How Skillveri CEO Sabari Nair grew 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 you know I I is is it okay if I don't disclose that amount? Well, can you maybe share a range? There's other people listening that might want to copy your strategy in terms of buying out some of their investors so they can learn from you. Okay. So, we we paid about 50% of what we had. Uh Okay. So, if they put in $2, you bought them out for a dollar. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Got it. Got it. And I mean, are we talking like before that had you raised like a like I guess how much had you raised? Was it just an angel round or a series A B C? It was back then called a series A. Uh it was $1.2 million, but back then this is 2016. Back then it was called a series A. Now I see now I see rounds at $5 million. So that was 2016. You said the series A. Yeah. Okay. Got it. And that was So the all-in capital you had raised before you bought anyone out was 1.2 million into the company. Yes, you bought them out for 50% of that amount in 2021 because your revenues crashed to zero uh because of COVID. You were pivoting and then you scaled back Commission structure for edtech channel partners up with your software product and hardware product in 2024 to 500k of revenue. Now you're at a one you expect to do about 1.5 million today here in 2025. Yeah, that's correct. Very cool. Very cool. And you're going to stay bootstrapped going forward or any plans to raise. So it's uh we're keeping it open right now for whatever business we have been pursuing right now with the current set of products. Uh we don't want to raise money for that. But we also looking at adding some adjacent products. Can you just hold up the headset one more time there? This is the generic one people can buy on Amazon, right? Yeah, they What's the brand? Can you put the logo to the camera? What's the brand called here? So this has a Meta logo up here. It is a I don't It's the Meta. So it's the Metav VR headset. Yeah. What does that retail for? So, this one retails for about $500, but there is a $300 version that also works. This is a Pico headset. So, we are kind of agnostic to the hardware. Okay. So, you just to be clear, you will work with any of these on my screen right now? The MetaQuest. And then what's the other one? Pico. Yeah. Pico virtual. This one. Yes. The ICO. Okay. Cool. So these are the two soft the hardares that you recommend to your audience, you know, the the schools if they want to get five units for their classroom. Yeah. Okay, great. Very cool. Um, so and no plans to move back into the hardware space. You already did that back in 2012 2013 and realized you didn't want to do that anymore. So you moved into software, right? We moved into software and then we realized that uh there is a certain value to hardware as an accessory as an upgrade. So then we came back to Software margins vs hardware economics explained hardware which we made it very differently. So earlier we had huge bulky hardware. But then now we have all these smaller ones which So what is that? What is that? What do you sell that for that you're holding right now? So this one would sell for 2500 one time. So they just pay it once and they they have it forever. And you're building that yourself. That's like an extension that works with your software on the meta headset. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting. So, if a school is buying for their CT, you know, their program, right, to train welders, right, or a community college, and they need five of those extension welding sets plus five headsets, they're going to pay about five headsets times 500 a pop is 2500. Plus, they need five of those welding extensions that you just showed at I think you said 2500 a pop, right? So, that's 12,500. So, now we're up to um like 15 grand and then they spend about another 15 grand for an annual thing on your software. So, it's about 30k all in for a school to get started. Is that accurate? Not necessarily. So what some schools do is to the software would still work with without the hardware extension. So they can they could still work with this. So they would buy five headsets uh and then they may buy two or three of those uh extensions. So they would get the beginners to work on just the controllers and then as they progress on the le lessons they would get them the the hardware extensions. I see. Very interesting. Tell me more about about how you grew. Right. My audience loves growth stories that they maybe can learn from. You mentioned that you obviously founded in India, you've expanded in the US, you have a large presence in the US and you have that presence uh through using a reseller program. Some people will hire full-time employees in India. Why did you go the reseller route and how did you find those first 10 resellers? So uh word of mouth was how we found the Bootstrapping through COVID and buying out investors resellers. So we we had a couple of resellers before and uh we found challenges with uh onboarding of customers. So one of the one of the biggest challenges with a tech like this is that unless somebody wears it and then feels the immersive uh method of how we are using this tool it it doesn't it doesn't sound different from any of my competitors products. So most of my competitors have tech from maybe 10 15 years back and so for example we use mixed reality quite a lot. So you wear the headset, you see virtual equipment in front of you, but you also see the surroundings and you can walk around with the headset which is wireless. Uh so some of these things uh if we try to do um without a reseller, what would happen is that they would think that um this is just like one of the competitor products. So they may not have had great success with that. So it can't be better than that is is a typical refrain we keep hearing. But the moment they wear the headset and try it, they are totally wowed. So that all makes sense to me. Sabari, my my specific question is how did you how are you finding and incentivizing these resellers to sell your product? Can you maybe name like what's the website of one of your top resellers in the US? So there's one company called uh Learning Labs. So these are typically Competing with VC-backed edtech incumbents smaller companies which operate in three, four or five states. This site learning labs, no learning labs, LLI is how they are called. Um these guys. Yeah. Yeah, these guys. Yes. Okay. So, they heard about you via word of mouth. They said, "We love your product." You said, "Okay, let's let's incentivize you. Why don't you sell more of our products into the US? What you know, you don't have to share their specific deal, but in general, how are you paying resellers to take the time to sell your product?" So, typically, we would handhold them. We would run some workshops to train them on how to uh how to demonstrate our product, how to highlight the benefits that this has over the other people also about uh we we have uh different scales of how much effort they put and how much commission they make. So if if we are assisting them very actively then the commission is less but if if uh they are doing it entirely on their own which they have started doing now then then they get a much higher commission. What's the range? What's the low? It's the high. So, it could range from something like uh 3 4% to as high as 20%. So, okay. Got it. So, if one of these folks, you know, sells a $100,000 package and requires very little help from you, you might pay them, you know, 10, 11, 12, you know, up to 20% potentially $20,000 on $100,000 sale. Yeah. I see. Very cool. And how many You said there's 10 resellers like Learning Labs that you're working with. Yes. Okay. At what point do you go, man, it makes sense for me to put a body or two in a small office in California and do this ourselves because we're paying our resellers so much in referral fees? No, actually um we find that we were Scaling from 100 to 2,000 schools in the U.S. early doing a lot more direct. Now we are switching that to have more and more resellers to do that. Mainly because US is a large country. It's it's even if we have an office in uh so um whenever I'm in the US I operate out of Dallas and then I fly towards various parts of the country but then we have prospective customers all over the country. We have inst three installations in Alaska three schools in Alaska. So it it's very difficult for us to even if we are based in one central point to to fly to all the parts of the country and then do the sale. Especially if your sale volume is only $5,000 recurring, then your flight expenses itself might eat away all that. Okay, that makes sense. The reseller model makes sense to me. Hey, we're about out of time, so let's wrap up here with some rapid fire stuff. First question I have is just on on on valuation. If someone came to you today, you know, you're doing 1.5 annually, right? We didn't talk about profit or margin or things like that, but we know that you own most of the company because you bought out your investors. But if someone came to you today and offered you $4 million all cash upfront to sell the business, would you exit? No. I I see a lot of uh growth right now. Uh so like I said, I I would like to take it to 2,000 schools in the next two years, 8,000 schools in the next 5 years. So uh I may be open to selling after five six years. Not not right now. All right, sounds good. Let's wrap it up with the famous five. Number one, favorite business book. uh most books by Peter Ducker or Eliahu Gulat. That's a good one. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying right now? So there's a Indian origin CEO who uh

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pricing, sales, and focus who started this company called Zoho. I don't know if you have heard of them but the most successful bootstrap company in the world. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building your business? So internally we use uh Unity uh for for creating all the virtual reality software. Uh recently I've been playing around with perplexity and some of the AI tools and seeing how can I make things faster than what I was doing before. Yeah. Very good. And what's your situation today? Married, single, kiddos. Married, no kids. Married, no kids. And how old are you? I am 42. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old. So when I was 20, I was most of my 20ies I was working for somebody else and I I was focusing on building stuff and I started this company when I was 29. So and then I realized that uh building is tough but it is tougher to sell it is tougher to have a financial way of thinking. So I wish the financial skills I had uh or at least I knew the importance earlier on. I did pick up those on the go but I I I could have paid more attention in business school. Hey guys, there you have it. Skill very sells products to school systems to help them train their students on things like uh you know spray painting uh in an industrial way or you know all kinds of sort of specialized skill sets. They sell to community colleges as well. They'll do 1.5 million of revenue this year up from 500k in 2024. So good growth. Launched in 2012 as a hardware company at a 1.2 2 million series A in 2016 before buying out his investors at a discount in 2021 when his revenues went to zero because of COVID. Now he's on the rebound. He's selling fast in the US already in a 100 schools. His go to market motion is he's leveraging 10 resellers in the US that he pays anywhere from 3% to 20% commission on sales. His plan is to expand uh to 2,000 plus schools over the next couple years as he looks to continue to grow the business. Sabari, thank you for taking us to the top.