How Sumsub CEO Andrey Severyukhin grew Sumsub to $85.6M revenue and 2K customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is vachassov giulio def he's a cto and co-founder of some sub he's a guy has over 20 years of it experience and a phd in computer science he's a product oriented cto and again the co-founder of sum sub which is aml and kyc tool okay watch yourself you ready to take it to the top yeah sure let's do it all right so for folks not familiar with banking and finance what is aml and kyc um basically you can say ml is anti-money laundering right and kyc stands for know your customer and basically it's kind of identity verification so you help companies to onboard bonus users as many as possible as quickly as possible but at the same time keeping frosters at bay right and of course if company is regulated then of course we're keeping uh we help keeping this company staying compliant now are our banks your main customer or who's your main customer main customers yeah we do have banks fintech actually crypto quite a bit uh actually car sharings marketplace shared economies basically everywhere kyc's needed nowadays and so how what did some of these customers pay you per month to use the technology how much yeah how much they pay you yeah we have about like 40 customers that we consider top uh tier one customers that are paying more than 100 000 a year right but some of them paying over 1 million actually this is fascinating okay so this is these are obviously huge so just be clear your largest customers acv is high they pay you how much two million a year a million a year even more maybe maybe five seven okay and so someone one of these customers paying you five to seven million dollars per year how many i imagine you bill based off number of verifications right yeah yeah it's a little bit more complicated than that because we charge for sub-service so we say because some customers need one service some customers like construct the flow from different parts so we kind of have sub services and we build per sub service so how many customers you ask well no i guess the question yeah i guess yeah how many customers that's a good thing um over 1 000 customers but 40 tier 1 customers paying more than 100 000 a year okay well what is the that's great to understand your tier one folks what what does the average customer pay you per year more like 10k or 5k a year yeah something like 10 to 20 i would say okay interesting and so um i guess put this all on a timeline for me when did you launch the business if you go to our website it says 2015 but the story actually starts a little bit before then in 2012 when i got mad like met co-founders and we were doing actually anti-photoshop software to determine what or photoshop so basically you detect which parts of an image were edited right but then at some point you are kim kardashian's worst worst nightmare yeah so yeah but at some point we realized that uh it's only part of a story because our customers potential customers they don't care about whether the image was modified or not they care whether they can trust the end user and then we pivoted in 2012 or 15 and that's when things started to look good for us okay interesting so i guess did the business almost like die before you pivoted what made you want to pivot yeah because yeah there were hard times actually working like let's say without salaries and like with our own savings you were working next three years between 2012 and 2015 with no salary no no there were good times so we also raised like some engine cut for like half a million something but then there were hard times when there was like one year uh of in you know just working but uh i was actually working part time was my pet project back back in the day it was a little bit later when i officially joined samsung 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner 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 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 raised they sold 22 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 valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to 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 valuation 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 when did you join and like quit your job and go all in on some sub what year um 2018 okay but before i was actually working at night so i mean you know this entrepreneurial life um yeah before i was more like consultant and like bringing my experience to the guys so that they can build on substantial business but actually i can explain where like why we almost died because i think it was about a because of the expectation mismatch our customers actually they wanted our product but they expected magic where you can detect like every modification even if the image was sent over whatsapp or you saved multiple times right but the life is more complicated than that so that's that's why we had to review it and we don't regret because obviously it looks good so far so what is the i guess you say guys and we had to pivot all that how many co-founders are there uh overall four actually the other three are brothers two of them twins which makes a really fun case for wild face matching algorithms that's funny okay so there are three brothers would you say that they were like struggling until you came in in 2018 i mean were you coming in to help save the business um now that we were struggling before 2015 when we pivoted then we again we struggle because like we're trying to find the right compromise between you know because some customers also wanted magic like super complicated solution but you kind of built complicated solution overnight so like it took us a while but at the same time i think it was a good thing that our first customers were from car sharing industry and they were super picky about like the rules and amount of documents so and that's why from the let's say day one our kyc system was built to be extensible like very generic so that we don't spend let's say developer resources but rather offload it to uh technical support and things like that but when you join full-time in 2018 i mean having an equity conversation is tricky it's like one versus three because they're all brothers right do you guys just put everything equally or no uh initially no but then like they probably saw my impact and then somehow they offered me just like i didn't have to negotiate so it was just split equal enough okay so it's basic you know outside of other investors and all that and employee option pools you each basically own a fourth of the business something like that yeah exactly okay very cool so let's okay so the pivot ha so 2012 is launch date it's a side project for you you're helping the team through 2015 photoshop software they pivot in 2015 to more like aml kyc identity verification you get excited join full-time 2018 prove your worth get more equity uh and grow the business now when did you start was 2018 the year where you start gotting getting into aml and kyc um no even before that because i was reading about that and of course like i'm still kind of consulting and helping guys but yeah i got probably most of my knowledge after 2017 i would say okay and did you guys so you mentioned you raised half a million bucks what year was that 2012 ah it was 2015 and 13. yeah but we raised since then i think...