How Speedsize CEO Vlad Malanin grew Speedsize to $6M revenue and 200 customers in 2025.

Founder background and SpeedSize AI media compression platform You obviously went through a crazy story here. What's the closest you came to running out of money? We were less than two months of the runaway. Some people were drafted to the army. There was the ongoing war in Ukraine where our R&D stays. So we were panicking. The first decision we made is even before that happens, we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders like enables your built-in mechanism of survival because you know that okay they may have no salary in 2 months but we do not have it already today. You're doing about $6 million bucks of revenue. If someone came and offered you a 4x multiple today, so $24 million all cash upfront to sell the business. Do you take the deal? 100%. No, it's definitely worth way more than that. Hey folks, my guest today is Vlad Malinin. He's an MD, PhD, and is a surgeon turned AI scientist and CTO, co-founder of Speed Size today, which is an award-winning startup transforming media optimization, think metadata for 200 plus global brands. He blends tech, neuroscience, and real world impact together and is a Forbes technology council member shaping the future of AI. Vlad, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah. All right. So give me an sense or two what speed size does. Um so speed size basically uh does something that is in one or two sentence we do AI media compression even one sentence. Yeah, AI media compression. Guys, to translate that, for those of you that are not neuroscientists, we all visit websites with e-commerce brands. More more now than ever, these e-commerce brands are not using just still images. They're using rotating, you know, uh, you know, animated graphics for products or things that change colors when people scroll or things like that. It appears Vlad is helping make sure those pages continue to load fast. Vlad, is that accurate? Yeah, it is. Because the more we live, the bigger data becomes, especially the modern rich media websites with a lot of videos and as you mentioned all those 360 animations, hero videos, product videos, all that. And it's not only about the fact of using that kind of How the SpeedSize idea started in deep tech and e-commerce performance media per se. It's also the fact that you need to maintain the quality and brands care about that a lot. In terms of compression, let's jump into a real example here. You have some really big brands. listed on your website. Everyone knows sort of hookah running shoes or let's do Crocs. Everybody knows Crocs. Uh before we dive into the Crocs website so you can show us sort of how they use you. How many customers are you working with today? Just total count. Yeah, we have around 200 customers and most of them as you can imagine they're fashion brands, clothing, apparel, this kind of industry. However, not limited. We also work with travel industry. We work with uh jewelry. We work with uh marketplaces. So all that kind of I would say general e-commerce with a focus on uh fashion brands mostly. Okay. So let's go to Crocs now. Where can I go on the Crocs website to see the thing that you're powering? So Crocs, Crocs specifically, we do not work with their main location. So we with Crocs specifically, we work with the uh Israel subdivision, their official retailer, Wish shoes. And uh we shoes is the biggest uh shoes retailer. Can you spell it? Uh just we Shoes.co. Yeah, it should be like this. Uh okay. Yeah, this is one of the biggest, if not the biggest websites that uh sell shoes and they use this pretty much across everything. So you picked a great So is this you right here? Is this you? Yeah, this is uh so you Okay, so let's dive into this example here. Like are are they controlling all this metadata through your platform or just the image over here on the right? No. So they control only the uh image data. So we do not work with the business data like the description although we can possibly and it might be a pivot in the future. So the idea is that uh we do the AI image analysis so First enterprise customers, fashion brands, and early validation we know exactly what's on the image and this is a part of our technology because we need to know we need to emulate the human brain and how it perceives the visual information on on the screen. Tell me more about your team. You come from a deep technology background. How many people are full-time today and how many are engineers? Yeah. So, uh we had I would say that uh it's uh not the standard yet natural for me especially uh way to handle the team. So, uh two years ago we used to be 50 people and we decided to focus and make a leaner team. So now we are around 20 to 25 people and a couple of contractors and the uh tax subdivision out of that is around 70%. So we are mostly tech people right now and before that when we used to have 50 it was less than 50% of technical people. All right so 25 on the team today about 16 17 of them are engineers writing real code. Um, explain to us how customers uh, pay you, right? You guys have a lot of engineers. I'm sure you have some business and marketing folks. What does your pricing look like today? Yeah, so we do not work with SMBs. So, our main audience is the mid-markets and small enterprises and ideally big SaaS pricing strategy: enterprise focus, ACV tiers, and positioning enterprises. So, we do have some big brands yet not that long. Fortune 100. Well, besides uh, Philip Morris International, I guess that's uh, lies into that category. But other than that uh Googles of the world are not yet working with us. So um uh the pricing works very simple. We have two units. One is the amount of data that you need to transfer in gigabytes and the amount of assets original assets. Not all that hidden charges with transformations and all the other words that people do not understand. Just the amount of SKUs that you have on uh your products. you can estimate how much you need to use. That's it. Uh the um the average uh customer pays us uh lower end five figures a year. Uh it's um annual contracts. So as simple as that. Can you So just to be when you say low five figures, is it fair to say an average contract price might be $50,000 per year? uh a little bit lower. So 50,000 is like lower tier mid-market uh like to general ones. So uh those which are closer to the SMB category, they pay around probably 10 to 20k a year and midm market is probably 50 to 100k and small enterprises is uh six Revenue model, ARR growth, seven-figure customers, and margins seven figures pretty much. And don't name the obvious obviously don't name the customer but what does the largest customer pay you today per year? So uh that's the seven figures and uh lower end of seven figures and that's that's our biggest uh values that we have. Okay. So it's fair to say you have one customer paying you more than $100,000 per year today? No, we have several several customers paying more than that. When will you have your first million dollar per year customer? So uh we do so the thing is that the way how we work is we rely to land and expand strategy and customers are generally growing and the beauty of speed size is that once they start using speed size they open the doors for using richer media. So we have plenty of cases. Wishes is by the way one of them. the one that we reviewed uh earlier, they started using video and you could see when you open the website, you could see that they using videos. They couldn't afford this their general Shopify. Wait, wait, wait, hold on. Let me get a visual up while you tell this story. Sorry, I don't see Tell me where to go to see the video like you're talking about this up here at the top. Yeah, you you have this one. Apparently, they have also product videos. I cannot name like exact products where they have right now, but they uh started using videos. Well, you can see some reviews, whatever. And uh before that, they didn't have anything. And we have plenty of brands that use video uh widely on the website. So almost every PDP product detail page has a video like this. So So you make this happen. Yes. So what they what they what they had and this is a general problem of Shopify specifically. Shopify limits your videos to full HD. You cannot have a video which is higher resolution than that. Also, they kill the quality. They don't have the adaptive delivery and just the overall performance is is just terrible. So, when you want to have like Biggest early challenges: wars, runway risk, and founder survival mode this kind of experience with full screen blowing away videos, you cannot do anything with Shopify at all. So, with speed size, this is the moment where you can actually start using videos like this. And that's that's pretty much the bottleneck that we saw for such customers. They have no other options. They cannot solve this with Shopify or any other two. Mhm. Okay. So, tell me you you you're mostly engineers, but you're selling expensive, you know, on average $30,000 ACB kind of contracts. How is your sales team structured? What do you set their quota at? So uh we made a pivot and we decided instead of uh heavily relying on direct sales we decided to go uh focused on partnerships. So we are fully based in AWS and we are premium partner of AWS and AWS since they do not have native uh image and video compression. AWS offers speed size as a solution for image and video compression as well and we have a variety of partnerships. We have the uh we we have the agencies which are promoting speed size and we have really quick sorry on a on AWS I brought it up but it looks like you don't have any reviews here which signals to me that very few people are using...