How Spyne CEO Sanjay KumarVarnwal grew to $18.4M revenue and 140 customers in 2024.

guys spine.ai allows car dealerships people working on the floor to take a picture of a Ford of an ugly background put it into his application and create a beautiful backdrop that they can use for proc images online uh the Walmart flip part all these folks excuse me he's doing 250 000 per month in Revenue today up from 25 000 a month just a year ago hoping to scale to 800 000 per month over the next 12 months his last round raise last year was a seven million dollar seed around led by excel at a 25 million valuation team up 100 people now getting aggressive about scaling in the United States and Europe we'll see if he can hit that Target hey folks my guest today is Sanjay Kumari he's a co-founder and CEO of spine a deep Tech visual tech company solving internet cataloging for the globe he's a tech entrepreneur taking a shot at transforming professional photography and the content industry you can follow along at spine dot AI again digital catalog for internet Commerce Sanjay you're ready to take us to the top yeah and thanks thanks for the nice introduction you bet tell us specifically about a customer that's paying you today and how they use you yeah so VB as as you described we are solving cataloging as a core problem so we are helping internet businesses uh create the product visuals for their physical objects using using a mobile application and technology so what we do is we we convert all those Sanjay sorry can you tell the story of what you do through the customer a real customer Story versus just a generic here's what we do got it got it so we work with a lot of large internet companies like Walmart Flipkart uh some of the large companies in the US as well Penske Motors one of them shipped so some of these like very very large companies work with us to create their catalogs so the the product images the car images the product images that you see in some of these websites are entirely done using spine so spine has a mobile application that is used by their field staff to shoot their cars and then uh the app basically guide them how to shoot like a photographer so there are competition models which is deployed of the application that turns a Layman user behave like a professional photographer so they shoot like a car photographer and after shooting we convert those those cars shot in the open ground into very premium Studio finish Studios right Studios or BMWs Studios of Mercedes Studios or Digger ships so all of these we convert using the AI and we get them published on their website so this is what we do very cool working mainly with car dealerships is that the main user yeah car dealerships is one of the major segments for us so we have been working a lot of geography so U.S Europe uh Middle East southeast Asia India of course because we are based in India so South America so we have got about like 140 plus clients all across the globe right now some of the names are pretty big names in in these geographies you said you have 140 customers yes very cool well tell us more the back story here I guess help me understand before we get you know when you launched now I got your first 10 customers how do you price this what's the average customer pay per month to use the technology yeah so we price it for product so per car so product could be anything it could be a real estate it could be a car it could be a product like a model clothing or anything food dish as well so you price buy the category buy the product so let's say a car so price them for anything between a car photo shoot done using our application will cost about three to eight dollars based on the volumes that you commit to us every month so let's say you are doing about 500 cars a month will give you a price of maybe five dollars a car you do about 30 cards a month will do give you a price of eight dollars a car so this is the price range that we we give you right for the large Enterprises we we go as low as low as one and a half to two dollars a car as well yeah okay if you take an average though across your entire customer base what's the average customer paying you per month or per year yeah so we generally Target the mid Market segment uh so not the very very large Enterprises so that segment gives us about like 30 000 to 40 000 a month uh a year a year and that's for something like 500 skus shot per month whether that's a dish for a food company or a car for a car dealership so immediately 80 of the business is Automotive right now so this is the uh the ACV that we are driving as of now now if I take a thirty thousand dollar ACV times 140 customers you guys are at about a 4.2 million dollar run rate today so we are not not uh not not all the customers are in that ACV zone right now but we are roughly at about three million three million okay and what do you hope to grow to by the end of this year so we are targeting about 10 to 12 million kind of fun oh wow oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and if you're doing if you're doing three million today in Revenue uh which uh which is what about 250 000 per month what we're doing monthly exactly one year ago do you remember yes one year ago we were exactly at about one tenth of this number one tenth yeah so 25 000 a month yeah so we were at what like 300K 250 to 300K in ARR one year ago oh wow so you've had explosive work when did you launch the company so we we launched this product in the middle of 2021. why do I have in my research that you launched spine in 2015 no 2018 we we launched I moved full time to spine in 2018 mid uh first one and a half years I we worked on a product idea which did work out so we pivoted by the end of 2020 uh to this model tell me the product that didn't work out you worked for a year and a half on it how much money did you spend on it before you killed it yeah so we we so we we spent almost 200k on that particular product uh overall so PV we went to a revenue of about like uh about roughly three to 200k uh kind of for Revenue but we realized very early on that this is something that will not scale uh big so we figured out that that because this can scale to about three to five million kind of an AR in roughly three to five years time frame but beyond that the market size is not there very good so basically we were building a Content uh SAS platform for the photographers earlier and you see photographers are not that high paying uh uh uh Persona do you have co-founders of the company okay so YouTube founded the company together two of you exactly did you split Equity evenly at the start 50 50. no so you got more yeah smart man all right Sandra gets more Equity so when you wanted to kill that first project there wasn't a big debate you just made the decision and you moved on no no no so that that was actually a big big uh decision because the startup started with some Genesis which was which was which we completely like turn 100 degree uh uh away right so so we actually were figuring out which idea to get into and uh because we wanted to remain the content domain right so in photography as a Content platform we were providing as a SAS platform but we uh decided to focus in the Deep photography space itself rather than helping photographers we thought hey why not solve photography as a domain with the computation which is emerging with AI yeah it makes tons of sense now what did you so you shut that first comment down in 2019 it's the same company but you showed the product on 2019 you relaunched this and get it going in 2020. how did you pay your bills between 2019 and 2020. yeah so we raised a bridge around of about 700k uh between that so sorry seven million or seven hundred thousand seven hundred thousand what year was that in the at the early 2020 we did that bridge 2020 okay and did you is that the only money you raised today no no after that we raised about 7 million and when was that 7 million we raised to early 2022 79 okay so that was like your series your seed your seed round yeah so we raised it from axle Partners oh great that's a great great form so most folks in their seed round especially if you're doing like Excel Excel is going to want 15 20 of the company in that round is that about how much they purchased yeah yeah exactly sorry that wasn't that wasn't the C the seven million seed right yeah yeah okay so that's what like a 40 50 million evaluation something like that free money I guess then right yeah no post 28 was 25 so there was some secondary which also happened oh okay explain how that works there's a lot of folks that think they can't do secondaries until it's like a series b c d how did you negotiate a secondary so early so there are some of the Angel Investors which axel wanted slightly more percentage in the company so uh but they didn't want to dilute the primary Equity of the farmers like us right so they offered an exit to some of the earlier Angel Investors oh so you didn't sell any secondary just early investors some of the early investors I see what multiple of the other early investors get like a 2X a 3X on their money 30 next 13x was that painful for them for you yeah so I can make it I can make like more money than 30 days that's fair enough then I guess that 700 000 pre-seed round how much of the company they own like 20 percent who excellent depreciate no the pre-seat 700 000. yeah they they own about 15 but some of them yeah yeah yeah yeah that's great so that's precede around in 20 early 2020 was that like a four million valuation or something like that three three and four three three yeah interesting um this is a great story okay so you're scaling now walk me through how you're getting customers today what's your gross growth strategy so here we are setting up a very strong GTM for the us we are targeting about 45 000 auto dealerships that are there in the US right now and almost near nearly the same number in the Europe geography like Germany Italy UK Sweden so some of the top geographies in the European so entire us and entire Europe so if you combine both the geography there are close to 90 200 000 dealerships in these two places so the ACV that we are targeting with this product is about 10K right now because we are now going slightly down uh I mean slightly smaller dealership segment as well so there's a huge opportunity even if you get to about like three to four thousand dealers in the next two years that will give us a very practical crack at about 30 to 40 million uh ARR and he said there's 90 000 dealerships in the US in the UK yes U.S and Europe U.S and Europe so how do you let's say like I'm in Austin Texas there's a Ford dealership down the road how are you gonna get in front of that Ford dealership so we are setting up a local sales teams in the in the various states in the U.S oh wow you're gonna set up local teams in every state so we we already have like one person in in Texas and one person in LA right now oh wow four to five people and then we have our inside CH team back here in India which is also closing bigger deals right now how many folks are full-time today full time we are about 100 people in the company 100 and and how many are in sales we are about 12 oh 12 okay and how many are engineers so we we are a heavily r d focused company so we are closely close to about 60 to 65 in product Tech AI uh design all teams and our most your engineers and Chennai or Mumbai or Bangalore where are they based all of them are in gurgaon okay okay A New Delhi okay and so what's like I'm just out of curiosity since you're on the ground there what is a what is a senior front-end engineer a New Delhi cost these days I mean senior engineer at about like uh four to six years of experience yeah but first about uh roughly 35 to 40 000 here as well per year yeah yeah really interesting do do employees in India care as much about Equity as employees in the United States oh oh sorry I didn't get this question to employees in India do they do they want option grants do they care a lot about Equity as much as the you know people in the US no so yeah so that culture is setting up here in India as well so people also are valuing Equity especially the people who are joining slightly at the later stage of their career I mean after six to eight years of experience then they value the equity have happened in India as well in the recent past interesting okay so you've grown the past 12 months 10x 25 000 per month up to 250 000 per month uh what do you hope to finish this year with in terms of monthly Revenue this year we should get to about uh in terms of monthly we should get to about like maybe 700 to 800k yeah 800k per month very cool we're rooting for you this is a great story and it's a very slick product I just checked out the website Sanjay we're out of time now for now let's wrap up with the famous five number one is uh what's your favorite book uh I'm these days I'm reading hard things about hard things written by Ben horowitzer a16z no number two is there is he's a great guy is there a c number two is there a CEO you're following or studying uh the CEO of course Elon Musk for his work ethics number number three what's your favorite online tool for building spine favorite online tool um I think um I mean I have plenty but these days I'm just figuring more more through chat GPT but but Google Google like all the way number four how many hours of sleep do you get each night um I sleep not not very six hours average okay that's not bad and what's your situation married single kids I'm married that's good how many one kid one seven years oh wow and how old are you I'm I'm 38 38 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20 years old yeah I mean the that uh the risk reward ratio is really really high and uh and and I I I I I I I sometimes think I should have taken this step much much early on so I took this Step at 34 years of age maybe 20 early 20s would have been a better better stage for me as well guys spine dot AI allows car dealerships people working on the floor to take a picture of a fort like an ugly background put it into his application and create a beautiful backdrop that they can use for proc images online uh they Walmart flip part all these folks excuse me he's doing 250 000 per month in Revenue today uh from 25 000 a month just a year ago hoping to scale to 800 000 per month over the next 12 months his last round raised last year was a seven million dollar seed round LED by excel at a 25 million evaluation team of 100 people now getting aggressive about scaling in the United States and Europe we'll see if he can hit that Target Sanjay thanks for taking us to the top thanks a lot for inviting me nothing one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every Thursday at 1pm 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 our poo 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 p.m 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 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