How Krome Image Labs CEO Eduardo Llach grew Krome Image Labs to $3.1M revenue and 500 customers in 2024.

Chrome image labs.com launched several years ago now doing 200 000 a month in Revenue up from a hundred thousand dollars a month just a year ago they're serving 500 customers they help those customers last last month process over 15 000 images through their system they set up of 200 editors and designers on their back end almost like uber for each image they charge about 25 bucks per image the editor designer makes call at 10 sorry uh five to ten dollars on that so the overall margin of a company called 50 to 60 they've done this in a very Capital efficient way they just now closed their first six hundred thousand dollar round of funding at saw call it somewhere between a 10 and 20 million valuation so very Capital efficient their team size just six people full time hey folks my guest today is Eduardo Jackie helps Amazon Walmart and Sotheby's create images that lift their product sales by using their proprietary data and AI algorithms to determine what image elements are lifting sales they then use generative AI designs and a global team of designers to create listing lifestyle and infographic images at scale affordably and faster than anybody else they do this at Chrome photos.com com that's Chrome with AK at the start Eduardo you ready to take us to the top yes absolutely all right very cool so you've got some Enterprise accounts here that must mean you've been doing this for a bit when did you launch the company we launched a company a few years ago we have done over a million images for over a hundred thousand customers we started creating images for our customers and we moved on to the Enterprise two three years ago um Walmart is using our technology and our images to help their National sellers Amazon we're a top ranked Amazon SPN seller studybee's users are technology in our images for their um Online Auctions uh Sasol hotels at home and a number of others and we're just launching an ability to for people we have launched it and we're actually creating Pilots where they can send us 10 of their products 100 of the products a thousand of the products and to your point we will then use the data um AI generate AI to create images that are guaranteed to lift their sales so Eduardo what are these companies today paying on average per month to use your technology they tend to pay per image anywhere from 25 to 50 or an image okay 25 to 50 per image and so how do you price do you let them just pay as you go or do you do you sort of price in buckets credits of images we do both you can get a subscription and have read it similar to the way that audible Works where you have credits that you can use for anything you can use them for listing Lifestyles infographics photography design sessions bundles you name it but most people are coming in and then using it for the lifestyles and infographics interesting okay so in March the last full month here last month how many images did you process we did about um you do the math here about 15 000. fifteen thousand well across how many paying customers we have uh consumers smbs and Enterprises and I would say that uh that was in the order of you know 500 customers or such some of the customers tend to do a lot more images than others but yes uh 500 customers paid at least a dollar last month something like that oh yeah no much more than a dollar uh but you're not just saying I'm just saying these are your pain these are not free users I'm just saying these are your paid customers last month now can we take 25 per image times fifteen thousand dollar images that would put you at about 375 000 a month in Revenue last month yes it's a little bit less than that because some customers are doing simpler images but yes that will give you a good idea north of 300 000 a month in Revenue it's more north than 200 000. okay okay so you're doing greater than 200 000 a month in revenue and help us understand growth this is a hot space everyone with chat gbt generative AI where were you exactly one year ago do you remember we were about a hundred thousand so oh wow yes have you done this have you driven this growth bootstrapped or you raise money we have done a little bit of racing money uh on the seed side of the equation but it's definitely been a lot of bootstrapping I also have put in my own money into the company but it's definitely been bootstrapped and with some seed uh funding when was the seed round we just finished a safe round that we did with our lead uh investor uh Evolution VC Greg Smith uh and that it was meant to power the the launch that we're doing with Walmart where basically they are taking our technology to highlight which products in their catalog they have 50 million products need to be updated uh we're telling them which Sellers and which products need to be updated highlighting those and then they're telling their sellers that hey these products are below par uh here's what you need to do here's a company that can help you and we expect to get 20 30 percent of those customers to use us and it's a very how much was there before I go deeper into the product though what was the so how much was the race for we raised um six hundred thousand dollars 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 evaluation 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 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 okay six hundred thousand dollars and this would be would you call this like a seed round or series a seed round we're focusing on a series a this this year likely in Q3 okay so 600 000 raised on your seed just now and most folks today are selling you know 15 to 20 of our company in their seed round were you sort of in that same range no no it was much less okay I was about to say with your Revenue I'm hoping you were able to preserve your Equity here um when you say much less can we say under 10 percent yes okay so north of a six million post money valuation said again north of a six million dollar post one evaluation then it was it was much much further north than that okay what I mean I found out all the time there's two School thoughts manage your multiple and who cares get the highest you can right very different so like which boat do you fall in we have optimizing for bringing the money when we need it at the best value we can get it at and that has helped I still have a significant portion of the company Greg is our lead investor he also has a significant portion of the company uh and that's the way we want it when we go to the series a then we'll be doing a more traditional 10 million round at 30 40 million dollar valuation and go from there but the good news is that when we do that we already have the technology that works we already have customers to your point and you know we've got it up into the right results so just to be clear then I mean you sort of raised it something like a six to ten X multiple on current Revenue then yes yeah so...