How Symbl.ai CEO Surbhi Rathore grew Symbl.ai to $3.1M revenue and 70 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is serbia rathor she's the ceo and co-founder of simple.ai the company's bringing to life for vision for a programmable platform that empowers developers and business to monitor act and comply with voice video conversations at scale in their products and workflows without building their own in-house data science expertise sir you're ready to take to the top do it let's do it all right i'm stoked that you're here people want to follow along it's s-y-m-b-l-a-i who are you selling to we're selling to developers and businesses that are really bullish on expanding their brand to go beyond communications and use the power of ai machine learning to build awesome next generation experiences that delights their users in conversations and how did you discover that this was a problem we were working in the conversation ai space both me and my co-founder before at mdocs and continuously over and over again came across chatbots but nothing for calls which actually connects humans together and we just wanted to put together a platform that enables and empowers people to maximize value information from human to human conversations and not just human to machine and that's how we started well there's so much audio and video data like this being created every day it's a powerful space to be in what do you charge for this what's the average customer paying you per month to use the tech so acvs depend upon whether you're a developer or you're an enterprise doing committed volumes we have you can just start pay as you go without any commitment all the way from like point zero five eight per minute which is like super cheap for anyone to get started with all the capabilities not just speech to text but also intelligence insights analytics all included is it point zero five cents point zero five uh point zero five dollars uh point zero yeah so five cents yeah five cents okay just making sure yeah so all the way from five cents to all the way to you know committed volume deals of 100 200k depending upon what's your tiers uh so we charge based on volume and usage i see and and so the volume is quantified by minutes is that right that's right yeah okay and what about is there a seat based upsell motion or no is there sorry do you upsell based off number of seats or no no so we truly believe in kind of like peanut peanut butter your uh intelligence all over the products that you have so you only pay based on usage and irrespective of how many seeds how many products you apply it doesn't matter at the end of the day it's the number of minutes which are analyzed by the platform that people get charged on okay and interesting i think if you don't obviously name the customer that's private information but their largest account are we talking like hundred thousand dollar acv or do you have 1 that not a million but that yeah 150 200 000 wow okay i mean do you see a path to having you know million dollar customers in 2022 2023 absolutely super bullish about it and actually talking to a few customers about that really interesting um and and so again it's nice because you've natural upsell based off this number of minutes it's really simple um talk to me about day one when did you guys launch the business uh may 2018. may 2018. okay and how'd you get the first customer do you remember yes linkedin called outreach wow what what give me like the verbiage what was the copy nothing uh it was uh hey we're building conversation intelligence system that will automate meeting notes out of your platform very very focused on their particular use case that they were going to solve for and got a meeting took a phone call followed by a meeting demo and then boom pilot signed wow okay how that was number one how many customers today uh today we have customers in higher double digits double digits higher double digits yes when do you think you can pass 100 so probably uh first first quarter of the next year okay so you're talking like 70 80 customers and something like that yeah where are you getting new customers still linkedin outreach no no no that was way back you never know sometimes it works you know yeah we focus a lot on generating content uh and just seo organic sign ups through developer hackathons community events all of that so our entire motion is kind of like product led acquisition that's kind of what we do so developers sign up on the platform get activated try uh we see whether they are from which domains are they activated have they qualified from a product usage and then either we reach out to them or get reached out by their product teams and that's how we get connected on meetings with them fascinating and today like across all your customers how many like i don't know what the right word is but how many minutes are you managing per month we are doing millions of minutes uh and we've been doing that since i think the last seven eight months uh specifically once products matured postcode and implemented some of the key use cases that are giving value in accessibility compliance or call tracking which are the most important ones since then we've like really taken off on the minutes consumption are we talking like 3 million minutes a month or like 30 million minutes per month no no not not 30 yet between five to ten five to ten and how many i want to get sense of growth rate how many more minutes are you adding per month um i would say 20 is kind of like our average growth wow okay i mean that's pretty impressive yes which is why we raised the series okay so tell me about that when was the series yeah we just closed i think a couple of weeks back a 17 million series a which was led by great point ventures really pumped to work with really and got them from there uh and they have scaled massive um enterprise scale companies so yeah super bummed and and why do you need the capital because obviously there's dilution associated with it there is and that's a great question because like that's always something that we think about as entrepreneurs is like we take the capital for growth as opposed to really surviving that has always been like one of our motives that we see an opportunity it's already working can we double down on the investment in our developer evangelism or relations that we are doing we're already writing pieces of content that's getting great action can we actually do it 10x times so things like that is always an opportunity of growth for companies and i think timing is so critical based on where we are today where businesses have started to realize that transcription is not good enough they need something more than that and like that's what we're bringing to the table which makes this time really exciting mm-hmm and certainly most folks the most deals i'm seeing today at least folks that come on the show series a's folks are selling between 10 and 20 percent say it's pretty standard were they sort of in the standard range or do you do something weird no standard range standard range okay so that did so that would be like 170 million to 250 million ish evaluation did that feel right for you or did you feel sort of that was high or low [Music] we did a 17 no i mean it wasn't the range that you were talking about it was different uh sorry i did i did i did that wrong sorry it would be hun between 100 and 200 million yeah uh so a little lesser than your lower range the one that you just mentioned right now but um i think uh it was just a function of where we are as a company and what was our previous because we got a pretty good multiplier based on our previous valuation well yeah so what was the 4.7 that you raised in 20 or uh 2020 i think yeah it was a 4.7 million rounds that we did that time but no but i'm curious how much you grew valuation over the past like 18 months can you share that like forex 4x okay got it so you were like 20 million valuation back in 2020 somewhere around that interesting do you do you come from a bootstrap background did you bootstrap like your first company uh first company what do you mean by that well no i don't know if you had a first company i'm just curious is this your fault oh this is our first one it is wow and who is we uh me and michael founder well like how did you guys meet who are they uh we were satoshi we were together in amdocs uh the same organization that we were working with working together on the product that we were really pumped to get to market and then ideated same time and then jumped so were you guys just peaceful at the start you said you know what we'll just do 50 50 split yes you should have fought for 60 you know yeah you say you know what i i have more charisma i'm doing all the podcast interviews you know well you haven't met him yet so we'll take that for the next time probably that's funny i'm sure that you'll go and tell him 60 40. that's so funny i'm sure he's a great guy so okay cool she's split from the start you're growing now now a lot of founders that are you know doing the kind of races you're doing always ask me nathan what's the standard esop pool that we should be setting up i imagine you guys set one up how much how much is your esop pool today we did we did a 10 10 at our previous rounds but this round specifically we set up actually 15 uh we set up a higher estop one at this time because uh this is a great time to get awesome people in the company and we wanted to make sure not just we get great people inside but also incentivize the people which are inside the company it's really important that people...