How TitanX grew TitanX to $9.7M revenue and 1.5K customers in 2026.

What did you spend on the IP? 1 million. 200 grand upfront, 800 grand seller. No. What's revenue today at Titan X? Today we're sitting at the time of recording this we're at 9.7 million error. What's your largest customer pay you per year today? One just expanded to 406 AR three-year contract. Oh wow. Okay. So it's a $1.2 million contract. Did you get creative on this acquisition? Was it 10 million acquisition, a million up front or how did you structure it? Yeah, it was a $13 million acquisition. We put 7 million up front. We went growth equity. So we raised 27 million and then 10 million went in our pocket as secondary cash. Zoom. If Henry Shuck at Zoom Info came and offered you $200 million all cash today to sell the company, do you take it? Hey folks, my guest today is Joey Gilkkey. He's a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TitanX, a sales intelligence platform that created the phone intent category. He famously bet his entire net worth on the company, shutting down three other cash flowing businesses to focus on a proprietary model that predicts who will actually answer your cold call. under his leadership, it's grown to millions of revenue and they just recently raised a series A. Joey, you ready to take to the top? Let's do it, brother. All right. So, tell me first, how did you get into this space? Are you an ex salses guy or when did you launch? Yeah, man. I've been in the enterprise sales world my whole career. So, I started off in the fortune world. Okay. So, tell me about that. When did you acquire that piece of IP? What year? That was August of 2023. And I acquired it for a different reason than it turned into. So, I seem like a brilliant I'm more just like a brilliant idiot. uh thought how I was going to use it was I was going to build it for my my fractional business. It was going to be the moat around that services company. We started using it in like a licensing model at the fractional company and then I realized pretty quickly that uh it was it was like dark magic that was heavily expensive and very slow and if I can get my hands on it, I can throw money at R&D and optimize it. Plus, I knew where a lot of the bodies lived when it comes to where does unique telode data live and fraud detection data and all that kind of stuff. So why what did you spend on the IP? Did it, you know, was it millions of dollars or one million on the dot cash? 200 grand upfront, 800 grand seller note. So I turned $200,000 into what is currently valued at 100 million, you know. Okay. Well, and now we have to like I got to figure out where to jump around. I'm curious about so many things. So I guess why did you feel like you needed to buy the IP versus just build it from scratch? And or the million bucks just bought you so much time? Uh it bought me a ton of time for one, for two, uh a lot of my competition, again the goal is to to both build the moat and pull the drawbridge up from competition. So a lot of folks in my space were starting to to look at it, see it, use it a little bit. And there were some big behemoth competitors like memory blue, abstract marketing, and things of that nature on the like outsourc sales development world that were starting to get their hands on it. And I was like, if I'm going to protect this and have a unique value prop, I got to own it and I'm going to dictate who can use it. What was I mean, I interview a lot of folks that tell me they have proprietary data and then when you dig under the hood, all they're doing is buying other people's data. They're running an ETL process on it and then selling it back to customers. What was the actual proprietary data set here? Was it a process or an actual data set? It was both, right? So, and it's been built upon dramatically at this point. So, when I bought it, it was a tech- enabled service. So there's a lot of like technology enabling humans in the loop to power it. And so for us, it was more about how do we make this scalable without having a deprecation of the quality of the outcome. So if anything, it's actually gotten faster, it's gotten cheaper, uh it's we can do it at scale at this point. And uh it's more effective in terms of the the data we're able to find now. So fast forward to today, you've grown this thing. You bought for 200k cash plus 800 sellers note. What's revenue today at Titanex? Titanex is sitting we just did a a small acquisition. Uh we paid low 8 figures for that. Um and that is in the dialer space. So we acquired a company called Front Spin at the time of this going out. That will be very public. So Front Spin was built for high velocity dialing. Not a very sound business, but an incredibly sound and scalable technology. Can scale to a million users and we've been uh power users of Front Spin in a lot of different ways. It actually powered the call center in the early days. So that's how we know so much about it. It excels in call deliverability. So anyways, uh today we're sitting at the time of recording this, we're in early 26. We're at 9.7 million AR. That's postacquisition, right? Postacquisition, they're contributing about 2 million. So for le or excuse me, well, old school Titanex is sitting at about 7 uh 7.2 7.4 and uh front spins at 2.1. And did you get creative on this acquisition? If it's you know what is it 10 million acquisition, a million up front or how did you structure it? Yeah, it was a $13 million acquisition. And we put 7 million up front. We went growth equity. So we raised 27 million uh 10 of which uh is primary. So that's for growth. A little bit more than 10. Uh 7 million went towards the uh acquiring Front Spin. 6 million of that from Front Spin CEO got rolled in. And then 10 million went in our pocket as secondary cash. Guys, I want to first off, it's very rare to find a founder that's as transparent as Joey. So I'm going to really push on this. One of the things that I see founders, they're just making a mistake right now is, you know, when you go out and raise external capital, people say, "Nathan, you just hate VC. That's not the That's not true. What What I actually am saying is if you're going to go give up control, g take cash as well. Don't give up control and cash. So like Joey gave up some control here with the series A, but he also got paid. He got his first bite. I mean, I don't know, Joey, what your personal net worth is, but I imagine 10 million secondary is meaningful for you. Yeah, I mean it it certainly adds some padding. I mean, I've done well in my career, but it I did bet my net worth on this this. So, uh, I'm basically just replenishing a lot of capital at this point, but yeah, it helped. So, let me ask you a question. You raised the 27 million at what valuation? Uh just under 100. So 90 something 92. Um but since then we've grown. We've added we've added about a million to in the past month since the acquisition finished. So we're well over 100. The reason I'm bringing this up is this is really cool arbitrage here. Mostly public companies do this, but you're doing it in the private markets. What I mean by that is when you did the 27 million round at we'll just call it 100 million post money. uh and you're doing 7 million of ARR that's about about a 14.3x multiple at the same time you use that money to go buy front spin which was 2 million of revenue right for call it uh I think you said 7 million right that's that right is that right that's 4x 13 oh 13 okay still though you're still in the money and so I wanted to give them a piece put them on the cap table obviously it's earned um and so I had a lot of criteria I wanted control I wanted to steer the ship don't touch my culture respectfully go f yourself if you want too and they were like cool we believe in that was great guys up in you know founder path my main gig it looked very similar to Joey's deal I'll just put it that way so update you'd also I guess Joey say good things about updata oh they're awesome I you know that was the biggest thing is I need a partner that believed in our vision knew our market like when they showed up for the first management meeting they had interviewed customers done deep market research like they came prepared whenever you're ready though I will convince Trey and eventually you to take a $5 million term loan from founder path with a with a 4-year IO no period and an all-in interest rate in the 12 to 14% range. No warrants, no PGs, no nothing. Click that. There we go. All right. Hey, so where do you do you keep running this playbook over and over? I mean, you effectively could buy your way to 100 million bucks of revenue just doing the same thing over and over. Yeah. I mean, I look at again just the buy verse build risk quadrant. For me, it's it's more along uh what's the timeline? What's our goals? When's our recap timeline of when we're going to actually recap this thing again? I plan on rolling this thing two, three times. Um, in terms of rolling equity over, I just really believe in the vision. It's always going to be about the partner. It's going to be about the valuation clearly and what the secondary looks like on those deals. Um, but we have, you know, with where Titanex lives today, we are an intelligence layer that lives between where people get their data from. So, think Zoom Info, Clay, Apollo, Cogniz,...