How Spyne CEO Sanjay KumarVarnwal grew Spyne 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...