How ParallelDots CEO Angam Parashar grew ParallelDots to $39.4M revenue and 15 customers in 2025.

hello everyone my guest today is an gone Parashar he's a founder of parallel dots he's also a graduate of Indian Institute of Technology after his graduation and before starting the company he worked as a consultant at opera solution in niche big data consulting firm angam are you ready to take us to the top absolutely go ahead okay what is parallel dots and how do you make money sure Sibella dots is an artificial intelligence platform for developers and enterprises globally we are when I talk about artificial intelligence platform what we essentially do is that we provide text analysis and LP / and Lu VP eyes as well as computer vision api's it's a simple plug-and-play API which people can just sign up on our website and start using it and when is it a SAS business yes it is a SAS business there are two primary uses that we are targeting one is the developers as I mentioned these are this could be students indie developers active the PERS whatever work they are doing there are many use cases for them the other one are the target users out enterprises for us so when you talk about developers it's essentially a pay-as-you-go model for them it is we charge them on a number of API calls that they make more than 12,000 developers have signed up on our platform today so we are one of the most popular and in P slash NLU api is out there today how many hate how many paid customers are you working with today so number of paid customers in developers developers usually use the freemium model where we provide a per month around 10,000 API calls for free so most of the developers around I would say I'm 90% of a developer 25% of developers would follow around that so we don't usually make a lot of money from it on the PIRs so I would say 5% of the purse would be us okay so so what's the number how many paying customers are we working with right now so it month we have around hundred a PR W pursue peers um that's what the numbers are but the real revenue comes from the enterprise it's as if it gets right in terms of let me talk a little bit about the enterprise as well so in enterprise are the kind of challenges that they face is different they are very much concerned about security they do not dominate the name one or two hundred just put give us a picture first and then work backwards so name a cut name and enterprise working with you I cannot disclose the name of the enterprise we are working enterprises there's no enterprise that you have formation with that you can disclose they're all execrate yeah I would not like to lose the name of the enterprise that we have signed up having said that we are working currently with people signed up fifteen enterprises as all okay there's very case averse it's it's a very few amount so far oh yes yes it's a yeah okay and what's their revenue model they they pay per month they pay of each of them on an annual licensing Mart basis typically we charge them the usual customer ticket size would be around $25,000 to $30,000 going up to a $50,000 at times therefore a typical year per year uh per year that's an annual contract sighs that's grand our contract usually lasts up to the duration of the contract is usually for three years so we have signed up around 15 enterprises as I mentioned our current ARR is around five hundred thousand dollars that's where we are that's great so 500,000 bucks guided by 12 you're doing about 40 cut out 40 42 grand per month currently yes yes you're right that's great and what's the growth rate look like so if you're doing 42 grand today how much were you doing a year ago in July of 2017 we are signing anything between two to three custom enterprises per month for the last three months so um July 2017 we worried we haven't really be until then we haven't really signed any Enterprise so all the growth that we have witnessed so far has been in the last ten months so you had no revenue a year ago yes we are no and when did you launch the company what here so um we started this company in 2014-2015 yeah we were experimenting with two different products and after a long time we eventually reached here way of the obvious shogi thing so although all the proof that we have witness up in the past ten months Joakim you're rich somebody was saying the bills for four years when you had no revenue who was it uh uh so that had this hello so most of the team is based out of India so back then everburn was pretty low we were a team of five people so the bond was pretty low as you can guess now we are we have a substantial burn but then we also make decent revenue so we can cover that and we're also funding what is substantial burn so I cannot disclose the burn again but we're definitely in losses it's more than what you make today but we are also funded and with the kind of growth trajectory that we are witnessing closing round to three enterprises in a month with the current team focus of the current sales team which is just two people so now it's a total team size we are 30 people at the moment easily zero yeah yeah and how much have you raised we have raised two million dollar in venture capital Jim I and was that from folks in India that you raised from VC's there are folks in the States or Europe word you raised from um it's uh it's folks from United States okay and was that a convertible note or an equity around a good about equity rally very good why'd you decide to do equity right at that instead of doing a seat on a convertible note or something so at that point of time we were looking for an equity round because we wanted to have more when we raised the money we did not have a lot of clarity around revenue numbers that we had and our team teams DNA earlier was very much based on the AI research rather than all the business side effects of a focus was always to publish the right papers build the right technologies rather than going out of the market so at that point of time the money that we raised was more on the technology side rather than the business side so we decided hey let's do equity let's do any career round I see I see okay and what year was that that you raised that capital 2016 16 okay and you my me asking what valuation did you raise that at I'm sorry I cannot disclose that okay what multiple of revenues at that point was it I just were talking like 10x or 4x or at that point of time as I mentioned of our revenue was nil so it was mom the valuation was um if we talk about the money but it doesn't make any sense so how did you how did you go in and say I want you know this valuation when you had no revenue what did you kind of base it on it was a simple actually um we had a lot of technology to show and we had some some previous failed production was true so this was what we had and we had we wanted to build the business as as we go ahead so those are the three things I had I had a very strong AI team with me I had a very strong technology with me and I had some strong experience of how to build the products so uh all these three things really helped us to raise this round of money and are you raising additional capital right now oh yes we are not actively raising it but there's a lot of inbound requests now given the traction that we have for the past one year now um let's see what happens are we are living we were talking with to investors let's see how it goes how much are you looking to raise we are looking to raise around five million dollars okay and are you I mean generally in a I mean I guess you could call this your Series B people were typically selling five or maybe 10% of the company right so I mean is it fair to say you're trying to get like a forty five million pre-money valuation something like that I don't think we'll get that kind of valuation with this much revenue so which is why I mentioned that let's see how it goes the kind of valuation that I'm looking right now is more of a twenty million pre-money rather than 45 million pre-money 20 pre means what you be if on five money it's about twenty percent of the company yeah that would means anybody yeah very good um and geez I mean do you have a lead investor do you think you'll get it we are in conversation at quite a few of them talks are in advanced stage I would like to of course I'm hopeful term sheet yet yes we have a time sheet yet we are still negotiating it might fall apart it might just go ahead let's see what happens yeah very good okay walk me through some of the kind of customer economics so you have a lot of developers on the platform but your real bread-and-butter are these 15 enterprises using you which churn today for enterprises that join has been zero although I have a small data points with just 15 customers that you're talking about the churn has been zero and it's been over the previous ten months only so I'm in doubles the chance the chance rate is pretty high as you would guess but developers for them the use case are very project driven they have a certain use case they solve it probably for the students there they're doing a master's thesis their bachelor's thesis they use it they go away so that what happens with the developers but for enterprises they have a huge scale at time so the pay-as-you-go model doesn't really work for them apart from that they're very...