we have a scattered yeah we have a scatter team we have a couple of them in bangalore which is a non-place in india for startups and we have a couple of them in delhi amazing something special is happening in chennai bangalore pune uh there's so many great sas companies coming out of that region right now so nice work on the growth are you raising the 1.2 million are you is there a healthy angel ecosystem there in pune and india are you having to look elsewhere to find capital i think in india currently have a healthy ecosystem but at the same time people are looking at u.s investors where their market is primarily us makes a lot of sense talk to me about churn uh these enterprise customers that are not paying per month two three four five thousand bucks a month do they turn uh so mostly for us we have not reached the stage where we could measure a lot of churn because most of the customers are going into contracting for us so we do not know whether how much is the churn rate because most of the enterprise contracts are for uh two three years kind of a timeline yep yep yep talk to me about you mentioned you know where to spend money to drive growth what does it cost to get a new you know three thousand dollar poc uh the cost to get a three thousand dollar poc is around three three and a half thousand dollars for us today okay okay so so you get a sort of instant payback on that which means you're only upside as if if they convert into an annual monthly plan after the poc correct correct the the cost involved primarily is in terms of uh getting the enterprise on board with us right so so we have an instant maybe break even you could say operational break even you have the cost spent yeah very cool ma let's wrap up here with the famous five number one favorite business book uh uh hard things about hard things and uh should of phil knight number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah steve jobs for many long years number three what's your favorite online tool for building keto works uh there are many top of the mind whimsical click up notion is good why do you use click up uh project management easy to use simple tracking any team member can understand no need of any handholding uh and and you're building this in pune so your whole team in india uses click up yes correct did you switch from someone else like trello or jira or asana or did you always use click up no we we have been quite tech savvy as a team so we have used most of these tools even at an early stage base camp trello asana jira so whichever is the latest tool which adopts to the pace at which we are going we we jump onto that and try to understand fit in our yeah that's what we do so what do you like about click up over trello i think trello is a combination of evernote notion and click and other tools which are available jeera right so it's it's convenient it could be used by any of the team so i think that's the most flexible thing trello becomes uh something which is available at a higher level you cannot go into the minute details of items so trello you could have a good uh quarterly plan or an early plan but once you go down to execution it's very difficult to track in renault it'd be so easy because you can plan and execute inside of click versus trello as more for planning correct very cool all right number four how many hours i sleep to get every night uh six six hours and what's your situation married single kids matter any kiddos no okay and how old are you mal so i'm 29 29 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. so i wish i could i could have read a lot more books early on maybe on board and mentor so that i could learn what i could do next in my life guys keto works a true uh tool to help you automate uh your data automation needs and scale they've got ten enterprise accounts right now about a thousand bucks a month in revenue a year ago now ten thousand dollars fifteen thousand dollars a month as they look to scale they raised a capital they raised four hundred thousand bucks in a seed round sold about 10 20 to investors now raising a 1.2 million series they had a 10 million valuation team of 14 mainly based in pune india as they look to scale them all thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you nathan thank you for your time one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm 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 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 1 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m 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 have by far the largest private slack community for b2b sas 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 for that at nathanlacka.com forward slash slack in the meantime i'm hanging out with you here on youtube i'll be in the comments for the next 30 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 got to push them away click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that i appreciate your guys's support all right i'll be in the comments see ya