How Symbl.ai CEO Surbhi Rathore grew 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 inside the company continue to get their esops refreshed i think as with their years of contribution and we have some awesome people that have completed two years three years wow how many folks full time now 54. wow okay and and where what's the split between like how many engineers 80 engineers still we are just building out our go to market team which is a big thing that we took on after our series that was one of the biggest motivations of investment that those dollars uh 80 is engineering and 60 of the overall company actually is in india uh so we are split between india and seattle so yeah 60 65 in india 30 35 percent in the usa which part india pune chennai yeah so pune is majority of the team we have some people in bangalore some people in new delhi uh and here in the us we are mainly centered in seattle and we have some people in the bay area some people in boulder so kind of split like that that's amazing and then going back to i know i asked you what like highest customers are and certain total number of minutes per month but what would you say like the sweet spot is what's the average customer i'm paying you per month i think 30 to 40k is like a great uh area for people to kind of get started acv annual yeah yeah and that way it's it's very comfortable for them to get started by that amount and start seeing the value at a very small percentage of conversation data they have and then go from there and keep incrementing it there are some folks which already know the use cases and they usually start at 200k above because they exactly know how to start this is the volume that i want to implement and that's how i go ahead and get started but for the folks that are trying to experiment with the use cases for them that that is a good sweet spot yep yep so i mean we can take three thousand well forty thousand dollar acv seventy ish customers and you guys are doing like 250 grand a month right now on revenue something like that i cannot disclose that information at all i'm just multiplying your numbers i'm i did not share the previous numbers and the letter numbers so yeah no you did share though you did share those numbers you said you had something between fifteen hundred customers and a forty thousand dollar average you can multiply right but those fifty two hundred are split in between uh pay as you go committed volumes all across okay so 40 000 is not an average then yeah i mean average across committed customers not across pay-as-you-go customers those are the two different kind of customers that we have so developers which are already upgrading from the platform they sign up for a different amount because they are just experimenting and then these are the other customers that basically we sign committed volume deals with it's a it's a pretty similar twilio model so it's based revenue and that there's a variable revenue you can't be far though sorry from a three million dollar run rate you've got to be flirting with it i cannot disclose that information i'm sorry i'm gonna be a pain here but yeah no what what revenue multiple shared valuation on the series a i'm curious because i like these benchmarks like 10x 20x 50x what was the revenue multiple uh revenue multiple was yeah 50x 5-0 yeah does it make you nervous growing into that valuation or no you're ready for it no totally ready for it yeah it's i think it's a lot about the opportunity uh that lies in front of us that we can tap into uh it was all a function of manpower like this round was so exciting because we had bunch of pipeline but no one to actually we have literally one sales guy like that's insane uh and we grew from like zero dollars in revenue to where we are right now over the last kind of like 12 months um which is why it was really so you had no you had no revenue this same time in 2020 at 20 20 same time you were doing like peanuts uh like 5k a month yeah we had we had a we had customers a little more than that we had customers uh that that was with us from a beta customer standpoint and but we only launched our platform post go it that's when we actually became live from a self-service perspective we did not see enough to go away all the growth that we have come across is over the last 12 to 14 months yeah your capital must be like pretty messy though i mean right because you did like 120 grand pre-seed round back in february of 2019 then you did another 1.8 million precede i think in september of 2019 right yeah so 1.8 million included the 120k that we got from techstars so our 1.8 million was our first round that we did that was the first price round that we did oh okay okay okay and that was what i like like a 10 cap something like that yeah interesting and text our standard deal i think is what 120k for seven percent that's right yeah yeah six percent six percent for 120 interesting very and that was seattle yeah that was seattle yeah very cool actually we were in the bay area and we moved to seattle just for textures smart oh that's very cool um real quick i'm trying to get more founders to do this pay as you go model like you're doing because your net dollar retention can go through the freaking roof when you look at your last 12 months i assume you guys are well above 100 ndr yeah 125. well interesting i think i bet you guys should get up like 150 160. yeah we want to do at least 132 by the end of next quarter that's our objective is that like the key thing when you're pitching the series one of the key metrics that is absolutely yeah what was the second most important metric dollar just like revenue growth yeah absolutely revenue growth is an important number for us uh and obviously uh number of developers on the platform i think that also is really critical all right serbia let's wrap up with the famous five here number one favorite business book uh hard things about hot things number two is their ceo you're following or studying jennifer tachara uh page of duty ah yes number three what's your favorite online tool for building the business notion and number four how many hours i sleep to get every night six six okay that's not horrible and which situation married single kids i am married my husband lives in sydney australia oh wow okay any kids no okay and do you mind me asking how old you are i'm 34. 34. last question something you wishing you when you were 20. start a company right now [Laughter] don't wait until you're 32. guys symbol.ai helping you guys make more sense of all the video data you're capturing during code and post kova to organize it pay per minute analyze they've got over you know caught between 1500 customers already on the platform scaling nicely doing like five ten grand a month in revenue like a year ago now well over that did a 17 million dollar series a recently had a 50x revenue multiple she's gonna hate that i'm saying this but if it's a 50x multiple and an 80 million valuation because they sold 10 to 20 that we can back into revenue of about 1.5 million run right about a year ago she's going to smile and hate me for that she can't comment but check them out i'm very bullish on these guys serbia thank you for taking us to the top absolutely thank you so much nathan one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers 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