Resurface Labs Revenue, Valuation & Funding (2021)

Introduction hey folks my guest today is christine buragara she is building a very cool company called resurface dot io she's a challenge seeker loves tech and is focused on building storylines teams and pipelines through sales and marketing functions she's happiest when she's collaborating and she marries strategy with execution with leadership roles at sybase sap rally rogue wave and compost her experience in databases customer connections acquisitions and api management is a natural fit for resurface where they're focused on api observability for security and quality christine are you ready to take us to the top i am thank you all right you bet okay when did you write the first line of code for this company ah boy um a couple of years back now i will say full disclosure i can demo um and i'm pretty dangerous with some cobalt but beyond that we've got a dev team that focuses more on that but about two years ago is when the effort began in earnest okay and would you consider that your launch date 2019 yeah yeah about that we closed seed in Raised 2020 which was interesting the covid financing round um so that really i think was more of our launch point tell me more about that how about you how much did you raise one point we raised uh just over two million in our seed round um and have some great investors we've got access ventures we've got first mile we've got sas and ellerian so some folks that are along for the ride seeing the future with apis and why did you need that capital why couldn't you bootstrap this um because i think we needed to develop the market a little bit more it's not a let me pull it off the shelf solution apis particularly when it comes to security and quality which is what we're solving for is kind of new i think people are very aware of appsec application security but how does that apply to apis it's a whole different world so we really felt like we wanted a long runway to be able to develop that to educate people to bring people along and to develop the product that would meet those needs as we go i see okay so you raised two million now did you do that on a safe for christine or did you price that round [Music] uh not sure do you remember what what the valuation was or how much you sold yeah we are you know that's it again sorry i don't no you're good maybe you're not on the numbers all the time i understand you're a founder though right yeah co-founder exactly okay so tell me how you guys split roles how many co-founders are there yeah so just two um and we had one of our uh investors slash chairman who was really driving that financing round so i will admit i came in relatively late on that and so a lot of those discussions that's you hopefully i'm not screwing this up for you no you're good take your time get some water christine get some water that's what happens get some water yeah and you can copy with that take your time take your time 2 million raised last year your co-founder the chairman led most of the round yeah in terms of just being able to structure the deals and making sure that you know we had the right cap table and everything was was working well okay so great tell me about customers right so so what are customers paying for so they are paying for the license for resurface so we are on-prem which is a little different which makes it easier to pass the legal and compliant scrutiny around sharing data when you're looking at api data there tends to be a lot of pii or relatively sensitive data it could be financial it could be phi health information so we wanted to have a solution where people could use resurface and gather the the data but not worry about the risk that we would be able to access that and see it so that was very purposeful on our part and it's solely self-hosted so people can deploy the workloads wherever they would like and be able to get the richness of api data without paying a penalty for either exposure or the cost penalty and so what's the would you say the average customer is paying you per month to use the on-prem installations so we it depends so it depends on how much data you have how big your payloads are and then again how long you want to retain the data so owasp recommends 180 day retention for audit trails and traceability so again we leave that to the customers we are priced per node and it's published on our site we are at 5k in node and then how many nodes you need to go into a class 5k node per month uh per it's annual per year okay yep yep but how many nodes you need per cluster is really up to the customer to font to define what that payload looks like and what they want to capture what would you say like your sweet spot is there are people launching with five nodes one node a thousand nodes yeah it's probably gonna be between five and seven um just because early you know and there's going to be probably a phase right you may not want all of your apis right away we run in production so that can be a healthy amount of data and you may not want that same level of detail around all of your apis so that's where there's some variability um and as you add new partners etcetera that volume will likely grow i see so christine let me start three and five i'm gonna say five nodes on average at five grand a pop you're talking like twenty five thousand dollar of contracts the sweet spot okay fair and um and let's see tell me the story of how you got the first customer that's always a good one usually yeah yeah so um it a bit of our origin story i'll give you that very quickly and that is that a very large hardware manufacturer fruit-based hardware manufacturer had a precipitous drop in their online store once they launched a new version couldn't figure out what it was rolled in there with our solution and tracked and logged all of the calls and was able to then say where are they failing what's happening so we knew what process and then being able to say how are these alike and figuring out what that cohort looked like and it turns out it was also clustered around a zip code failure so it was a trailing zero error which means that anything in a zip code ending in zero would fail and so people kept trying to buy and it would say nope nope not a valid zip code um and it turns out that six percent of the zip codes in the u.s end in zero so that was a six percent revenue drop so it became really clear not only the value in the data to be able to root cause but to say let's reach out to everyone who is impacted so that's the beauty of the data to say nathan tried to buy something he didn't report a problem he just didn't buy so then we could remediate and reach out to each of those affected people and say come back buy again so that was our origin story and then that's sort of the the storyline that we're seeing is those silent failures or security risks that people need to know about in real time so that was company and customer number one how many customers are you serving now today Currently serving 3 customers so we've got i mean we're early days but we've got a couple dozen that are active in all states of you know hey we're trying this out proof of value through in production and again with apis they carry some degree of scrutiny in terms of they can carry revenue or again customer data yeah i would say a couple dozen is a lot considering how young you are and the sensitivity of the data how many nodes is that actually installed nodes um it depends so what i would say is the way that we quote that it depends on their implementation can you look at what you've already implemented across the 36. see that's that's where we don't have visibility because we're not sas but the way that we're priced is annual so it could be you know again taking the average of like five nodes per okay right so wait i don't understand how do you know what to build them if you don't know how many nodes they're installing well we we price annually but they can increase so we may have to do a true up at the end of it well that's what i'm trying to figure out but so you don't know right now how many nodes you know you have installed across the 36 customers yeah it'd be about 72 oh 72. okay cool you do know that and what you're saying is they may be adding other ones right now and you won't know to the end of the year when you sync it all up yeah yeah and that's part of the challenge right in our is that we don't always know exactly how they're deploying um but you know obviously we've quoted him at the beginning of the year and then we'll true up as we go forward yep yep yep and christine can i do the math if you have 72 live nodes at five grand to pop you Monthly recurring revenue guys are doing about 360 000 a year in revenue right now yeah that you know we're priced so that we could get early input so that we can get our steering council so i i would not do that math i don't think that's really fair when can you break that do you think you can break that next couple months that revenue you know it's probably going to be here's the trick nathan is that we realize that we're playing a little bit bigger in the organizations that we thought so some of those implementations may be larger which means our sales cycle could be a little bit longer i think to work through uh different groups that have opinions and ideas and ownership over those apis so i would hesitate to you know forecast out what that looks like but we expect that in the next year we'll be able to you know aggressively move that needle that's good that's exciting tell me more about the team today how many folks yeah so we are just under a dozen people and some of those are fractional we've got developers all over the world that are helping us build the product and then we've got some folks on the sales marketing side that are doing the outreach but a lot of that is you know us us founders reaching out to our networks and and having those good early conversations how many engineers so we've got five engineers okay very cool and the sales reps are mainly you guys well are you targeting any sector i mean i imagine financial institutions are probably a big one maybe governments who are you targeting yeah um right now it's people that are api first so i think the early movers and that tends to be pretty horizontal we're looking though at some heat maps that are sort of coming true around telco um less financial services but i would say fintech is probably the better more precise definition and then healthcare uh just because a lot of that now has moved to online with the fire protocols i think apis are a world that where they need to feel more comfortable and that's where we can help is by exposing the data they need to understand very cool now have you had anyone install you know five nodes a year ago and they've downgraded to three nodes do you have any churn having seen that we've seen the opposite not yet in in let's talk in a year because they think that that could happen there's always the risk when you have software of it being little used or disused right but we see the opposite which is where we were in the operations center and now we're talking to the people who own the online platform itself and said we want to be part of this our customers are asking for api audits and we need to be able to satisfy that so moving from ops to the product side is an interesting pathway for us and we're just now starting that i see very cool okay talk to me about funding moving forward you guys have enough runway in the bank to last yourself a year are you raising now we do um that that clock is ticking for sure and we're thinking we're about 12 months from series a it could go faster just depending on the climate and where we think we're ready but we're in acquisition mode for customers and users right now again to get that feedback loop we really want to understand the problems that we're solving for people and if there is a vertical spin on that meaning will there have to be different versions are they going to look at different protocols we want to make sure that we're conversant in that before we start really ramping and scaling makes sense managing burnout is really critical for an early team when you look at your total expenses per month right Profits now what are they about yeah you know i'd hesitate to to quote on that but i will say that we are managing it very conservatively um let's quantify that christine what does that mean does that mean you have 15 months to run away in the bank right now or five or what it's probably again back to 12 you think it's 12 okay we got in a little bit plus or minus but just spending in terms of like marketing programs being conservative there and making sure that those are things that we can measure and that are you spending on marketing right now a bit yes um we had a couple of pilot programs and you know enough results to say this is something we want to move forward with but right now it's content creation um a lot of events because that's where we can get in front of people we don't expect that they'll come to us right away google ads you know sort of the the more traditional method some social um and then on our uh you know team side being able to have some fractional contributors helps us fiverr for design work like again just being really cautious frugal makes sense makes sense this is a good story i'm going to see where you guys end up six 12 months from now to be fun but in the meantime christine we're out of time let's wrap up with the famous five number one what's your favorite business book um challenger sale number two is there a ceo you're following are studying right now oh that's a good question i just was reading last night recency effect on masterclass the founder of masterclass and that pathway is interesting number three what's your favorite online tool for building resurface oh um maybe just think about what you use this morning would you what a lot of zoom unfortunately but um zoom's a good one number four how many hours of sleep did you get every night i i'm i'm an eight gal that's good and what's your situation married single kids uh all of the above noah married and kids very cool how many kiddos i've got two boys oh wow very cool and can i ask how old are you no no i like it and honest the reason we ask is the next question is take us back to your 20 year old self what's something that you wish that she knew that um that it will pay off the hard work does pay off that that sometimes it doesn't seem like it but it will and it adds to your experience and your knowledge base even if it's good or bad guys christine building resurface dot io launched in 2019 they raised 2 million pre-seed last year and are now helping all kinds of customers call it healthcare fintech and telcos install on-prem installations to manage internal apis that might have sensitive data on them they price per node about 72 live nodes they price anywhere between saw two three four five thousand bucks a year per node as they look to scale hoping to break 500 000 bucks in revenue coming up here next year we'll see what happens christine thanks for taking us to the top yeah thanks 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 pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2 p.m central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you to 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