How Query.AI CEO Andrew Maloney grew Query.AI to $10.5M revenue and 10 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is andrew maloney he's the co-founder and chief operations officer at query.ai where he's responsible for establishing and delivering on the company's go to market and business operations strategy the tool provides the market's only security investigations control plane all right andrew ready to take to the top sounds great nathan thank you all right explain this to a commoner like me what does that mean security investigations control pain plan great question great question so first thank you for having me it's great to be here with you today uh so query ai is a relatively early stage company uh we just raised our a round in october um the premise of what we pre-revenue our post we were post revenue yeah we just uh we did our a round we had two rounds this year we just see round early in uh the uh may time frame right now i think there's man look at the specifics of it it's all coming together it's been exciting year for us um but then we did uh october a follow-on a round of that to kind of help expand uh and continue the the growth in the market your question though was more like what is this and what does it do um have been in and around security for for 20 years my co-founder dhiraj and i and uh you know we've spent a lot of time in in sim type tool sets working with security operations teams and how to bring all of this data together to effectively run an investigation what we found though is even in historical times with less data more on-prem environments it was very difficult to centralize all of this uh and what we found with the adoption of cloud and uh you know software as a service providers data is truly everywhere so this silo data that is really a disparate environment the inability to see this kind of centralized view has really slowed down security teams and their ability to run investigations and get to outcomes with high confidence so the investigations control plan is really about bringing all of that together centralized insights and access to all of this decentralized data without having to worry about how to move the data around how to get it centralized first which which offers a lot of capabilities and advantages to you know comparative to legacy approaches and what are customers paying on average per month or per year to use this technology you've built our asps today are just under 100k we're planning on growing those to 125 and our 2022 forecast plans and i think realistically we can get into the 200k range pretty easily on our average customer that's annually right annually correct yes yep okay that's great nice mrr but we're not quite there yeah that would be incredible that would be great um okay cool give me sort of a back story here when did you guys launch the business so we started our go to market operations in very late 2019 uh we officially launched the company perfect timing aligned with the pandemic in march of 2020 so the first year was an interesting one for us just coming out of kind of stealth mode and getting those first kind of customer traction as the whole world was shifting to remote workforce but i think we've been a remote first company from the beginning so for our operations capabilities didn't really change too much of our tempo and we i think we're very well aligned to this market shift in the move to the cloud right because the less data you can get in one environment the more you start without these different technologies the more you have a need for a solution like ours now when did you turn on your first paying customer it would have been july in 2020 so uh shortly after our launch 2021 is the year we're inside all right 2020. you're all good we're on the same page how did you how did you fund yourself from 2019 to 2020 before your first paid customer so we had a pre-seed round from angel investors uh which gave us the initial runway to build the prototype do some market validation and testing it's interesting kind of story uh how much was that for just under a million dollars okay yeah operations have been very lean and a lot of our development is out of india which keeps our costs down but they are query kind of employees so uh those relationships have been very beneficial dhiraj has been in engineering for well over 20 years now uh he and i met about 16 years ago at a company called arcsight so he's got a lot you guys just split 50 50 at the beginning or no no he actually started the company prior to my joining uh from an incorporation perspective and was building a bit of a kind of a prototype you know how do you more simply access data from a single solution almost like siri for your sock as it kind of started the technology was even called iris inside and you can literally natural language processing ask it questions and get answers and that is unique and interesting but the real market problem that we saw and aligned to as we really started to kind of test and validate is the need to do this across decentralized platforms because no one again has all that data in one place which kind of an obvious aha moment looking back because we tried so long to get it all in one place but it's really a paradigm shift in the way people think about security today so what's the energy like that between the two of you i mean would he call you a co-founder do you have more than 20 of the business uh he would call me a co-founder we don't disclose publicly the ownership percentages but we're both in strong positions and want to see the company succeed but yeah we're definitely partners in this so i would say 50 50 partners without any kind of equity association to that if you will yeah yeah fair enough i mean the reason i ask it sounds like you have a story to history right you're not going to join a company like this unless someone puts together a very compelling compact for you that actually looks like co-founder equity yeah no i agree with that absolutely and i think uh you know the way that we split the responsibilities of the business and and how we've kind of built this up um i think he would very much agree that we have completely done this together i handle all the business operations go to market sales marketing customer success he's responsible effectively for kind of r d and bringing all of the product to life okay so you get going in 2019 you sign up your first paid customer 2020 how many customers are now serving today so we have um just under 10 customers today with a couple more we hope to get done in the last couple weeks always down to crunch time in the year um we've got a pretty aggressive growth plan coming into 2022 uh which will be both on kind of the revenue and the customer acquisition in terms of number of new logos but we've landed from really strong accounts that we're very excited for no it sounds like it and at the average asp that you just articulated a couple minutes ago times 10 customers it sounds like i can give you congratulations you guys are either flirting with or just passed a million dollar run right we are flirting very close and uh you have great plans to go and not just expand new customers and logos but we got some deals that we see a lot of expansion opportunity with andrew you have you have 10 days nothing happens now you have 10 days i know or 5k of new mrr hit that hit that magic number baby i will tell you too that my vp of sales is feeling that pressure as well i bet i bet he is all right very cool what a fun story all right so um fill up the capital stack again so a million in 2019 what was the next round um it was a million in 18 was the pre-seed round in um early 2021 we did a seed round of 4.6 million okay um well 4.6 3.6 million we announced it including the precede let me make sure that i'm getting that right so 4.6 that announcement included the first funding announcement we did um for a total of 4.6 and then this year we just did a 15 million um in october a second round uh which was our a round decision yeah how do you go out i mean again you sort of just told us your revenue run rate you know imagine you guys aren't going to go out and do a series a that's super dilutive you know most companies are selling 10 to 15 percent of the business right in the series a so assuming you were in that range you had to go out and convince the world that you're worth 100 million bucks or something around that right which is basically like 100x multiple how did you do that well uh multiples are crazy right now and evaluate they are but that's really great i mean that's another one we didn't we didn't get to 100 million in that we gave a little more away it was important for us to find the right investors who could really help us move the business from a relationship from an experience perspective we feel like we've built a very very solid board to help us drive the company forward so i think we did very well we didn't give too much of the company away but you know we we also were telling a story on kind of what the future holds versus just what we've done today right because you know you've got to drive towards revenue we did it probably i don't say you know late summer we kind of started some of these conversations we had some folks interested early on that we had kept up to date so they saw the progress they saw us kind of marching towards our targets and milestones some of the forecast abilities where we're going to end the year and then obviously our operating plans going forward are...