How Ledge grew Ledge to $1.5M revenue and 24 customers in 2025.

Since we don't know your current revenue, are you comfortable sharing a multiple range that you just closed at? >> The multiple range for us was in kind of the mid double digit one. >> You mean between like 10 and 20x? >> No, more than that. >> You told us earlier our average revenue per user per month is about 3,000 [music] a month and say 24 customers paying that price point, breaching that million dollar AR point. [music] Are you guys above that at that point? Is that math accurate? >> We're above that. >> I think you left in 2022. Zero pays $2.5 billion, I think, in 2025. If you join Millio on a one-year cliff and four-year vest, which is pretty standard in startup world, you gave up and you can't help but go try to say, "Man, how much did I lose?" Cuz you know the price is 2.5 billion, right? >> You know, it's in the seven kind of digit range. >> How are you building a moat at ledge so that when Claude releases their next announcement? You're not replaced [music] by their B2B ERP automatic netswuite closing tool. Hey folks, my guest today is Tal Kerbam. the co-founder and CEO at Ledge, an AI native financial close platform. Before founding the business, his experience includes leading M&A transactions at Meta, developing new products at Melio, the payments company. Earlier in his career, he was strategy consulting at BCG and a venture capital associate at Intel Capital. Tal, you ready to take us to the top? >> Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. >> I get I get pitched all the time from folks saying we're financial AI software. you have so intentionally positioned you use the word closed software which I love because my first question to these generic companies is what do you actually help folks do. So tell us more about the business what are you selling? We work with finance teams at mid-market and enterpriseized companies to really help them automate month and close which of course is one of the most kind of repetitive manual time consuming tasks that finance teams struggle with something that I'm also quite familiar with. we uh were able to help them better get a better sense of how this process is progressing for themselves, their broader team, and then actually able to help them execute tasks within that process by leveraging the engine that we've built and the AI agents that are built on top of it. >> My research team pointed out to me, you know, one of the trending terms when you dig deep into this space are things like how to use AI with QuickBooks or how to use AI with Netswuite. I could not find even going over integrations an Intuitit logo anywhere but you do Netswuite a ton. Am I reading that right? That means you're more focused on the enterprise. Correct. Correct. We like to think of it as been market enterprise starting at you know a finance team of at least five people is usually when it starts becoming a massive project. You've got to coordinate different people. You've got dependencies between different tasks. You've got data that is spread across multiple different disparate data sources. And that is really when a solution like ours is able to add a ton of value to streamline all that data into one single place and then to be actually able to automate some of those tasks by the use of AI agents. >> So I want to get in obviously to the growth story how I came up with the idea the launch and how you got to where you are today. Before we do that though, give me some context. Somebody listening today if they were going to sign up to Ledge, what's your average customer paying you per month or per year today? >> You know it's a few thousand per month. It's a monthly SAS fee. We are not a seatbased solution. We uh we think that in this day and age we're helping teams become leaner and much more effective. We're helping teams be able to support a scaling business without necessarily having to scale the size of the finance team. And so the way that pricing for us is built is really around the complexity of a business. More entities, currencies, distribution channel a business has to have generally speaking our price point is going to be higher. But aside from that, it really is about how can we help them, those teams become much more efficient and how can we essentially get them to a place where some of their engineering colleagues are in today. being able to leverage AI to run the most time consuming repetitive tasks that they deal with and really be able to shift their focus uh to be more of guiders in this process back at the place where everyone joined finance wanting to be which is a strategic thought partner to the business. So, it's fair to say you don't upsell by seats. You really upsell by additional product features related to currency or other integration sources. And when you do that and look at your current customer base, the average customer, you said a few thousand. Is it fair to say 3K per month is a good average? >> That is that is uh fair to say yes, it's decent. >> Interesting. Any push back on the pricing structure? There's a lot of folks trying to like debating, you know, do we do see pricing? Is it dead in the age of AI? Have you regretted that decision yet or is it are you spot on, you think? >> No, not at all. If anything we have especially finance teams also someone being involved in procurement and dealing with let's say cursor based pricing question does come up are you eventually going to evolve the pricing model and start an agentbased pricing uh structure and I think that's something that may happen over the course of time but at least for now we try to keep it simple and also predictable and transparent when you think of our user base finance folks that is something that they appreciate. And so, of course, that's how we we wanted to build our pricing. >> And before we get your backstory, how how many customers are you serving now today? >> A few dozens of customers. We're very proud to have some public companies that we support. Um, as well as some, you know, smaller companies that are experiencing tremendous growth. Our customer base tends to be skewed to to tech companies per million in the US and in Europe. >> Okay. So, a couple dozen. Fair to say maybe between like 24 and 100. Not yet at 100. Correct. >> Okay. Very cool. Let's give the backstory here. You right. You come from consulting, you come from meta M&A, you come from payments. How does sort of all these, you know, genetic lineages of you sort of result in ledge? >> Uh it actually starts with the actual genetic lineage in my specific case. I grew up in an environment that um values entrepreneurship to a massive extent. And I always say I I don't have any other option. I've never had any other option aside from being an entrepreneur. In every job interview I've ever had in my life, people would would always ask me, "What's the endgame?" And I would always say, "It's eventually to do my own thing." And so I view the different steps in my professional career as ones leading up to my entrepreneurial venture and as ones that are able to to to better equip me to deliver the lever against that endgame in my specific case. What about the Israeli Defense Forces seems to just pump out winning software CEOs? Roy man Monday. I mean, I could go on and on and on. I've never met Maybe it's cuz they don't talk about it, but I've never met a failure who came from the IDF. >> No, no. I'm um you know, statistics are what they are. I I think one of the things that tend to generate entrepreneurs or tend to push people into entrepreneurship is necessity. And if you think of a, you know, a country like Israel where military service is mandatory, that has to do with necessity. And one of the key things that you're taught at a very young age, post high school, is how can you operate effectively? How can you drive meaningful impact and value even with scarce limited resources? I think it's one of the common uh traits people are able to to to gain from serving in in the Israeli Defense Forces. And so if if anything that might be that that might be it. >> All right. Take us forward to Ledge. When did you guys write the first line of code for the software? >> So about 3 years ago, Ledge its origin actually started with Mio. Mio is a payments company um that experienced some some challenges on its own but actually had the ability to solve those challenges because it's a very sophisticated company. its engineering team is I'd say very capable of generating any type of internal infrastructure that they may need that pertains specifically not just to payments but to finance to banking to data uh uh flows that are related to that in general. So Amelia was able to develop that infrastructure internally. I noticed that other companies as well struggle with the exact same issues but don't have the relevant knowhow uh required to develop a similar internal solution and even if they're able to bring in that knowledge inhouse it is way outside of their core competency and therefore they should probably not go through the build route and that really led us to uh to to ledge >> guys remember I am not just a YouTuber I'm investing into my third fund we've deployed $250 million dollar into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com, if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So, sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, "Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com." I mean, you were, I assume, a major part of of the business, Malo Payments. I mean the company is not a small...