How Symbl.ai Raised $17M at a 50x Revenue Multiple with 125% NDR (Interview with CEO Surbhi Rathore)

Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Surbhi Rathore. She's the CEO and cofounder of Symbl dot ai. The company is bringing to life a 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. Surbhi, are you ready to take us to the top?

Surbhi Rathore

00:19>> Do it. Let's do it.

Nathan Latka

00:21Alright. I'm stoked that you're here. People wanna follow along.

Surbhi Rathore

00:23>> It's symbl dot ai.

Who Symbl.ai Sells To

Nathan Latka

00:26Who are you selling to?

Surbhi Rathore

00:27>> 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.

Nathan Latka

00:40And how did you discover that this was a problem?

Origin Story and Problem Discovery

Surbhi Rathore

00:43>> We were working in the conversation AI space, both me and my co founder before at Amdocs, 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.

Pricing Model: Per-Minute Usage

Nathan Latka

01:07There's so much audio and video data like this being It's created every 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?

Surbhi Rathore

01:16>> So ACV is dependent 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 0.058 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.

Nathan Latka

01:35You said 0.05¢?

Surbhi Rathore

01:37>> Point $0.05. Point $05.

Nathan Latka

01:42Point yeah. So 5¢.

01:44>> Yeah. 5¢.

01:44Okay. Just making sure. Yeah. So all

Surbhi Rathore

01:46>> the way from 5¢ to all the way to, you know, committed volume deals of 100, 200 ks depending upon what's your tiers. So we charge based on volume and usage.

Nathan Latka

01:56I see. And so the volume is quantified by minutes. Is that right?

Surbhi Rathore

02:00>> That's right. Yeah.

No Seat-Based Upsell, Pure Usage Billing

Nathan Latka

02:01Okay. And what about is there a seat based upsell motion or no?

Surbhi Rathore

02:06>> Is there sorry?

Nathan Latka

02:07Do you upsell based off number of seats or no?

Surbhi Rathore

02:10>> No. So we truly believe in kinda like peanut peanut butter your intelligence all over the products that you have. So you only pay based on usage and irrespective of how many seats, 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.

Nathan Latka

02:26Okay. And interesting. I think if don't obviously name the customer, it's private information, but their largest account, are we talking like $100,000 ACV or is do you

Surbhi Rathore

02:34>> have a More than that. Not a million, but, yeah, $150,000 to $200,000.

Nathan Latka

02:40Okay. I mean, do you see a path to having, you know, million dollar customers in 2022, 2023?

Surbhi Rathore

02:44>> Absolutely. Super bullish about it and actually talking to a few customers about that.

Nathan Latka

02:48Really interesting. And and so, again, it's nice because you've natural upsell based off just number of minutes. It's really simple. Yep. Talk to me about day one. When did you guys launch the business?

Surbhi Rathore

02:59>> May 2018.

First Customer via LinkedIn Cold Outreach

Nathan Latka

03:00May 2018. Okay. And how'd you get the first customer? Do you remember?

Surbhi Rathore

03:04>> Yes. LinkedIn cold outreach.

Nathan Latka

03:06Wow. What what give me, like, the verbiage. What was the copy?

Surbhi Rathore

03:10>> Nothing. It was, 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 gonna solve for, and got a meeting, took a phone call, followed by a meeting demo, and then boom, pilot signed.

Current Customer Count and Growth Target

Nathan Latka

03:27Wow. Okay. That was number one. How many customers today?

Surbhi Rathore

03:30>> Today, we have customers in higher double digits.

Nathan Latka

03:33Double digits, you said?

Surbhi Rathore

03:34>> Higher double digits. Yes.

Nathan Latka

03:36When when do you think you can pass a 100?

Surbhi Rathore

03:38>> Soon. Probably first first quarter of the next year.

Nathan Latka

03:43Okay. So you're talking, like, seventy, eighty customers and something like that?

Surbhi Rathore

03:45>> Yeah.

Growth Motion: SEO, Content, and Product-Led Acquisition

Nathan Latka

03:46Where are you getting new customers? Still LinkedIn Outreach?

Surbhi Rathore

03:48>> No, no, no. That was way back.

Nathan Latka

03:51You never know. Sometimes it works, you know?

Surbhi Rathore

03:53>> Yeah, we focus a lot on generating content and just SEO organic sign ups through developer hackathons, community events, all of that. 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. 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

04:20>> product teams, and that's how we get connected on meetings with them.

Minutes Processed Per Month and Growth Rate

Nathan Latka

04:24Fascinating. 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?

Surbhi Rathore

04:31>> We are doing millions of minutes, and we've been doing that since, I think, the last seven, eight months, specifically once products matured post COVID 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 have really taken off on the minutes consumption.

Nathan Latka

04:52Are we talking like 3,000,000 minutes a month or like 30,000,000 No, minutes per

Surbhi Rathore

04:56>> no, not 30 yet. Between five to 10.

Nathan Latka

04:59Five to 10. And how many I wanna get a sense of growth rate. How many more minutes are you adding per month?

Surbhi Rathore

05:05>> I would say 20% is kind of like our average growth.

Nathan Latka

05:08Wow. Okay. I mean, that's pretty impressive.

Surbhi Rathore

05:11>> Yes. Which is why we raised the Series A.

Series A Details and GreatPoint Ventures

Nathan Latka

05:14Okay. So tell me about that. When was the Series A?

05:16How much?

Surbhi Rathore

05:17>> Yeah. We just closed, I think, couple of weeks back, a 17,000,000 Series A, which was led by Greatpoint Ventures. Really pumped to work with Real Lean and got them from there. And they have scaled massive enterprise scale companies. So yeah, super pumped.

Why Raise Capital: Doubling Down on Growth

Nathan Latka

05:30And why do you need the capital? Because obviously there's dilution associated with it.

Surbhi Rathore

05:34>> 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 the reaction. Can we actually do it

05:58>> 10x times? 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.

Nathan Latka

06:16Mhmm. And, Surbhi, most folks, most of the deals I'm seeing today, at least folks that come on the show, Series A's folks are selling between 10 to 20%, say it's pretty standard. Were you guys sort of in the standard range or do you do something weird?

Surbhi Rathore

06:26>> No, standard range.

Nathan Latka

06:27Standard range, okay.

06:29So that would be like 170,000,000 to $250,000,000 ish valuation. Did that feel right for you or did you feel sort of that was high or low?

Surbhi Rathore

06:37>> We did a 17 no, I mean, it wasn't the range that you're talking about. It was different.

Nathan Latka

06:44I'm sorry. I did that wrong. Sorry. Would be between 100 and 200,000,000.

Surbhi Rathore

06:52>> Yeah. So a little lesser than your lower range, the one that you just mentioned right now. But I think 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.

Nathan Latka

07:04Well, yeah, so what was the 4.7 that you raised in 2020, I think?

Surbhi Rathore

07:09>> Yeah, it was a 4,700,000 round that we did that time.

Valuation History and 4x Growth Since 2020

Nathan Latka

07:12But no, but I'm curious how much you grew valuation over the past, like, eighteen months. Can you share that?

Surbhi Rathore

07:17>> Like, four x.

Nathan Latka

07:19Four x. Okay. Got it. So you were like 20,000,000 valuation back in 2020?

Surbhi Rathore

07:23>> Somewhere around that.

Nathan Latka

07:24Interesting. Do you do you come from a bootstrap background? Did you bootstrap like your first company?

Surbhi Rathore

07:29>> We first company?

07:31What do

07:31>> you mean by that?

Nathan Latka

07:32Well, no. I don't know if you had a first company. I'm just curious. Is this your first

Surbhi Rathore

07:34>> Oh, this is our first company. Yeah. It is.

Nathan Latka

07:38And who is we?

Surbhi Rathore

07:40>> Me and my co founder.

Nathan Latka

07:42Well, how did you guys meet? Who are they?

Surbhi Rathore

07:44>> We were so Toshish, we were together in Amdocs, 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 jump ship.

Nathan Latka

07:56So were you guys just peaceful at the start? You said, You know what? We'll just do a fifty-fifty split?

Surbhi Rathore

08:00>> Yes.

Nathan Latka

08:01You should have fought for 60%. Know? Now you say, You know what? I I have more charisma. I'm doing all the podcast interviews. You know?

Surbhi Rathore

08:09>> Well, you haven't met him yet, So we'll take that for the next time probably.

Nathan Latka

08:14That's funny. I'm I sure

Surbhi Rathore

08:15>> bet you'll go and tell him sixty-forty.

ESOP Pool: 10% Then 15% at the Series A

Nathan Latka

08:18That's so funny. I'm sure he's a great guy. So, okay, cool. So you split 50 to get the start. You're growing now. Now a lot of founders that are, you know, doing the kind of raises you're doing, always ask me, Nathan, what's a standard pool that we should be setting up? I imagine you guys set one up. How much is your ESOP pool today?

Surbhi Rathore

08:31>> We did. We did a 10%, 10% at our previous rounds, but this round specifically, we set up actually 15%. We set up a higher ESOP one at this time because 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,

08:56>> I think, as with their years of contribution. And we have some awesome people that have completed two years, three years

Team Size and the India/US Split

Nathan Latka

09:02So in the How many folks full time now?

Surbhi Rathore

09:05>> 54.

Nathan Latka

09:06Wow. Okay. And what's the split between, like, how many engineers?

Surbhi Rathore

09:10>> 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 A. That was one of the biggest motivations of investment, those dollars. 80% is engineering and 60% of the overall company actually is in India. We are split between India and Seattle. So yeah, sixty to sixty five percent in India, thirty to thirty five percent in The US.

Nathan Latka

09:32Which part India? Pune, Chennai, Bangalore?

Surbhi Rathore

09:34>> Yeah. So Pune is majority of the team. We have some people in Bangalore, some people in New Delhi. 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.

Nathan Latka

09:46That's amazing. And then going back to know I asked you what, like, highest customers are in sort of total number of minutes per month, what would you say the sweet spot is? What's the average customer paying you per month?

Surbhi Rathore

09:55>> I think 30 to 40 k is, like, a great area for people to kind of get started.

Nathan Latka

10:01ACV, annual.

Surbhi Rathore

10:02>> Yeah, yeah. And that way, 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 200 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

10:25>> get started. But for the folks that are trying to experiment with the use cases for them, that that is a good sweet spot.

Nathan Latka

10:31Yep. Yep. So I mean, we can take three well, $40,000 ACV, 70 ish customers. I mean, you guys are doing, $250,000 a month right now in revenue, something like that.

Surbhi Rathore

10:38>> I cannot disclose that information at all.

Nathan Latka

10:41I'm just multiplying your numbers.

Surbhi Rathore

10:44>> I'm I did not share the previous numbers and letter numbers. So yeah.

Nathan Latka

10:48No. You did share though. You did share those numbers. You said you had something between 50 and a 100 customers and a $40,000 average you can multiply. Right?

Surbhi Rathore

10:54>> But those 50 to 100 are split in between pay as you go, committed volumes all across.

Nathan Latka

11:00Okay. So 40,000 is not an average then?

Surbhi Rathore

11:03>> 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 pretty similar Twilio model. So it's base revenue and that there's a variable revenue.

Nathan Latka

11:24You you can't be far, though, sorry, from a $3,000,000 run rate. You've got to be flirting with it.

Surbhi Rathore

11:29>> I cannot disclose that information.

11:35>> I'm sorry. I'm gonna be a pain here, but yeah, no.

The 50x Revenue Multiple

Nathan Latka

11:38What what revenue multiple you shared valuation on the Series A. I'm curious because I like these benchmarks like 10x, 20x, 50x. What was the revenue multiple?

Surbhi Rathore

11:48>> Revenue multiple was, yeah, 50x.

Nathan Latka

11:51Five zero? Yeah. Does it make you nervous growing into that valuation or no? You're ready for it?

Surbhi Rathore

11:56>> No. Totally ready for it. It's I think it's a lot about the opportunity that lies in front of us that we can tap into. 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. And we grew from like $0 in revenue to where we are right now over the last kind of like twelve months.

Nathan Latka

12:19Oh, so you had no revenue this same time in 2020?

Surbhi Rathore

12:25>> At 2020, same time, we were doing like peanuts.

Nathan Latka

12:30Five k a month?

Surbhi Rathore

12:31>> Yeah, we had customers a little more than that. We had customers that was with us from a beta customer standpoint, but we only launched our platform post COVID. That's when we actually became live from a self-service perspective. Did

12:45>> not have self-service function after COVID.

Nathan Latka

12:46I see.

Surbhi Rathore

12:47>> So all the growth that we have come across is over the last twelve to fourteen months.

Nathan Latka

12:51Yeah. Your capital must be like pretty messy though. Mean, because you did like $120 k pre seed round back in February 2019. Then you did another 1,800,000 pre seed, I think in September 2019, right?

Surbhi Rathore

13:01>> Yeah. So 1,800,000 included the 120 k that we got from Techstars. So 1,800,000 was our first round that we did. That was the first price round that we did.

Nathan Latka

13:10Oh, okay. Okay. Okay. And that was what? Like a like a 10 cap, something like that?

Surbhi Rathore

13:15>> Yeah. Interesting.

Nathan Latka

13:16And Techstar standard deal, think, is what? 120 k for 7%?

Surbhi Rathore

13:20>> That's right. Yeah. 6%.

Nathan Latka

13:21Yeah. 6%. 6% for one twenty. Interesting. Very and that was Seattle?

Surbhi Rathore

13:25>> Yeah. That was Seattle.

Nathan Latka

13:26Yeah. Very cool.

Surbhi Rathore

13:27>> Talk to me. Actually, we were in the Bay Area, we moved to Seattle just for Techstars.

Net Dollar Retention at 125%

Nathan Latka

13:32Smart. Oh, that's very cool. 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 twelve months, I assume you guys are well above a 100% NDR.

Surbhi Rathore

13:43>> Yeah. One twenty five.

Nathan Latka

13:45Well, interesting. I think bet you guys should get up to, one fifty, one sixty.

Surbhi Rathore

13:48>> Yeah. We wanna do at least one thirty two by the end of next quarter. That's our objective.

Nathan Latka

13:52Is that, like, the key thing when you're pitching a series a? Is that one of the key metrics?

Surbhi Rathore

13:56>> That is. Absolutely.

Nathan Latka

13:57Yeah. What was the second most important metric?

Surbhi Rathore

14:00>> Dollar.

Nathan Latka

14:01Just like revenue growth.

Surbhi Rathore

14:03>> Yeah. Absolutely. Revenue growth is an important number for us. And obviously, number of developers on the platform, I think that also is really critical.

Famous Five

Nathan Latka

14:10Alright, Surbhi. Let's wrap up with the famous five here. Number one, favorite business book?

Surbhi Rathore

14:15>> Hard Things About Hard Things.

Nathan Latka

14:17Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Surbhi Rathore

14:20>> Jennifer Tejada, PagerDuty.

Nathan Latka

14:22Ah, yes. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business?

Surbhi Rathore

14:26>> Notion.

Nathan Latka

14:27And number four, how many hours of sleep do get every night?

Surbhi Rathore

14:31>> Six.

Nathan Latka

14:33Six. Okay. That's not horrible. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Surbhi Rathore

14:37>> I am married. My husband lives in Sydney, Australia.

Nathan Latka

14:39Oh, wow. Okay. Any kids?

Surbhi Rathore

14:40>> No.

Nathan Latka

14:41Okay. And do you mind me asking how old you are?

Surbhi Rathore

14:44>> I'm 34.

Nathan Latka

14:4534. Last question.

Surbhi Rathore

14:46>> Something you wish knew when you were 20.

14:49>> Start a company right now. Don't wait until you're 32.

Nathan Latka

14:54Guys, symbl.ai helping you guys make more sense of all the video data you're capturing during COVID, post COVID, organize it, pay per minute, analyze it. They've got over, know, call between 1,500 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 $17,000,000 series A recently at a 50X revenue multiple. She's gonna hate that I'm saying this, but if it's a 50X

15:14multiple and an 80,000,000 valuation, because they sold 10 to 20%, that we can back into revenue of about 1,500,000 run rate about a year ago. She's gonna smile and hate me for that. She can't comment, but check them out. I'm very bullish on these guys. Surbhi, thank you for taking us to the top.

Surbhi Rathore

15:28>> Absolutely. Thank you so much, Nathan.

Nathan Latka

15:31One more thing before you go. Have a brand new show every Thursday at 1PM Central. It's called Shark Tank for SaaS. We call it deal or bust. One founder comes on, three hungry buyers, they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards, their expenses, their revenue, ARPU, CAC, LTV, you name it, they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live. It is fun to watch every Thursday, 1PM Central.

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