How Rev grew to $10M revenue and 6.1K customers in 2025.

Nathan Latka (00:01) Hey folks, my guest today is Adi Batha. He's the CEO and co-founder of Rev with 2Vs, an AI platform for transforming how auto shops handle ADS calibrations. That's for cars. He's a Forbes 30 under 30 honoree, previously product and engineering at companies like Misfits Market, Walmart, and Jet.com. Adi, you ready to take us to the top? Adi Bathla (00:19) Let's do it. Nathan Latka (00:21) All right, cars are becoming more like computers and your bet is that repair shops are not ready. Tell me more about what you're building. Adi Bathla (00:28) Absolutely. ⁓ at Rev we're building the platform to manage ADAS workflows. It is the largest operating system to manage ADAS workflows. And what that means is cars today have ⁓ sensors, cameras, modules, electronics that power features like adaptive cruise control, lane keep. the industry has really been hit by a brick wall where due to government made... they have percolated majority of the car park and it's a tectonic shift for the technician who's been used to repairing the bumper, the fender, the quarter panel with their hands to now work with mats, targets and lasers. It's more physics and more akin to a skilled engineer to repair a car and we help them navigate all of the net new and put safe cars back on the road. Nathan Latka (01:18) So you're selling directly to repair shops like Paul here at Paul, Paul Bostel. Adi Bathla (01:23) Yes, absolutely, Pabostl is a very special customer, he the first dollar in the business. But yes, we are selling to repair shops and we're selling to any business that touches a car after it's been sold. your collision shops, body collision shops, your mechanical shops, dealerships, glass shops, PDR, you name it. Nathan Latka (01:47) Interesting. Okay, and how many of these are there in the US just so everyone can understand the market size? Adi Bathla (01:53) Yeah, absolutely. mean, if you're combining the all the FNICPs that I'm mentioning today, there's about 300 to 400,000 of these businesses across, I'd say, North America. Nathan Latka (02:08) And give me a sense, well we want to get more of your back story here, but I want my audience to understand sort of what you're charging on average to these repair shops. What's the average one paying you per month or per year would you say? Adi Bathla (02:18) Average revenue per account looks something like $12K per year. what we also offer, the platform is revenue generating, liability protecting platform. And one of the aha moments within the first five minutes of the customer seeing the demo is the fact that the payback period is for a monthly fee within two repairs, the product pays for itself, basically. So the customers all in all generate 10 times the revenue than they pay us. Nathan Latka (02:49) So just let's say I'm in Austin, Texas, I drive a Tesla. Let's say that the screen is like stuck on black. It's a simple example, right? I can't figure out how make the screen work again, which means I can't shift to park or neutral, whatever. I take it to the local Austin repair shop here. What you're saying is three years ago, they'd have no idea what to do. But now if they use your software, they could connect some cords to the car and instantly know the software they need to fix. And they can charge me more for that and make up the $12,000 fee that they pay you for the year. Adi Bathla (03:15) Yeah, that's a great question. know, simplistic use case I'll walk you through. So let's say you take your car for repair, the check engine light is on or your... spot wasn't working or even the bumper needs to be repaired. So the car comes into the bay and Rev is already integrated with every piece of software and hardware that the shop uses. And so as soon as the car comes into the bay, Rev runs in the background and essentially within seconds does a research around what needs to be done to the car and puts the result of that research in the technicians' fingertips. So now the technician has the technician has the components that are equipped in the car, why they need to be repaired, what are the step-by-step instructions directly from the manufacturer's requirements around how to repair it, and the perfect claims packet that they can put together, send to the insurance companies, and get reimbursed by it. And if there's a third party, and oftentimes we did the study and more than 90 % of the shops now need to collaborate with specialists and a third party to do these repairs, so you're able to collaborate with that third party and collectively put together that proof of repair and while the owner of the shop is able to look at the P &L of what is my revenue leaky bucket ⁓ and the bookkeeper is able to do the books so it's purpose-built for shops of all sizes all types of users in a shop ultimately it lets the shop puts the safest car back on the road which prevents accidents which is the fourth largest cause of death in the country Nathan Latka (04:48) You launched this in 2022 and I'm studying your history trying to see if you worked at a repair shop or something to understand where you got the idea. I don't see it. So clue me in here. Tell us your background here and when did you get the idea? Adi Bathla (04:59) Yeah, I would, I'll highlight two key points in my career. I'd say, you know, I was a teenager when I really started building. I built a concept of a space colony for NASA. That, you know, did two things to me. It planted the entrepreneurial bug by ⁓ telling me that I could envision the future 100 years from now and really build a solution towards a pain point that that world would be solving for. And second, I didn't need to ask for permission to build something meaningful and create value in society. So that was really kind of the genesis of my entrepreneurial journey. And when I put myself in uncomfortable situations and threw myself in high growth startups working closely with founder CEOs who built multi-billion dollar businesses in record time. That really showed me how to build mission driven businesses. What does it really take to build that scale of a business? And when you surround yourself with people who are doing big things, doing small things becomes very uncomfortable. So I was willing to do anything and everything it takes to solve a meaningful problem in the world. And I started with the auto industry without knowing the exact pain point that I'm going to be solving for but I picked the industry. Nathan Latka (06:19) Where is that? Like I don't see any exposure to auto on your background here. Where did you first get exposed to these shops? Adi Bathla (06:26) That's my extended family in Houston, Texas, where they essentially own an auto parts distribution business. So I saw firsthand through them how pen and paper the industry was. That inner look into the industry really started in 2018, but in 2022 is when I reached a breaking point and threw myself in the abyss, quit my job, left my bonus, didn't know where the paycheck was coming from, and I started sleeping in their shops to really find out the pain point I would solve for. Nathan Latka (06:55) Give me a sense of how much you gave up. Are you comfortable sharing the salary and bonuses you gave up to go all in on Rev? Adi Bathla (07:01) I'd say I was still, you know, at that point living paycheck to paycheck. that paycheck was the source of my rent really. And the bonus that I gave up was around 20, 30K ⁓ plus no salary for a very long period of time. Plus, you know, me and my co-founder, didn't really pay ourselves really for the first year and second year. We were barely paying ourselves about 60K. ⁓ city so it it was was navigating all that stuff but you know looking back ⁓ wouldn't change a thing about it. Nathan Latka (07:40) Tell us how you got your first customer, 2022. Adi Bathla (07:44) I got my first customer so I had Nathan Latka (07:47) It has to be your family, by the way. Hopefully your family in Houston was the first customer. Adi Bathla (07:51) My family in Houston was not the first customer because that's not the problem that I ended up solving for. So yeah, through the network, I did get to understand a much more grueling hair on fire problem, which I'm solving today. But back then it wasn't as evident. So I really had to dig deep into the industry to find that pain point. And I'd say how I got my first customer was when I... Nathan Latka (07:54) Yeah. Okay. Adi Bathla (08:18) there was one phone call that really changed the whole game for me. So back then when I was trying to solve for my family's pain point simultaneously I was hopping around shops physically knocking doors and giving everybody my phone number and asking people to call me if they had a pain point to solve for. So there's one phone call that changed the game, which where a friend of a repair shop owner calls me, says, I just repaired a car. The lane change on the car malfunctioned. The driver got into an accident and they were worried they were gonna get sued. That sparked a series of discovery items, me hopping shop to shop, realizing that everybody has this pain point. It used to be one in four cars, but now it's three in four cars. So there's a massive why now and NetNew attached to it. That's when I really felt the pull from the industry. So I put together something, a concept, a proof of concept, and I started, built an album engine, and I started reaching out to shops across the country. There was one shop, I remember, that hopped on the call with me. Nathan Latka (09:18) Adi, what specifically though, you're breezing over some of this without giving the juicy details. So where were you door knocking? Was it New York City auto shops in the Bronx? Adi Bathla (09:23) now. I was door knocking in auto shops in Houston, Texas. I'm still in Houston, door knocking at shops in Houston, Texas. I was meeting dealerships, was meeting used car owners, I was meeting, you know... Nathan Latka (09:32) Okay, so still in Houston. Okay, so one of them returns your call about this lane change issue you just gave, and then when did you write the first line of code for Rev? Adi Bathla (09:51) At that point, I still didn't write code, but we built a prototype on, which was solely design based. It was maybe a few lines of code attached to it, nothing too extensive. That's exactly, it was right after I saw repeatability. What I found was asking the same question to shops gave me the same answer. That today, if I take the bumper out, there's a bunch of sensors and electronics that I have no idea what to do with. So that was on repeat as I was asking the same questions to multiple shops and even how gruesome it has become, how many cars they are ⁓ facing this problem with was increasing and that was also another repeatable point that I was hearing. That gave me confidence enough that I had to put something out there to really understand how big the demand is. You know, when I got that, when I got that, mm-hmm. Nathan Latka (10:48) Okay, so you launch. You get going, then you launch in 2022. We heard your first customer story, the lane changing one, and your first hundred or more customers basically came from an outbound strategy you put together. Walk me through what you did there. Were you on LinkedIn sorting for a job title? Was it asking for referrals? How did you build that initial list? Adi Bathla (11:09) The initial list, I essentially ⁓ utilized Apollo and really found out some ⁓ emails of folks who would be interested in the solution. was, you know, folks who are fixing the body and the chassis of the car, collected those emails, precisely built an outbound engine, it in the dark, and I got some bites. And when I hopped on the call, Nathan Latka (11:36) What was the subject line you used in one of those emails? Adi Bathla (11:38) ⁓ I don't know if I remember that exact subject line to be honest with you. Yeah, but I did have to did have to massage that subject line. I do remember just really honing on that subject line. ⁓ it fortunately enough emails of auto shop owners weren't the most most you know sought out or most infiltrated ⁓ Nathan Latka (11:43) Okay, okay. Adi Bathla (12:08) And also the fact that the pain point is so grueling speaks for itself. That's why I got those bites as well. Also, shop owners don't really live in emails, they live on phones more. But that piece aside, I would say, know, I remember hopping on my first few calls and in one of those calls, the shop owner says, I really need this problem solved. But I still didn't have the whole solution, of course. I needed their help, I needed to pick their brains. And all this information, this subject matter expertise ⁓ is in the brain. Nathan Latka (12:14) Okay. Adi Bathla (12:43) of these technicians who are ASC level certified. There's about 200 of them across the country. There's not that many. So I really needed their help to take the products to an MVP and then an MSP. So I asked them that, I am going to go above and beyond for you. I'm going to build this platform and take it to market and solve your problem. But you need to help me out. So they asked me, where in Minnesota? Come through. So next thing you know, I took a plane ticket and I showed up at their shop. And they graciously invited me and I started sleeping in their shops pretty much ⁓ and built what the first version of Rev would be. Nathan Latka (13:24) So these are your first couple of customers. Fast forward to today. How many customers are you working with? Adi Bathla (13:30) Today we're working with 6,100 plus shops across two countries who are utilizing Rev in some form or fashion. We've hit eight figures in top line. We've raised 33 million in capital and have about 60 plus employees. Nathan Latka (13:48) this. When was your first million dollar revenue year? Adi Bathla (13:52) First million dollar revenue year was six months into launching the product actually. it was 20, it was 2023. 2023 is when we ended up launching the product. It was a long and arduous journey to get it to launch and we wanted to get it, know, put it out there as soon as possible. But we did make our first million while taking the product from a minimum viable product to a minimum sellable product. Nathan Latka (13:57) So 2022. 23, okay. I love that. And then when, what year did you break 10 million of revenue? You mentioned you're at eight figures today. Adi Bathla (14:26) We broke 10 million in revenue last year. Nathan Latka (14:30) Okay, and what's the goal for this year? You thinking it up to like 20, 30 million? Adi Bathla (14:34) I would say, you know, we definitely have ambitious goals. I want to balance, you know, top line, not being the only metric and not just a vanity metric and building vertically and solving the entirety of the pain point for the industry that has evolved quite a bit. But what I can mention is So last year we grew about 500 % and last year, in the last 12 months, we grew more than 100%. Yeah. Nathan Latka (15:04) Okay, great. try to repeat that back to you. You finished 2025 at north of a million run rate, which means you're doing more than $840,000 of revenue in December of 2025. We're now recording this in March of 2026. So we're three months in, and you were saying you've grown what percentage over the last three months? Adi Bathla (15:22) I would say the last 12 months we've grown on more than 100%. Yeah. Yes. Yeah. Nathan Latka (15:26) 12 months. Got it. Got it. Okay, perfect. That makes sense. Okay, and then tell me, I want to get to the capital story, but one piece of math, I want to just clear it for a second. You mentioned earlier, the average ACV was 12,000 per year. If I multiply that times 6,100 customers, that would put you at 73 million of ARR. Obviously, you're not there yet. We are betting on you. One day you will be. Is that just because some earlier customers are maybe free or paying less? Adi Bathla (15:50) That's the difference between rooftops and paying customers. So one unique thing about Rev is that we have a one-to-many relationship, essentially. this phenomena of doing ADAS calibrations goes a bit deeper where one paying shop or entity can calibrate the vehicles of a lot of other shops within the 20 mile radius around them. basically, so they might foot the bill for the entirety of the network, you know, but we are plugged into each of those nodes, if that makes sense. Nathan Latka (16:18) I see. I see. Okay. So the right way to phrase this is there's 6,100 rooftops across what? A thousand customers? Adi Bathla (16:33) Yes, yes, right about that. Exactly. Nathan Latka (16:35) around that. Interesting. Okay, talk to me about capitalization. You mentioned New York City, 60K salaries. Like, I mean, when you started this, you had no idea what was gonna happen. How did you fund? When was your first, I guess, round? You mentioned you raised 30 million. Adi Bathla (16:47) Yeah, we did a pre-seed round that was about 2.1 million before we took the product to market. That was early 2023. And then we raised another 20 million Series A and did a 10 million plus extension on top of it as well. That was, those would be last year. Nathan Latka (17:12) Okay, ⁓ I missed the seed round. Did you go directly from the 2.1 pre-seed to the 20 million series A? Adi Bathla (17:18) Yes, we skipped that seed piece just because we had found a hair and fire problem, really strong product market fit and went from zero to a million in about six months. So we ended up doing a series A and a price round right after that. Nathan Latka (17:37) I see. Why an extension versus a go out and do a series B? Adi Bathla (17:41) That's a great question. series A was very competitive. We had a lot of interest and it was really, it was short after that interest. There wasn't that big of a gap ⁓ where we did the extension because one, we like working with the parties, you know, ⁓ and what they would bring to the cap table. us also wanted to stay heads down and focused on building the business rather than having to go out for another round soon after our A. So those were the two main factors of us taking in that capital. Nathan Latka (18:18) Interesting one of things I care deeply about is as founders scale they balance their dilution with you know How they personally generate personal liquidity from the company and for their employees etc When you did the 20 million series any extension was that all primary capital or was there some component that was secondary? Adi Bathla (18:34) I would would I skip this question if if that is okay Yeah Nathan Latka (18:39) Okay, ⁓ so you don't have to answer the question, but I guess maybe talk, it's clearly a sensitive topic. This is something I think every founder should be thinking about. So can you maybe talk about in generalities, maybe not about your specific situation? Adi Bathla (18:52) Yeah, in general I would say you know primary and secondary capital is you know it's At these stages, earlier stages, you want majority of the capital to be working for the business basically. And the amount of capital that you're raising, are more focused on balancing the dilution as well as the capital that you're taking up. But really depends from situation to situation, founder to founder. You don't want a founder to be in such a dire need of personal capital that they are going to kind of push beyond the boundary that it starts, you know, being debilitating to the business when it comes to physical and mental toll that it might take, right? So one founder might get more eagle-eyed towards the long-term success of the business, and for their situation, it might make sense to take some chips off the table. But on the other hand, if you are... if you don't have any of those restrictions, be it your personal constraints, family constraints, or loved one constraints, and you're able to stay focused on the business, then you would wanna put more towards the business, and because that is directly translating to growth, ⁓ and your equity value increase, yeah. Nathan Latka (20:12) Adi, did the bank balance ever get so low that you considered shutting down the company? Adi Bathla (20:19) We were always very frugal with the spend. And frugal might be not the right word. I think it's more, you know, we extended ourselves in the early stages very much on purpose. Me and my co-founder didn't hire beyond just the two of us after the pre-seed, up until we had some semblance of repeatability from a go-to-market motion standpoint, as well as had gone the product to where it should be. So that's number one. That actually gave us superpowers. So really, really deep expertise in the industry early on, getting to understand the entirety of the problem space and being very fluent in what we're building. So we can translate it to a go-to-market engine as well as a very, very targeted R &D, accomplished R &D team and inspire them towards a problem space. So that led us to hone in on... How much how we can do more with less, you know, so what's happening with AI these days is actually a forcing function for many companies But I think we kind of carry that ethos from day zero, you know ⁓ And next thing I'll mention is the business after raising Series A. Of course, the foot was on the ⁓ gas in terms of scaling, but we really had to balance scaling as well as ⁓ my personal passion and what I'm seeing, what I saw in the industry was this gap that was created by the problem that we solved for in 2022. really, really showed color and in such a dynamic market evolved quite a bit. So that gave us the opportunity to build vertically and solve more and more of that pain point. So that was balancing between go-to-market growth and scaling as well as R &D, how do you prioritize, how do you swim in that direction. So all that to say, that's when we really started spending money because we thought that we had to do both and we had to balance both. But fortunately in the B2B SaaS space as well, think one high gross margins, which is great, which is really positive, but also really hiring for best in class talent when you absolutely are feeling the pain to go for that. That actually showed a lot of color in a positive way to us now because looking back, we were able to essentially build a team where everybody is able to have a massive impact and not dilute that really across the board in the organization. Nathan Latka (22:53) Adi, you shared that last year, 2025, you broke $10 million of revenue. One way to measure if a company is doing more with less using AI is to look at their revenue per employee, right? If you're caught 12 million of ARR today divided by 60 employees, that puts you about 200,000 bucks of revenue per employee, which respectfully is not that impressive. There's a lot of software companies that are doubled and triple that. Now you're hiring a little bit ahead of your growth, probably because you just raised some money, but can you get to 50 million of ARR with your current team? Adi Bathla (23:20) That's a really good question. I think the one component ⁓ for us specifically when it comes to software companies that we're selling to an offline buyer. you know, when it comes to a product-led motion for, you know, the broader B2B SaaS space, if you think about that, this becomes a little bit more tedious, I'd say, than that, where, you know, ⁓ our shop owners as our customers, even though we're selling the best possible revenue-generating and liability-protecting solution to navigate the net new, they still want to hear from a human being, and there's a lot of trust-building and education that is needed. ⁓ So a lot of our investments go there too, but you're right around the revenue per employee kind of metric that we're seeing from our side. ⁓ What we have been able to do from our go-to-market motion is, for example, our sale cycle used to be about 21 days in year number one, and we've been able to compress it to less than five days. And what we've built over the course of last three years is this layer of systems, people, and process that made our payback periods go from 12 months to about less than five months today. So we're able to essentially do five to eight times more with a single rep for example in terms of productivity compared to where we were about eight months ago you know so that's absolutely yes yeah yeah yeah Nathan Latka (24:48) So you have quota carrying sales reps. Yeah, it's a tough balance of this price point because they've got to do volume to hit their quotas. You know, there's like a dead zone between like five and 30 K of ACVs because it's in that size where it's too big to be a credit card swipe on a website, but it's too small to put like real touch on it. And you're sort of in that messy middle right now. Adi Bathla (25:01) Yes. Great. Yeah, absolutely. It's a high velocity motion as well, which is, it needs to be a high velocity motion and then what you need is you need the product to be pulled off the shelf to create that motion and make it productive for the sales team, which is why I think another metric I can share with you is that 70 % of folks who hop on the demos end up converting into... and MSA that signed and then 90 % of those customers actually signed on the same day, basically. And this took a very, very long time to build and a lot of breaking it apart and putting back together and what worked from zero to one didn't work from one to five and then you had to rebuild it from five and above. But it's been so fun. Nathan Latka (26:01) You're figuring it out. Let's wrap up here. Quick questions. How old are you today? Adi Bathla (26:05) I am 31 today. Nathan Latka (26:07) 31 years old, number two, what favorite AI tool you're using. Adi Bathla (26:11) My AI tool at the moment would be Whisper Flow. It's just, it's really shortening the time of me communicating all that I need to communicate to all the people that I need to communicate to. Nathan Latka (26:25) What's your average words per minute? I'm a WhisperFill power user. I'm at 186 WPM. What are you at? Adi Bathla (26:30) Let's see. I'm at 162 WPM. You're beating me there. Nathan Latka (26:36) That means you're a better thinker than I am. You're more articulate. That's what that means. I rush. go, what are you doing, Whisperflow? Fix this, fix this, fix this. Okay, very cool. Last thing, something you wish you knew your 20-year-old self knew. Adi Bathla (26:48) Something I wish my 20 year old self knew ⁓ was, know, things don't get easier in life. Things only get harder, but you just develop a thicker skin, you know? Yeah. Nathan Latka (27:04) I love that. Guys from is from is. parents, not parents from his family's Houston's repair shop where he's asking questions, digging around the receipt and the cashier and Austin. goes, you know what? The thing I want to solve here is now live at RevHQ.com. It's ADAS identification, documentation and reimbursement built right into these repair shops workflow. Today, he's serving over a thousand repair shops, which cover over 6,100. He calls them rooftops. He's building this out with his team of 60. They got the MVP going in 2022. 2023 broke a million bucks of revenue, closed to 2.1 million pre-seed. And by 2025, This incredible growth, 10 million bucks of revenue, 20 million Series A with a 10 million extension, and now they're just scaling faster and faster. Adi, thank you for taking us to the top. Adi Bathla (27:47) Thank you, Nathan. I appreciate it.