How Locale.ai CEO Aditi Sinha grew to $1.8M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is aditi sinha she is building locale.ai the control tower for operations team she's one of the co-founders now the company was started in 2019 when she and her co-founder rishabh spotted a problem while working on data projects in their previous company locale's now 20 people strong as clients in multiple geo's she's got a great she's a has a graduate from bits pilani in india with a master's degree in economics and finance adida are you ready to take it to the top yes definitely great to be here you bet okay so who's paying for look how that ai and how are they using you definitely so our overall target market is any company that has uh moving assets is what we call so that moving asset could be a vehicle delivery people sales people trucks so the companies that we're going after our delivery mobility logistics and so on so right now we have global customers from across you know all geographies uh for example you know uh one of the companies that we work with in europe is called felix and they're an electric bike sharing system and they use the product to understand things like where are you know users booking their apps and the where are the users booking their bikes and if they're booking the bikes in those areas do they have bikes available or not right interesting so these kind of problems and how is a company like felix paying you is it per api call or a flat sas fee or how do you model it sure so our pricing is actually based on the amount of data that we ingest from them uh so we have a base platform cost and every additional data point that they send is divided into different packs so it ensures that you know uh as the company is growing we also grow along with them data measured by what like again number of api hits are like how measured by number of api hits could be a good proxy you can see that okay okay and then so what's the average customer i'm sure you have a range what's the average customer paying you per month or per year to use the tech sure it's about five thousand dollars per month i would say i would code that as an average number um and of course it depends on like how large the company is what are the number of teams that we're working with and what are the use cases yep very interesting some of your work uh so the solution solutions you put on your website are things like hyper local delivery ride sharing apps um app-based workforce logistics and supply chain companies which one of these four industries is your biggest cohort your biggest customer base sure so biggest customers right now belong to the overall hyper local market right which would include uh not only mobility companies but also like your on-demand delivery right so you tap something on the button and it comes to you the problem statements in both those companies are quite similar right uh which is what i was explaining it to you earlier as well interesting okay give me the backstory when did you launch uh so we started the company in march 2019 we launched the product last year in august so it's going to be about three years since we started the company that's amazing and how many customers today so we have about 10 customers these customers are divided into i would say very different sizes so we have customers who work in like one or two cities and we have a customer that works in let's say 90 90 cities all over the world and indeed can i take 10 customers times 5 thousand a month on average you're doing about fifty thousand a month in revenue right now um approximately yes a little less but approximately yes so maybe more like forty thousand something like that something like that yeah and and if that's where you are today where were you exactly a year ago so we can calculate growth rate actually uh at this time of the year we had just launched the product uh so this time of the year was when we started doing sales so all the sales effort over the last year or to come to this point has accumulated in this last one year so maybe like a thousand bucks a month or something very small a year ago yes very cool all right we love that um now have you bootstrapped this and kept your equity or did you decide to raise no we have actually raised we raised a seed round this year from uh one of the top tier institutional vc's here in india they're called chirate ventures and in addition to that we had you know uh people who participated from a last round uh including you know better capital from india and ffs sorry what was the side of the size of the sea round sure so the size of the seed down was 1.3 million dollars and how big was the precede round the pc round was quite small we have not actually disclosed uh the amount publicly anywhere as of now uh but yeah at that moment we were you know just about five to six months old so it was quite small for us to just you know build the product yeah you're talking like 40 or 50 000 bucks in the precedent round something small a little bit more than that yeah but as i said we have not announced that publicly yet why would you not announce that publicly but you would announce the 1.3 million seed round why would it matter um because at that moment uh it was just a call that we took because the round was a little small and uh we are still figuring out a lot of our stuff including you know uh what is it that we do what is our positioning a lot of those type of things and and how have you and your co-founder thought about this when you guys launched the business did you just say you know what adida we're equal partners we'll just split it 50 50 or did you do something different um no we did not do anything different you just said 50 50 let's move on right yes that's that's funny okay but then there's two of you right two co-founders yes okay so when you went on obviously to do the the seed round you're raising 1.3 million most people today when they're doing a cedar under selling 10 to 20 percent of the business were you guys sort of in that same range yes okay interesting so call like a 10 to 15 million valuation something like that okay interesting and are you raising more capital now or are you still using your seed round money so um the idea is for us to raise a series a in the next six months or so is what we've planned out so we have some revenue goals in mind that we want to hit um and you know as we as we sort of start reaching there we start building those relationships those start those conversations so yeah and by the way i'm i'm also gonna travel to the us very soon so the idea would be to sort of start you know uh start those conversations with some investors we have some angel investors already from us so the chief global officer ex-cpo at uber is one of our investors so a lot of these people i really want to meet face to face because we've just been meeting with them on video that's amazing which city are you coming to in the us um so i have some family in sf so i'm gonna start from there and uh yeah then i need to plan my entire trip also depending on you know where do we land a lot of these calls with our customers yeah they are 40 000 bucks a month today in revenue what's your revenue what do you think you need to hit before you can go raise a good series a sure so um a lot of like offers you started getting now to be very honest uh but we wanted to actually you know sort of hold off a little longer and try to get to like 750k approaching to a mill sort of a thing so that uh you know we when we go we are we come from a position of you know uh strength yep no that makes a lot of sense and eddie how did you get these first 10 customers um so it's a lot of things um but overall so most of our our customers we try to reach out to them so it's a purely uh outbound effort uh we try to reach out to them on linkedin email and so on but we also get some percentage of customers that are purely inbound that we get to our content uh so essentially we want to double down on that as we go forward and sort of build a repeatable engine to get more and more inbound customers right because when people are reaching out to you inbound they already have a need they're looking for a product and it's much easier to sell to them with a smaller sales cycle yep that's fair talk to me about your team today how many folks so we're 20 people 20 people how many engineers um about 10 11 engineers and uh i'm so sorry about that um and uh nine uh nine uh people in the business team very interesting and talk to me a little bit more about what you're building next like actually what's the most unique use case somebody is using you for right now sure so we people use our product to understand anything that they want about their areas or any like behavior of their drivers users anything on their operations right so for example think of yourself to be in some art or instagram story or postmates and understand okay what are the areas where you're not getting demand you're getting demand where you're doing delays cancellations all of that so it's a lot of those kind of someone is at the door nathan i there's no one in the house i'm so sorry can i go go grab it i'm gonna yeah go grab it i'm gonna describe i'm gonna describe a use case while you do that so guys one of the very interesting use cases on the website that a duty has is are effectively um ride sharing companies that use the platform and the right training companies can track where users drop off or where they leave their scooter right so where they drop the scooter and that will inform uh bird or lime or whatever the scooter company is that hey users are dropping off here we should open up a hub there and deploy more scooters they can track you know things like completion rates on the ride conversion ratios things like that so that's a really good use case yep exactly all right adi very cool okay good stuff um talk to me about um where you're investing the capital right now that you raised is it an engineering sales somewhere else most of it is in the engineering segment as you know it's so so so hard to find good engineers so i'm gonna put a shameless plug here saying that we are hiring uh but having said that yeah most of it is in engineering some of it is uh on the business side as well uh and sort of you know hire more sales folks and sort of get deeper penetrate more in our existing geographies are you fully remote can people apply to work for you wherever they're in the world so uh we are actually setting up our office in bangalore but we are not we're not just restricted to that so this following sort of a hybrid model uh if people are remote they can definitely apply to us uh there we will figure out you know some vocations or uh times and places where we could meet with them as well very cool all right let's wrap up with the famous five of dd number one favorite book uh creativity inc by uh ed kaplan he's the ceo of pixar number two is there a ceo you're following or studying brian chesky from airbnb number three what's your favorite online tool for building your business i love notion uh but there's so many tools we cannot live without uh including github that we use extensively at local number four how many hours of sleep to eat every night how many hours of sleep i try to not compromise on my sleep so i try to get seven to eight hours of sleep every day that's good and what's your situation married single kids single of course okay not married no kids how old do you want me asking how old you are i'm 26 26 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 when i was 20 years old yeah enjoy life as much as possible enjoy college figure out what you really really want to do and just go with the flow so guys okay locale.ai they help delivery companies ride sharing companies understand what's happening in a hyper local fashion with their api they had a thousand bucks a month in revenue a year ago now forty thousand dollars a month in revenue they look to keep scaling just closed a one point three million dollar seed round this year i caught like a seven to fifteen million dollar evaluation looking to raise a series a as they get closer to a million dollar run right with their team of 20 11 engineers based in bengal are growing quickly aditi thank you for taking us to the top thank you so much uh then and i'm so sorry there were so many background noises uh that you no problem you did great thanks for coming on thank you so much again 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 p.m central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 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