How Qobra Reached €7-8M ARR and 250+ Customers (Interview with CEO Antoine Fort)

Highlights

Antoine Fort

00:00Actually, I didn't really have a proper job before launching Qobra, so I created a company almost right out of after school. So we launched as a sales compensation software, so automating end to end commissions from integrations to generating statements. We serve more than 250 customers now.

Nathan Latka

00:17Can I take 250 customers times that 30,000 ACV to sort it back into your ARR? That puts you at, like, 7,000,000 of ARR.

Antoine Fort

00:23Yes. Slightly above that.

Nathan Latka

00:25Congrats, man. That's exciting. Yeah. It's cool. I just saw this on your LinkedIn. Top sales rep earned 1,500,000 in commissions in 2025.

Antoine Fort

00:35He's earning, like, 75 x what people earn on average in in variable compensation.

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:41What on earth was that sales rep selling to make that kind of commission? Hey, folks. My guest today is Antoine Fort. He's the co founder and CEO of Qobra, an AI first sales compensation platform. He graduated from college and then co founded the business in 2020 to fix one of b two b SaaS's most broken workflows, commissions. Alright. Antoine, are you ready to take us to the top?

Antoine Fort

01:02Yes. I am. Thanks very much, Nathan, for hosting me on this episode.

Antoine's Background and Why He Founded Qobra

Nathan Latka

01:06I appreciate you joining. Do you have a horror story? Were you a former account executive that, you know, wasn't paid your quota on time or something?

Antoine Fort

01:13Actually, I didn't really have a proper job before launching Qobra, so I created a company almost right after after school. So I did not live the horror of commissions myself, but I could see it very clearly, so that's why I wanted to solve

Nathan Latka

01:26So here you go. These are the products you're selling today. Which of these products did you launch with, and what year did you launch?

Antoine Fort

01:31So we launched as a sales compensation software, so automating end to end commissions from integrations to generating statements.

Nathan Latka

01:40And what year did you launch the business?

Antoine Fort

01:42Oh, yeah. 2020.

First Customers and the Pre-Seed Round

Nathan Latka

01:432020. Okay. So you launched the business in 2020. And walk us through your first paying customer. How did you get those first couple customers?

Antoine Fort

01:50There's, like, two first customers. One of them so I was just with the idea of launching Qobra, but Qobra was not live. We didn't have the name yet. It was called sales crew, and, actually, the the the legal name of the company is still sales crew. And I saw, like, the co founder and CEO of Part two, French French company, who wrote an article on sales compensation. So I reached out to him on LinkedIn, and during

02:17the full weekend, he and his CFO worked on building kind of a sales compensation app, wireframing. And so on Monday, he sends me an email saying, we need to talk. So we have this meeting on Monday, and he's saying, okay. I like the idea. So you can see what we do what we did. So if you want, we could be your first investors and your first customers. So I said, yeah. Let's go. And we we we

02:45raised a very tiny seed pre seed round at that time, and part two became our first customer. And then the other one, it was almost at the same time. We just launched publicly on on on LinkedIn, and someone reached out to me saying, hey. It's interesting what you do. Can I get a demo? So there was almost nothing to demo at that time, just a promise. But in the end, we landed this customer very quickly.

Nathan Latka

03:08The pre seed round that you did with Part b, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. How big was that round, or how small was that round?

Antoine Fort

03:14So it was 100 k, very small rounds, with seven business angels. That really helped a lot then.

Outbound Calls as the First Growth Channel

Nathan Latka

03:20Was LinkedIn part of your strategy to get your first 100 customers? That was a big influence?

Antoine Fort

03:24I was mostly doing, you know, outbound calls. So it was just me and my phone, and then a little bit of network as well.

Early Pricing Strategy and Per-Seat Model

Nathan Latka

03:31And what was the price point back then? How much were you charging?

Antoine Fort

03:34So we just looked at what was the price in the market for similar solutions, especially US ones, and we said, okay. For our first 10 customers, let's just split that in two.

Nathan Latka

03:44What was that price point? 10,000 a year? 1,000 a year?

Antoine Fort

03:47Yeah. That that was yeah. 10,000 a year.

Nathan Latka

03:50And what were you packaging for that? Were you pricing per seat, per feature upgrades, a usage metric? Per seat. Okay. And why was that the right metric? Why not number of reps managed, commission, you know, reps managed on your platform or some other usage metric?

Antoine Fort

04:04Oh, yeah. So, actually, that's exactly what we do. I I I said per seat because it's, you know, per number of sales rep seats, but, you know, admin licenses are free. So if you have a 100 reps for which you're paying commissions, that's gonna be 100 licenses no matter how much, you know, finance and RevOps people you have on top of it.

Current ACV and Pricing Evolution

Nathan Latka

04:25I see. I see. Okay. And then you mentioned that those early customers paying 10,000 per year on average were 50% of your pricing today. So is it fair to say customers today are, you know, averaging more like 20 grand per year?

Antoine Fort

04:36Actually, it's now again, like, 30.

Live Events and Trade Show Strategy

Nathan Latka

04:38I'm on your LinkedIn, and I see it looks like you guys are spending a lot of a lot of investment on sort of in person events. Is this accurate?

Antoine Fort

04:45Yeah. Actually, this year, we we decided to put some gas on this type of events, meetings, dinners, trade shows. I think that that that helps creating meaningful connections.

Nathan Latka

04:57So, yeah, so tell me about this. What are we looking at here? Walk me through this strategy here. Like, what what did it cost you all in? Did you see a good ROI? Should other people be thinking about events, booth sponsorships?

Antoine Fort

05:06Yes. So we took this booth at SaaStr. The it was like the the the silver package, so it was the the the the lowest one, actually. You know?

Nathan Latka

05:15I think he published this most. Think it's like 10 or 10 or 20 grand or something. Right?

Antoine Fort

05:19It's it's more than this. It's more than this.

Nathan Latka

05:21Okay.

Antoine Fort

05:21And then the plan here is just, you know, to get as much people as possible who are walking past our booth talk to us. So it's a very easy icebreaker, so you can speak to people. And what do you see at the back on the on the TV is that we we did multiple advertising. We like to do, you know, type of b to c marketing, but apply to b to b. And we advertise that then

05:45on LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads, and so on, but we also felt that for the trade show, it was good to just have it displayed on the screen so people, again, they they they they they they come and talk.

Paid Advertising Spend and Ad Creative

Nathan Latka

05:57You mentioned paid ads as well. Are you comfortable sharing how much all in you're paying per month on just direct paid advertising?

Antoine Fort

06:03So per year, it's between 200 and 300 k.

Nathan Latka

06:07And how do you know if it's working or not? Maybe talk about the LinkedIn ads.

Antoine Fort

06:11Yeah. So, basically, you can then track, you know, traffic on your website coming from different sources, including LinkedIn. You can also see with LinkedIn the engagement with your with with the posts. So all this it is very hard indeed to link revenue to a marketing source, especially LinkedIn since it's, you know, top of funnel. So people might just, you know, come back on the website afterwards. But you can have, you know, very high level signals where

06:41you can say, okay. I drove more traffic to the website because of these ads.

Nathan Latka

06:44Are you managing all these creatives here on LinkedIn one by one or using a platform to generate these?

Antoine Fort

06:49We've got an amazing person in the company, Dylan, who's handling all of this directly. We also have a I must admit, like, an agency, someone in freelance. You know, lately, we closed the not with the SpongeBob meme, but with another meme. We we just closed the deal. You know? Like, it clicked. It it took a demo, then there was the opportunity. We closed it. 80 k per year. Crazy.

Customer Count and ARR Today

Nathan Latka

07:16That's okay. With all these growth strategies, how many customers are you now serving today?

Antoine Fort

07:21We serve more than 250 customers now.

Nathan Latka

07:25Wow. Okay. And can I take Antoine, can I take 250 customers times that 30,000 ACV to sort it back into your ARR? That puts you at, like, 7,000,000 of ARR.

Antoine Fort

07:34Yeah. Slightly above that.

Nathan Latka

07:36Congrats, man. That's exciting.

Antoine Fort

07:38Yeah. It's cool. You know, as a founder, you always want more.

Nathan Latka

07:42What's your goal for the end of twenty twenty six? Can you break 10,000,000 of ARR this year?

Antoine Fort

07:46Yeah. Yeah. That's the plan.

Nathan Latka

07:48Come on. You gotta be more American. Like, hell yeah. We're gonna we're gonna crush 10,000,000 ARR.

Antoine Fort

07:52That's the plan. We're crush a million ARR.

Nathan Latka

07:54Yeah. I love it.

Antoine Fort

07:55Maybe 20.

Funding History: Seed and Series A

Nathan Latka

07:56Maybe 20. There you go. Okay. And and walk me through how you funded this. I know you have raised some capital. Obviously, every founder wants to manage growth with with also dilution. So you told us about your 100 k angel round. What happened in between there? Anything else raised?

Antoine Fort

08:10So, yes, after that, we raised a seed round and a series a round. So the seed round was 5,000,000. It was 2022 January 2022, and then we raised our series a 10,000,000, like, two years later.

Nathan Latka

08:26Okay. So Series A in 2024?

Antoine Fort

08:29To the end of 2023.

Nathan Latka

08:31'20 okay. What was I mean, the valuations were so funky back then. I mean, people were getting crazy forty, fifty x multiples on their ARR. Did you sort of play that valuation game back then or no?

Antoine Fort

08:42No. No. We didn't want to play that valuation game because it was quite obvious that, you know, this would this could turn into a trap. And, you know, I think that the markets, you know, collapsed not too long after. So I think it was a good decision.

Crossing the First Million ARR in 2022

Nathan Latka

08:59Do you remember the year you broke your first million of revenue?

Antoine Fort

09:022022. We had an amazing party. It was a crazy week because we closed one customer every day of that week, which at that time, you know, did not happen. And on Thursday nights, we have the CFO of this company, Akenio, signing a contract that gets us above 1,000,000. So we took all the champagne from the bar that we were in and, you know, just had a good night.

Nathan Latka

09:30I love that. That's so cool. Okay. So you passed a million in 2022, and do you remember like, what's growth rate today? You're at around 8,000,000 today. Where were you exactly one year ago?

Antoine Fort

09:40We were, you know, between four and five. We're working hard to increase that growth rate because there's, you know, there there's lots of things that we we do well, but there's so many that we can that we can do even better. So this growth rate is exciting. It means that we're doing lots of things right.

Investors and Venture Debt

Nathan Latka

10:01My notes say that you raised from Singular, the revenue syndicate, and and Breega. Or or, I mean, are they feel are they putting pressure on you? Hey. Get to 200% year over year. Get to 300% year over year growth. What are they like as investors?

Antoine Fort

10:12You know, they they they are perfectly aware that pushing a company to just burn stupidly

10:21can do more harm than good. So, of course, they're they're putting pressure. They they want us to to to to grow faster, even faster. There there there are investors that that understand what it is to be in in the in the shoes of the founder. They don't only look at the numbers, and I'm glad that we have them on board.

Nathan Latka

10:43That makes a lot of sense. And then my notes say that you also raised $2,000,000 in debt. Is that accurate? And if so, should other founders be thinking about using debt to avoid dilution?

Antoine Fort

10:53Yes. I think it's really something useful to do, especially on top of of fundraising. It's good moments to go and talk to bankers. Mhmm. So let's do it. You you just need to be aware that, you know, this money needs to be paid back. So a few years later, when you when you when you look at what you're paying,

11:15make sure to to you know? Don't take this money as as if it was the investor money because it isn't.

Nathan Latka

11:22Yeah. You did that 2,000,000 on the back of your Series A 10,000,000 round? Yes. Correct. I see. I see. Did you do end up working with, like, SVB or HSBC? Or who do you end are you comfortable showing who you worked with there? Were they a good partner?

Antoine Fort

11:35We we got HSBC on board and two other banks.

Top Rep Commissions and AI Replacing Sales Reps

Nathan Latka

11:39I just saw this on your LinkedIn. Top sales rep earned 1,500,000 in commissions in 2025. Tell me more about this data you're tracking, and what on earth was that sales rep selling to make that kind of commission?

Antoine Fort

11:51So I'm not allowed to say what that person was selling because, you know, it's data of our customers. But what I can say is, you know, it's real data. So the person that earned the most money just in variable compensation across, you know, really

12:10thousands it's not thousands, like 10 thousands of sales reps earned $1,500,000. Yes. Wow. He's very ahead of the second one. And, you know, as you can see, it he's earning, like, 75 x what people earn on average in in variable compensation.

Nathan Latka

12:30There's a massive battle going on right now to basically replace the sales rep. Right? Replace the the commission structured sales rep. People are saying, like, AI can do it. I had Amanda on from OneMind. She's basically convinced firms like HubSpot. She confirmed this with me live to pay a 100 to $400,000 per head, per fake AI agent head to put on the website to actually take the Zoom call, close meetings, and her argument is, look. This

12:53is much cheaper than paying a quota carrying sales rep 300 k if they hit the 1,000,000 quota target. How would you sort of react to that?

Antoine Fort

13:01Products that have very fast sales cycles where just, you know, a one call close, AI will replace sales rep. But as long as the, you know, more complexity, I think it's still very far from being capable of of doing so.

AI Agents: Analyst, Architect, and Coach

Nathan Latka

13:17Very cool. Okay. Anything that you are building in the AI space that we should talk about in terms of product?

Antoine Fort

13:22Yes. So we really believe that's I mean, what we're doing with our product is we're turning a SaaS product, which is basically a product that helps people do their job to an AI product that does the job. And we are building three agents that we're gonna be releasing this quarter in June that are called, yeah, that are called the analyst, the architect, and the coach. The architect allows you to build and deploy comp plans in minutes instead

13:58of weeks. So typical implementation of Qobra or any incentive comp management tool takes weeks because you need to sync the data, then implement the comp plan rules. There's usually a ton of plans across the organization, and they all have their, you know, specificities. All this now is just this is my comp plan. Here's my PDF. Here's my PowerPoint, whatever. Build it and deploy it. So that that's the architect and then the analyst and coach for, like, similar use

14:33cases of

14:36reports building

14:39and sales rep engagement. So this is truly exciting because I really believe that this will allow us to provide so much more value to our customers.

Nathan Latka

14:48When you launch agents that actually do work for your customers, do you think your own agents will cannibalize your current revenue at all?

Antoine Fort

14:55No. I don't what I believe in I'm a big fan of, like, what Sequoia says about AI and services. They say that for every dollar spent on software, there's $6 spent on services, and that AI turns the $6 into software. So we believe in in a different world where you don't need all these people to maintain your sales your sales compensation tool, and you can do it autonomously. And we believe even further. We believe that the

15:20tool will do the work themselves. So I don't think it's gonna cannibalize our revenue. On the on the contrary, I believe that it will increase dramatically our revenue because we'll be able to capture dollars that currently are going into people and consultants.

G2 Reviews and GEO Visibility

Nathan Latka

15:35Antoine, as we wrap up, I wanna just touch on two other growth channels I think you're crushing, but correct me if I'm wrong. It looks like you're investing pretty aggressively on making sure you get a lot of reviews. I mean, a thousand G2 reviews is a ton of reviews, but a lot of people say, but I have to pay G2, like, 10 grand a month to then be featured and, like, maybe the leads are good, they're bad.

15:53Is G2 working for you?

Antoine Fort

15:55Yes. Yes. G2 has very strong authority on SEO and GEO. So having lots of reviews and being highly ranked like we are is really driving lots of traffic.

Nathan Latka

16:06When you say drives you a lot of traffic, can you quantify it? Do you do you know how much you get from G2 weekly or monthly?

Antoine Fort

16:13It's not necessarily that we get traffic from G2, but let's say that you ask a question to Claude about what is the best sales comp software out there. Claude will rely on multiple data source and links online that can provide with the answer to that question. So so that that drives traffic.

Programmatic SEO and Glossary Strategy

Nathan Latka

16:33This is where you're getting most of your traffic from. So you're you built a glossary SEO playbook, which is smart programmatic SEO. Was that intentional or by accident?

Antoine Fort

16:41Yes. It's intentional. We we have really been working strongly on SEO for the past, maybe, like, two to three years. So at first, you don't see the results so much, but then, you know, when it starts to kick in, it it it really does.

Nathan Latka

16:59This is a really smart go to market motion. The trick is you have to know which which glossary terms you wanna rank for. So, Antoine, I imagine that was you sort of contributing what you think is important, but also a little AI enrichment as well.

Antoine Fort

17:09It was not my idea, but, again, someone someone from the team that I'm really glad that he's working for for the company.

US Expansion and Acquisition Question

Nathan Latka

17:16You look like you get a lot of your traffic from France. Are you are you actively trying to sort of break into The States and, you know, get more traffic? I mean, you if you've monopolized France, it probably for sales commission software already. Right?

Antoine Fort

17:26That's still a big part of the market to capture over there. I don't think we even have, you know, 1% of the market, so there there there's still some strong growth opportunities out there. But, yes, we're really breaking strong into the The US market. I'll be relocating to New York. We're everywhere because The US market is a priority for us, and we already have, like, a significant part of our revenue coming from from The US.

Nathan Latka

17:50If someone in The States wanted to expand to France and acquire you, would you if someone offered you a 100,000,000 all cash today, would you take the deal?

Antoine Fort

17:57For a 100,000,000? You asked me to be transparent, so I'll take it.

Nathan Latka

18:04I I love that you're so honest. That's amazing. Are you comfortable sharing what your valuation was back in 2023 when you did that round?

Antoine Fort

18:12No, sadly. I I cannot.

Nathan Latka

18:14You can't share. Okay. Was that can you share if it was higher or lower than a 100,000,000?

Antoine Fort

18:18It was lower.

Nathan Latka

18:19It was lower. Okay. Very cool.

Antoine Fort

18:21Otherwise, I wouldn't take it.

Nathan Latka

18:22Yes. So that's why I asked. Yeah. Very cool. Well, hey, Antoine. This is really helpful. You taught us a ton. If people wanna follow your story online, where can they find you?

Antoine Fort

18:30On LinkedIn, Antoine Fort. Feel free to to to hit me up.

Nathan Latka

18:35Antoine, thanks for taking us to the

Antoine Fort

18:37Thank you so much, Nathan. Really appreciate this this session with you.

Nathan Latka

18:41If you enjoyed that interview, you should click here to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss new interviews every Tuesday. If you've got some free time and wanna listen to the next interview right now, click right here. Lastly, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and here on YouTube.