How Skillveri CEO Sabari Nair grew Skillveri to $1.5M revenue and 250 customers in 2025.

Combining VR and AI for skilled trades training What are your largest software contracts there? Currently, it's at 350K for the largest contract. There are very costly methods to rate how you welded or how you painted separately on the field. So, we want to add some AI grading tools for the real world so that a student when they move from the simulation to the lab that they have in the school or when they go back to work at some point, they should be able to use an AI tool from us which would grade them objectively on how well they have painted or how well they have welding. Someone came to you today and offered you $4 million all cash upfront to sell the business. Would you exit? No. I see a lot of growth right now. Hey folks, my guest today is Sabari Near. He is the co-founder and CEO of Skill Vary BRI.com where they're redefining vocational training through XR simulations. He started his career in deep tech before moving into product management and now he's building immersive solutions to bridge global skill gaps. He's also the prime minister's champions of change panel on that panel on edtech and skills. Sabari, are you ready to take us to the top? Yes. So, all right. So, take us in the product first. I'm going to share a screen here and go to your website, but but tell us what we're looking at here. What does the company sell? What do you do? So, we sell virtual reality and mixed reality simulations that uh run on either a MetaQuest or a Pico headset together. Hold that up. Hold that up close to the camera so the audience can see it. I didn't realize you had an example. Yeah. Very cool. So, it's like a VR set. It is, but you could pair it up with real world tools like a spray painting gun or Uhhuh. welding gun. That's awesome. So, are you mainly then selling to you know companies that do a lot of welding who are onboarding and training hundreds of employees? Yes, we have two uh major uh channels I SaaS pricing vs expensive legacy simulation tools would say. We have the industry which does their own in-house training for their staff but we also have a larger set of customers from the high schools and community colleges which have a CTE program. So that's that's where it's more popular in the US in Europe and in Asia it's more popular with the industries. I see. Very cool. How and so how do you price this? Right. So so if a school buys I guess give me your sample customer. What do they look like? So, uh, one example could be a high school in, uh, in a place called Modesto, California. And so, they have a SAS version of a product, which means that they they own the headsets like these, and they use the controllers that come standard with the the VR headsets uh, to use the product, but they are looking at doing an upgrade to have one of these spray guns and the welding guns added to their program. So typically uh we are possibly the only one in this space who have a SAS option as well. We compete with wellestablished large corporations which sell costly one-time purchase simulations which which cost upwards of like $35,000. We have something starting at around $4,000 as a software sub. So 4,000 just gets me the software. How many headsets does that get me? that can at the at the starting version of the product that can power up up to five headsets and uh you could additionally buy these hardware add-ons the the the welding gun or the spray painting gun that I showed. So that adds to the immersive feel and touch and feel of the real trade. If you look at total revenue last year in 2024, what percent came from software How Skillveri bundles hardware and software versus your hardware sales? It's currently about a 60/40 mix. 60% from software, 40% from hardware plus software packages. So we have a significant recurring revenue component coming from the software packages. Uh but some schools enhance it by having a onetime purchase of the hardware alone or sometimes they do like a full package. So we we have very advanced simulations that sell upwards of $25,000 per per set, but that includes the hardware and a perpetual license of the software. Interesting. and and I guess are you comfortable sharing the largest package you've ever sold like today the largest customer you support don't name them obviously for confidentiality reasons but what are your largest software contracts say are these $50,000 per year contracts or 5 million per year contracts currently it's at uh 350k uh for the largest contracts so we would like to take it up to to above a million of course yes that's great now three a customer paying you $350,000 per year is your outlier that's your big kahoon Una, your big whale. What's the average customer though paying you for just your software annually? Uh, typically a school would either go in for a subscription as low as 4,000 that I mentioned or a typical would one would be about uh 15 to $20,000 every year. It varies from scholarship to school, district to district, and what what kind of skills that they want. Okay. Okay. You keep using sort of schools as your example. Is it fair to say that is your primary customer? You're selling mainly to schools. Yes. In the US, uh the schools, high schools and sometimes middle schools which have a CTE program. Those are the ones which uh primarily use. Sometimes community colleges uh and in the US it's Selling to U.S. schools vs industrial customers very rare in in industry. We have only four or five industrial customers right now, but that's also changing. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So, four to five industry customers, meaning you're branching out from just selling to schools, but that's in the early days. How many customers today are you serving with your software? In the US, it's about 100 schools, which means about 500 installations. Typically, a school will have a minimum of five installations. Some of them may have 20 or 30. Is an installation equivalent to like a seat, a single person using the software at a time. Um the the the license is linked to a device, but a device can be used by as many students as they want. So there is no limit on the number of users but there's a limit on the number of devices. Okay. So when you say 100 schools and 500 installs an average of five installs per school and install is the software on one headset that headset can be moved from a body to a body. So mult more than five people can use it but only five at a time at a single time can use it. Yeah. This is typically how it looks. Uh so you would have a school which has multiple screens and one student would be using it. four or five other students would be watching what the student is doing and they would get a know feel of what is this person doing and what kind of scores are that person doing. So they would take turns every 30 minutes to 40 minutes. So by the time they get their turn they would have observed the other people and there would be a sense of competition as well. So you have if if I got 70 out of 100 in my attempt my my peer would want to have at least 71. So it encourages more and more practice in a very gamified manner. Yeah, that makes sense. Now you mentioned a 100 schools and $15,000 average annual contract value. If I Pivoting to SaaS after hardware challenges multiply those, I get about a $1.5 million software run rate for your company. Is that accurate? Yeah, that's that's where we're currently at. But we're looking at so we are only at 100 schools in the US 250 other customers globally worldwide but we're looking at there are about 26,000 schools in the US which have a CTE program. There are a thousand community colleges which have a CTE program and so the the scope to grow is is much larger. So we have earlier we used to do only direct selling. Now we have about 10 resellers covering about 35 of the 50 states in the US. And uh so we hope to grow to 2,000 schools at an average of $5,000 minimum per per school. So we are looking at growing uh to $10 million ARR. It's it's a steep growth, but that's what we we believe should be possible. I want to talk more about how you expand in the United States using those 10 resellers. I also want to talk more about how you funded the company, bootstrapped versus VC or not, and then also just more about how the hardware and software work together. Before we do that though, I just want to make sure I get you have your growth sort of accurate. So, if you're at a 1.5 million run rate today in 2025, are you comfortable sharing what revenue was in 2024? It was about uh 0.5. Okay. And when was your first year revenue? When did you launch this thing? Yeah. So, this what we are talking about now is our pivoted form of business. So we had an earlier life before the agrant of virtual reality. We we built a lot of hardware ourselves and we started in 2012 and uh that's when you were doing hardware. Yes. And we then just before the Building a reseller GTM model in the U.S. pandemic we had switched over to the uh we pivoted to the software mode which allowed customers in the US to buy the headsets off Amazon or wherever and then just load our software onto it. And we had to pivot because we uh were facing problems during the pandemic here in India with our revenues going close to zero because we are we were not able to ship uh these products out and our investors at that point of time were uh very Indiacentric impact centered investors. So they they wanted out. So we gave them an exit. So we the promoters bought back the company and then uh what year was that? 2021. Yes. 2021. And how much did you have to pay them to buy them out? We paid them um...