How Quantagonia CEO Sebastian Pokutta grew Quantagonia to $3M revenue with a 26 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is dirk zakiel he's the ceo of very cool company called quantogonia they're provided they provide a quantum and hybrid computing sas platform for enterprises turkey ready tickets to the top yes all right so what does that mean quantum computing platform for sas uh for enterprises yeah so as you said we're running a sas platform and for us star stands not just software as a service it's more about solution as a service because our platform helps companies make better decisions in less time and these could be these decision problems exist in the current hpc the high performance computing space so we're talking mainly about problems in the optimization simulation and ai space okay interesting and so i guess give me an example can you tell me specifically how a customer is using you have any case studies you can share yeah so for example the big optimization problems in the world exist in almost every industry like for example if you need to schedule airplanes yeah these problems are so big that it's impossible to schedule them by hand and it's even impossible if you take the largest computer on the market to just put it on the computer and think this computer could take all possible solutions and find the best solution yeah and so quantum computing so the promise of quantum computing is that these problems could be solved in the future when these quantum computers will be available so industry availability of these computers would take at least three years we estimate three to five years and then putting these problems on a quantum computer will help to speed up really to solve these problems in less time and you can even yeah solve bigger problems yeah so dirk how do you do that i mean do you guys own a bunch of quantum computers you rent out space or you're using other pieces hardware and people's hardware and processing power yeah so far we have access to quantum computers but all these quantum computers are more in research state because there are currently no real industry um usable quantum computers out there but we are currently so that's our hybrid classical compute way we are going because currently we are able to use these problems and put them on classical hardware and this classical hardware could be cpus or gpus fpgas so that these companies already get to speed up and later on when quantum computers are available we can internally move these programs on a quantum computer and basically the the customer will not see anything but he will get get an immense speed up out of that so just be clear are you using sort of a crowdsource approach someone can say i'm not using my laptop right now give it to guantagonia and let them use the processing power and sort of a mesh network sort of format so that a pilot or delta can use them to schedule airplane tracking yeah no no it's not a crowd thing it will be so we connect to computing centers in the back end like we could rely on services like amazon web services and so on on compute centers uh providing these cpus or gpu stuff and in the future quantum computers as well okay got it so you're not you're not necessarily uh like owning quantum compute right now your your secret sauce is writing and taking complex things like tracking airplanes and enabling that problem to be solved with you know aws right now but in the future easily switch your customers to quantum computers exactly yeah we are we are a software provider uh software guys and we help companies to make these better decisions through software so the thing is because you cannot really you cannot just port existing software to quantum computer in the future because it's a totally different architecture um it's a little bit like the new m1 chip with apple so they have invented this rosetta platform the virtual machine so that you could put in x86 code and run it on m1 chip which is a totally different architecture and we will do basically the same for quantum computing so put your x86 code in and you can run it on the quantum computer in the future i see 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 it 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 valuation 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 frowner 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 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 raised 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 valuations 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 so these customers today what are they paying you on average per year to use your technology so we have founded the company um end of last year end of 2021 so the company is four months old five months old so we got the first investment in december uh four months ago uh and so we are in development you're pre-revenue today then yeah so yeah um exactly so but we have signed up with 10 11 customers were on on loa basis so we're calculating the first wheel problems with them so we could already proven that we have a speed up uh in solving their problems and yeah we are not yet charging them so dirk let's go back to his 11 customers here in a second but first obviously you have to pay yourselves while you guys are building this if you're not making revenue so you guys have raised capital how much did you raise in december we cannot to disclose that because it's under nda but it's enough for this year to grow up to 20 people now well sorry why can't don't don't i mean most governments hire when you raise most most governments require when you raise your investors that you file government forms to to basically say that and on your crunch base profile it says last funding type precede why can't you disclose the amount it's and investors didn't want to disclose it yeah but but why is that it's your company why would the investor why would you give investors control over that i don't know i need to check with them sorry for that well you work directly with them you didn't ask them hey guys why is it important for you not to like to keep this private not yet sorry [Music] well i guess that's a the reason i'm asking is because your ability to retain talent people aren't going to join you unless they know you have runway and so putting a press release out that says we raised x right gets people confidence it also enables you to bring on customers faster this had to have been a conversation during the race i don't believe this never came up so i'm just trying to understand strategically why you were okay with it yeah i need to check with him so we are not disclosing it so that's that's our point yeah so dirk you're missing my question i'm not asking you to disclose how much you raised what i'm asking is strategically why did you decide not to disclose it it doesn't help you get talent and it doesn't help you communicate to the market that you're going to be around for a long time to get big enterprise accounts on day one yeah it's a strategic decision decision which has been made and that's uh we we are not disclosing that decision yeah sorry for the answer you're not answering about four times now so i'm not going to ask it again uh we'll we'll move on um the i guess uh i guess some of them pivot right so how many folks are full-time today on the team we are now with uh 12 i need to think about it because we're adding people every week yeah 12 foots now yeah okay and how many of those folks are...