How Squirro CEO Dorian Selz grew Squirro to $17.8M revenue and 48 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is dorian sells he's the co-founder and ceo of squirrel before that he co he founded the swiss search platform local.ch and made it the market leader in four years prior to that he was partnering ceo at namix the largest ecommerce consultancy in switzerland in germany he holds a phd from the university of saint gallon and a master's in economics from the university of geneva dorian you ready to take us to the top sure all right so you're having big you bet so you're building squirrel today tell us what the company does and what your revenue model is how do you make money security is an augmented intelligence company what we do is we help companies do more with their data sets particularly with their unstructured data sets and for that we build an aya platform that is a liability to take these data sets to extract insights of them and get them to people um in the case of their workbench as an example integrated into salesforce or microsoft dynamics or other such systems okay business model series i was gonna say one time sorry what kind of data are people feeding you though so what are the inputs that feed your system that could be as an example textual data sets like earnings transcripts from for financial services as an example or research research notes that can be company internal data sets like as an example call notes contracts emails uh all types of sharepoint documents word documents everything that you and i nathan can read every day but computers have a hard time to do and deal with okay and your pricing model is it a pure play sas company it's a pure play sales company we price on the number of ctus or in some uh very rare situations repriced by the number of transactions you use the platform for okay and then help me understand on average what's the company going to pay you per year to use your technology um what we see over the past years and that i think called straightaway true for ai ai is still an asset industry there are not many really big operational cases out there so in many cases we see companies coming to us at the very beginning with maybe 50k 100k us in terms of a bit of services a bit of subscription mixed in year one and then year two it goes up and we have seen our largest customers in the multi-million dollar range okay just the pure place sas business excluding professional services or onboarding what would you say the average customer pays per month or per year per year um on average at the moment we have about acvs up by 150k us okay so this is very much an enterprise play do you have an inside sales team that's correct we do have an inside sales team it's very much an enterprise play it's very much play that tackles company internal business issues around as an example deal origination or service service insights and so how many people are on the team today total we have at the moment about 30 people on the team and where is there one major in zurich uh engineering is based here in zurich switzerland and then i have pre-sales post-sales sales teams in new york and london and munich okay so switzerland and remote locations and and during this on the timeline for me when did you launch the company uh with school we started in 2013-14 okay 2013 2014 and um and have you in terms of capitalization have you bootstrapped or raised we have the first two years completely bootstrapped that is my co-founders and i um have built private companies and then we put up the initial money and then we took a bit of business money back in 2016 17 and then back in 2017 salesforce joined us plus a dutch-based investor called finch capital okay so how much have you raised a date in total we have raised about 50 million okay five zero one five got it very good and um and all equity or is any of that debt or venture debt all of that is equity with a small token that we did in the early age days where it was a convertible debt drive okay makes good sense and walk me through so 2013 you're kind of leaving where was your head at that point did you just sell your your prior company or or where or did you quit your full-time corporate gig what were you doing my founding team and i we built back in 2004 to about 2009 a citizen's largest homegrown web platform by any kpi local search called docker ch um beat google at their own game in the local market here and that was acquired in 2000 by swisscom which is the incumbent's telecoms company um asked we hanged around a bit what was the acquisition price um about half a billion okay um and then my team and i my co-founders and i who go back together for about 20 years by now we started that back already in 2007-8 as a little side project a thing called online note-taking back in the days there was no evernote as an example onenote and microsoft was really kind of like a forgotten child of the office platform and we saw an opening with an online memory for you for me whatever we collect digitally we start to build memonic and then we'll face it a bit of financed american rival called evernote came up and in the b to c space very different from a b to c b to b space so in that b to c space every node overtook us and then we folded and back in 2013 started the first thing called sparrow okay very good so back um going back to 2013 or when you exited that first company before jumping into squirrel um how were you the founder at that company yes and what did you guys scale that company to in terms of team size the prior company local ch was scaled to about 600 people okay so fairly large and did you did you boot drop that yourself or raise there as well uh parts of it was raised parts of it was bootstrapped how does that work it's either one or the other isn't it well you know the beginning it was bootstrapped and then later on we started to inject commercial cap we started to inject um institution capital from a big media company in switzerland and eventually also from swisscom who eventually acquired a company okay very good all right and then so let's focus back here on squirrel so you launch in 2013 what have you scaled to today in terms of total customers on the platform we have today about uh about four or five thousand customers on the platform around the globe from asia to south africa to europe to the u.s and even south america but predominantly in the financial services space customers like we can talk about like investec as an example standard chartered but many other others that unfortunately always come with ndas they don't want us to tell anyone that we use that's a good thing dorian that means they really like you i don't know we'd love to talk about their success stories because at the end of the day all of these companies share one common trait they have so much data that they don't do anything with and i think over the past five years we learned the trick or two how to do more with unstructured data and it would be good to be able to tell those stories um here and there whether it's financial services or outside because there are so many other companies that simply don't use to the best extent possible their data so dorian you said you have 4 000 customers today and they and they all have four thousand i said four dozen for that oh four dozen okay got a dozen enter big bay enterprise customers i was going to say that something's something's not matching up here something doesn't work okay so about maybe 48 50 customers today that's right at the acv you gave me earlier that would put you about 600 grand per month right now in revenue is that about right that's about right yeah okay and it won't go into too much details we don't disclose our because the probably held company we don't disclose figures by the way i'm only i'm only multiplying numbers you gave me i don't want you to tell me numbers that you can't disclose that's okay well help me understand what growth looks like you've done this before so over the past 12 months what have you grown by the possible funds we've grown by about 100 okay good so if you're doing 600 grand a day that means you're doing 300 a month about a year ago yeah that's right where's most the growth coming from expansion revenue or new customer ads all together um we actually just did the math at a board meeting earlier today and if you break our numbers uh a good half of it is actually coming from expansion revenue from existing customers that actually go broader and actually we expect that to be a bigger bigger slice of the chunk um in 2019 because we see some phenomenal growth with some existing customers at the same time we have been selectively onboarded we have selectively onboarded new customers international services and insurance space and we expect the game to change late 2018 early 2019 because we also have now set up a number of worldwide distribution partnerships as an example with definitive the form of financial services and risk division of thomson archers that resell our stuff with salesforce was an investor in ours and we now see early tractions of that starting to kick in with bigger deals with newer customers so we expect that game to change radically over the next 12 months and the expansion revenue you're driving what pricing axes are you driving that expansion around is it really just number of seats or number of transactions or is there some other value based metric um most of our most of our product is used in conjunction with an existing workbench such as microsoft dynamics such as salesforce all those workbenches are sold on seed-based pricing and we simply adapt to that model for making it easy for...