2024 Revenue
$80.6M
Customers · 2021
300K
Funding
$101.3M
Team
108
Founded
2014
Veem Revenue & Funding (2024)
Veem is a San Francisco-based global payments platform founded in 2014 by Marwan Forzley that enables small and medium-sized businesses to send and receive payments in local currency across 110 countries and more than 70 currencies. The company operates a transaction-based model with no subscription, setup, or ACH fees, generating revenue instead through foreign exchange spreads, credit card processing fees, real-time debit card deposits, and a newly launched capital program.
As of September 2021, Veem reported approximately 300,000 accounts on its platform and said it processes billions of dollars in payment volume annually. The company has raised roughly $120 million in total funding, including a $31 million Series C closed in August 2020 and a strategic investment from public payments company Repay announced at the time of the interview. Goldman Sachs led the Series B round.
Forzley told interviewer Nathan Latka that the platform has roughly doubled its account base each year since commercial launch in 2017, with 65 percent of new accounts arriving through in-transaction referrals rather than paid acquisition. Average revenue per user runs approximately $20 per month, and the company employs roughly 160 people.
Last updated
Veem Revenue
Veem crossed $1 million in annual revenue in approximately 2017, the first year the company was commercially active at scale after spending two to three years on licensing and compliance before that. Forzley declined to disclose any revenue figure beyond that milestone, saying the company is not in a position to share financial details publicly.
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Veem Hit $80.6m revenue in November 2024 | listcorp.com |
| 2024 | Veem Hit $26.3m revenue in October 2024 | Estimated |
| 2023 | Veem Hit $25.1m revenue in December 2023 | Estimated |
| 2021 | Veem Hit $24m revenue in September 2021 | |
| 2014 | Launched with $0 revenue |
Forzley confirmed that the platform generates approximately $20 per month per active customer on average. With 300,000 total accounts on the platform as of September 2021, Forzley noted that not all accounts are active in any given month, and that activity varies by invoicing cycle, ranging from weekly to quarterly or occasional. He did not confirm a current annualized revenue figure. The host noted that a straight multiplication of 300,000 accounts by $20 per month would imply roughly $6 million per month, but Forzley clarified that the active-versus-inactive distinction makes that calculation imprecise.
Forzley said the company has roughly doubled its account base every year since commercial launch, which he described as the primary growth metric he tracks. He declined to confirm when Veem passed $10 million in annualized revenue. A GetLatka forward estimate, applying the stated 100 percent annual account-growth rate as a ceiling and a deceleration-adjusted rate as a floor, is not calculable without a confirmed current revenue base; Forzley explicitly declined to provide one.
Veem Valuation, Funding Rounds
Veem has not publicly disclosed its valuation. The company has raised $101.3M in total funding to date.
Veem has raised $101.3M in total funding across 5 rounds, most recently a $31M Series D round in 2020.
| Year | Round | Amount | Valuation | % Sold | Source |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | Series D | $31M | - | - | |
| 2018 | Series C | $25M | - | - | |
| 2017 | Series B | $24M | - | - | |
| 2015 | Series A | $20M | - | - | |
| 2014 | Funding round | $1.3M | - | - |
Founder / CEO
Marwan Forzley
CEO
Marwan Forzley is the co-founder and CEO of Veem. He was 49 years old at the time of the September 2021 interview. Forzley said he was motivated to start the company after watching family businesses struggle with what he described as old-fashioned payment processes, including paper checks, wire transfers, and manual invoicing.
Forzley incorporated Veem in late 2014 but spent the following two to three years building out the regulatory and licensing infrastructure required to move money commercially in the United States, where a money-transmitter license is required in each state. The company acquired its first customers in 2016 on a limited basis as licenses were obtained state by state, and did not begin acquiring customers at scale until 2017. Forzley recalled that 2017 was approximately the year Veem crossed $1 million in revenue, describing it as a milestone he uses to mark a startup's early progress.
Forzley said he wishes he had learned to code more efficiently when he was younger. He cited Jeff Bezos and Amazon as a leadership model he studies, and named The Innovator's Dilemma as his favorite book. He is married with two children.
Q&A
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What's your age? | 52 |
Customers
Veem had approximately 300,000 accounts on its platform as of September 2021, across 110 countries and more than 70 currencies. Forzley said the account base has roughly doubled every year since the company began acquiring customers at scale in 2017.
The platform carries no subscription fee, no setup fee, and no transaction fee on ACH payments, checks, or debit card receipts. Revenue is generated on what Forzley called advanced features: foreign exchange transactions, where the spread ranges from approximately 0.25 percent to 2 percent depending on currency pair and payment method; credit card payments, where Veem charges 2.9 percent; and real-time deposits to a linked debit card, where Veem charges 1 percent. A capital program launched approximately one month before the interview allows businesses to defer payments for up to six months at a cost of roughly 1 to 2 percent per month, implying an effective annual rate of 12 to 24 percent.
Forzley described the typical customer as a startup or small business processing a few thousand dollars per month, starting with a handful of supplier payments or outbound invoices and expanding usage over time. Average revenue per active customer is approximately $20 per month.
Veem serves 300K customers.
Veem Business Model
Veem operates a transaction-based model with three primary revenue streams: foreign exchange spreads, card-based payment fees, and a capital program. Foreign exchange is currently the largest contributor, reflecting the company's origins in cross-border payments. Forzley said domestic monetization through credit card fees and the capital program is newer and growing faster, and he projected that the three streams would eventually split roughly one-third each.
The capital program, launched approximately one month before the September 2021 interview, allows SMB customers to defer a payment obligation for up to six months. Veem does not fund these loans from its own balance sheet; instead it works with bank partners and strategic investors who provide the capital. Forzley said the program is too new to project loan volume. The company processes billions of dollars in GMV annually, though Forzley declined to give a more precise figure or confirm whether any single month has reached $1 billion.
Forzley said 65 percent of new accounts each month arrive through in-transaction referrals, meaning an existing Veem user sends or requests a payment and the counterparty, who is not yet on the platform, signs up to complete the transaction. The company also acquires customers through its own marketing programs and through integrations with accounting platforms including QuickBooks, Xero, and NetSuite, as well as bank partnerships. Forzley described the sales motion as primarily inbound rather than outbound, consistent with a high-volume, low-ARPU model. Profitability was not discussed in the interview.
Forzley, speaking as an observer of the broader SMB fintech market rather than about Veem specifically, said companies in the segment typically need $30 million to $40 million in revenue growing at 70 to 100 percent annually to support a $1 billion valuation, with revenue multiples in the 20x to 50x range depending on growth rate. He did not confirm whether Veem has reached those thresholds.
Point-in-time figures shared on the GetLatka podcast, each linked to the exact moment it was said on camera.
Customers (2021)
300000
“Marwan Forzley: We have about 300,000 accounts on the platform. We're in 110 countries. We have 70 plus currencies that we support.”
WatchAverage revenue per user (2021)
$20
“Nathan Latka: So what will you make on average per month from these guys? It sounds like it's probably like ten or twenty bucks, right? Marwan Forzley: Yeah, it's SMBs. You're making yeah, like $20 a month a good way to characterize it.”
WatchVeem Employees & Team Size
Veem employed approximately 160 people as of September 2021. Forzley said a significant portion of the team works in engineering and product, consistent with what he described as a heavy infrastructure build, but he declined to give a specific engineering headcount.
Veem employs approximately 108 people as of 2026, down from 124 in 2023, including 26 sales reps that carry a quota. It serves 300K customers that rely on its solutions.
| Year | Milestone | Source |
|---|---|---|
| 2024 | Reached 108 employees (October 2024) | |
| 2023 | Reached 124 employees (December 2023) | |
| 2023 | Reached 124 employees (September 2023) | |
| 2023 | Reached 116 employees (January 2023) | |
| 2022 | Reached 122 employees (December 2022) | |
| 2022 | Reached 120 employees (January 2022) | |
| 2021 | Reached 160 employees (January 2021) | Estimated |
Frequently Asked Questions about Veem
What is Veem's revenue?
Veem generates $80.6M in revenue.
Who is the CEO of Veem?
The CEO of Veem is Marwan Forzley.
How much funding does Veem have?
Veem raised $101.3M across 5 rounds.
How many employees does Veem have?
Veem has 108 employees.
Where is Veem headquarters?
Veem is headquartered in San Francisco, California, United States.
Compare Veem to the industry
See how Veem ranks against the best Supply Chain & Logistics Software companies by revenue and funding.
Full Interview Transcripts
Will Veem's 300,000 SMB Customers Process Over $5b in 2021? 3 Products Driving Growth.Sep 23, 2021
[00:00] Hey, folks. My guest today is Marwan Forzley. He's the co founder and CEO of Veem, a next generation global payment provider that enables businesses to quickly and securely send and receive payments in local currency. Marwan, you ready to take us to the top? [00:12] >> All right, thank you. Thanks for having me. [00:14] You bet. So did you have a local currency crisis a couple of years ago, and this is what made you get the business going or what? [00:20] >> I have a lot of businesses in my family, and it's been quite painful watching SMBs deal with payments all day because they're busy selling what they do best, selling their products, and they're looking for ways to simplify paying and getting paid, and I'm amazed about the number of things they do that are what I call old fashioned processes, so like cutting checks, sending wires, creating paper invoices, and we wanted to rip that whole thing up and [00:55] >> provide something simpler to the user so that they can pay and get paid without having to think about it. It kind of becomes natural and secondhand. That's why we created Veem so that we help them do it in domestic markets as well as cross border international. It's one login that gets you to do payments, payables, receivables, domestic and cross border under the same service. [01:19] Interesting. Help me understand. I'm not quite sure what the right question is here, but you'll guide me. How many small businesses use you guys? Sent at least $1 via Veem last month. [01:31] >> Yeah, we have about 300,000 accounts on the platform. We're in 110 countries. We have 70 plus currencies that we support. We've been doing this since 2014, and customers use us to pay suppliers, pay labor, some customers use us to move money between their own bank accounts, some customers use us to collect payments on invoices, they either create on the system or they have an invoice already created, they send it out and collect payments on it. [02:03] And so, I guess, what was total, you'd maybe call it GMV through your platform in August? [02:09] >> Yeah, we generally don't disclose that data, but this is a scalable platform that is designed to simplify payments for SMBs. We're not talking about we're not PowerPoint in early stage. We're not a big company either. That's a very large company. We're, I would call, mid market accounts in the way that Wall Street describes companies. [02:31] Yeah. I won't push you hard here, but it would be helpful. Could you give a range you're comfortable with in terms of GMV? Like, you over 1,000,000,000 in GMV last Yeah, [02:39] >> we do billions annually. [02:41] Okay, billion. Have you had a billion dollar month yet? [02:46] >> I can't disclose that, but it's really billions a year. That's what we can discuss. [02:51] Got it. My guess would be you're not billions a month would be impressive, so maybe you're not there yet. But is it on the trajectory? Do you think you can get that within the next twenty four months? [02:58] >> It's a scalable system. We double the number of accounts pretty much every year. We've been in existence, and every year, the number of accounts on the platform at least doubles. [03:09] Interesting. Tell me about how you're doing that. If you're 300,000 now, you're 150,000 a year ago, how are you signing SMBs? [03:15] >> Yeah, so it comes in three different buckets. Some of it comes through our own marketing programs. We acquire customers directly. Some of it comes through partnerships. We're plugged into QuickBooks, Xero, NetSuite. We're integrating with bank partners. Most interesting, the bulk of it, over half of it, from customers that already on Veem. Think of it like member get member. The reason why they do that, they like the service, they find it to be delightful, it's a simple [03:46] >> experience, so they tell other customers that they have, Hey, I'm going to use Veem to pay you, or I'm going to use Veem to get paid from you. And so that naturally brings other customers to the platform. That actually is the primary way of getting customers on the system, existing customers, bringing other customers. [04:05] Do you measure that? Do know what your viral coefficient is? [04:07] >> Oh, yeah. We're at every month that passes by, 65% of new accounts come in from customers that are on the platform. That's your 65% [04:21] of new sign ups come from referral links from current customers. [04:24] >> Interesting. It's not the traditional refer a friend model where you don't know if you've been referred or not. This is in the transaction. I send money to you, you'll like it. You say, I'm going to use Veem to get somebody else to pay you, or I'm going to use Veem to send money to somebody else. So it's in the transaction flow. [04:45] Yep. So one party might not use Veem yet, but they get an invoice from me and they go, What's this Veem thing? Maybe I should sign up. And you get 65% of your growth comes from that. [04:53] >> And what's amazing about that model is basically, in return for a delightful experience that you give to the customers, customers become party to their growth. They themselves introduce the concept to other customers that they have, that they have relations with. [05:09] This makes a ton of sense. I want to try and put a face. I don't want just get lost in the 300,000 number. Want try and put a face to this SMB. Can you name? Is there anyone you can cite? [05:18] >> We have so many of them. We have a lot of startups, e tailers, e commerce. [05:23] Can you name one though, a [05:25] >> specific I'm trying to [05:29] There's so many to pick from. [05:30] >> There's so many to pick from. I I [05:33] Pick a startup, a startup, an SMB startup. So, [05:39] yeah, he's searching through his HubSpot, his CRM right now. Yeah, I [05:42] >> was just about to say, I have so many of them. This is one of the things about SMBs, unlike enterprise clients where you have big accounts that you know them by heart, This is such a wide swath of businesses that use us. Not only businesses, businesses, accountants, partners, so it's just a large number of customers that [06:02] use Well, me paint a picture and you tell me what's accurate. I'm a new startup. I need help invoicing. I'm gonna use Veem. We're in a couple of different countries. I'm gonna use Veem to do that. I might put like, what, 10,000 through the platform each month, something like that, my first couple of invoices? [06:15] >> Yeah. I mean, that's a typical profile. [06:18] That's a [06:19] >> good way of describing it. Actually, customers start either paying suppliers and they start with a couple of suppliers a month, then they like the system, they start expanding on it and adding more suppliers to that platform. And some customers start the other way around. They start on the invoicing flow, exactly what you said. You have a couple of customers you want to collect on your invoice, and so you send them the invoice or the request and [06:45] >> you collect payments on Veem. That's a typical profile. [06:48] So let's stick to this exact story. Again, I'm a new startup. I did $10,000 through your system this month in September. How do you guys make money on the $10,000 I use your system to collect? [06:57] >> Yeah, we make money on foreign exchange. We make money if the payer paid with their credit card. We make money when we deposit funds real time to your debit card, and we make money on capital programs. A bunch of customers really like the idea of accessing capital lines from Veem. I have a bill, need to pay it, but I'm kind of short on cash. So what I do is I request the payment to be delayed. Essentially, [07:23] >> think of it like a pay later type program. [07:27] The NPL, right? The [07:28] >> NPL, that's exactly similar to that for businesses. So these aren't the types of revenue we make. What's interesting is there's no subscription fee, there's no setup fee, and there's no transaction fees on ACH, cheques, or debit cards. They're all corporate. We make money on what we call advanced features, which is credit cards, foreign exchange, and capital program. [07:49] Let me repeat these back to you quickly, and just to make sure I got them. You [07:55] said foreign exchange credit card fees, deposit funds real time to the debt debit cards, and then capital programs. But really, I can eliminate the deposit funds to real time to debt cards. Do really think foreign exchange credit card fees and capital programs? [08:08] >> Yes. [08:09] That's I see. Okay. And of those three, is there like clearly a leader in terms of what your core business model is? Or is it like 33%, 33% revenue split? [08:17] >> Well, historically, foreign exchange is the leader because historically we come from cross border payments market. And over time we know there's quite a lot of activity in domestic markets, so we started adding other ways to monetize domestic. So that's a newer revenue stream, parts and capital, but today there's more skew towards foreign exchange. In the future, it'll balance out. [08:40] I see. Okay. So I mean, is it fair to say that right now more than 70% of your revenue is foreign exchange, but the other two ones are growing very quick because they're brand new? [08:47] >> It's not as high, but yeah, the growth rate on domestic is, you know, definitely high. You know, it's like high growth markets. [08:55] Give us a prediction. I mean, a year and a half, two years from now of these three lines, which one do you [08:59] >> think is Yeah, going to the they'll divvy up like maybe a third, a third, a third. These are all different ways to monetize customers, and these are all big trends in the market. Credit card and B2B and card issuance and deposits, these are all hot markets in the B2B space. Capital and, like you said, the NPL, that's a hot market as well. But foreign exchange is the most painful thing to do, and that's a known pain [09:26] >> that everybody goes through. That's a reliable, very good revenue stream that we're going to have for a long time. [09:33] So again, I'm that startup with 10,000, I need to send it through foreign exchange, like, how much might you make on a 10,000 that I'm processing through that channel? [09:43] >> It ranges from on the low end about quarter percent, on the high end about 2%. It varies depending on the payment method you choose, on the currency terms, on the countries. There's a difference between sending payments to Europe versus sending payments to Vietnam. That's just the cost structure is very different, so there's a range of outcomes. But it is very competitive. It ends up being half the price compared to what you usually pay when you use [10:07] >> a bank product. [10:08] What about on credit card rates and depositing funds to your debit card real time? How much can you make there? [10:11] >> We charge 1% on payments to a debit card. That's real time payments. Instantly, the money is deposited in your bank account that's linked to your debit card. On paying with a card, we charge 2.9%. [10:25] Interesting. Okay. See, when I hear those, you're basically capped at 2 to 2.9% on those first two revenue streams. The capital program, that was very interesting because the buy now pay later stuff, if your cycle time on this is very tight, you'll be able to recycle capital very quickly, and you're charging like a two or 3%, don't know what it is, but you're charging some percentage, but the APR is through the roof. You can print money doing this. [10:46] >> Yeah. On the APR, that is also a range. It's not necessarily a fixed amount. It depends on the quality of the customer, where you're located, how long you've been on Veem. So there's a range of outcomes. But in general, what we try to do is make sure the experience is delightful, it's simple. We're not going to milk it on the revenue side. We just want to make sure that there's multiple products we can monetize, and that's [11:10] >> the key thing. [11:11] So Marwan, if I, again, same use case, I'm going start up 10 ks through your platform, but let's say that that 10,000 is a bill that I'm paying to a vendor. I've bought it and I want to pay it later. I want to keep that 10 ks. How much am I going to pay you? Like, how long can I push that payment off using Veem, and what am I going to pay you at the end? Like, [11:27] what's your cost? [11:29] >> You can push up to six months. And generally, you pay anywhere from about a percent to 2% a month on that schedule. [11:39] Okay. So 12% to 24% effective interest rate. Pretty fair. Pretty fair. Are you doing this off your balance sheet? Do you have debt on a balance sheet? [11:48] >> We work with bank partners and partners that have invested in Veem, and we work with them on these programs. [11:58] Interesting. So why haven't you raised? I mean, again, you want to own this in house if you can. Why not go raise 4% or 5% cost of capital from a bank and do this off your own balance sheet? [12:07] >> You know, there's different ways of doing it. Generally, we like to stick to the things we do well and outsource to partners that have their expertise, so there are partners that we have that are in the balance sheet business, and they're very good at scaling that. My business is more payments related, more customer experience, and so I'd like to stick to the things I know and then hand it off to partners that this is their sweet [12:34] >> spot. That way, raise complementary offerings and we are able to scale that program without having ups to figuring out to raise capital all the time. [12:44] Yeah. Do you think you can do, like, $50,000,000 in loans this year? [12:49] >> This is a new program that we had that we just launched, like, like, a month ago. Oh, wow. I'm not sure where we're at. It's like a brand new program. I'd tell you, though, capital, access to capital is something that SMBs won't like. There's demand for it. A reason why GetL is a hot thing these days because there's a general demand in the market for these types of products. [13:14] Yeah. I mean, had Jim on the co founder of Square on the show, and we got going into his POS business and his credit business and how the POS system allows their buy now, pay later stuff, and one of their fastest growing arms. This is a very, very, very hot space. [13:26] >> What's interesting is if you look at Square, it's a really good, interesting case. Square Payments is the engine that was created first. Square Capital landed second. Square Capital now is a big thing, And actually, the whole concept of embedding capital to payments is a hot topic because if you look at where capital has scaled in the past, it's situations where it is embedded into something else. Payments is a natural. Yeah. You see the same trend with [13:49] >> PayPal, PayPal and PayPal Credit. See the same thing with Intuit. So like there's cases in the market where embedding capital into something else have done really well. [13:58] Oh, embedded finance is the future. I mean, that's why you launched the product and you're testing it. We'll see what happens. I want to move on to more of your backstory and the team here. Before we do that, though, so we just learned about all your revenue streams, your different products, how you're helping these SMBs. So what will you make on average per month from these guys? It sounds like it's probably like ten or twenty bucks, [14:14] right? [14:15] >> Yeah, it's SMBs. You're making yeah, like $20 a month a good [14:22] >> way to characterize it. [14:24] Yeah. Okay, give me more of your backstory here. So you launched it in 2014. Mean, how did you get the first 100 customers? [14:29] >> Oh, no. I started the company in late twenty fourteen. You know, we regulated company, meaning we're licensed in every single state in The US, and we also have licenses in other parts of the world, so it took us like two, three years just like legal compliance licensing. And in The US you can't just move money, you got to have all the licenses in place before you do it. So the actual selling of getting customers in did [14:55] >> not really begin until later, like 2017 timeframe before you can really start adding customers and bringing customers at scale. The initial set of customers, I call it like friends and family, it's like whoever we know between all of us that have access to customers, we call them up, it's like, Hey, we built this thing, you want to try it, Can you give it a shot and give us feedback? So that's the initial group that came in [15:20] >> that used the product. [15:21] Makes a Once lot of we have the first batch of customers in, we got their feedback, and so were very good at building quickly to whatever their customer feedback is. We then started hiring sales and marketing teams to then get the next batch of customers, and that's where you start going from the first 100 to the first thousand to the first 10,000. That becomes like sales and marketing efforts. [15:47] So sorry, what year was that that you got your first customer? [15:51] >> Oh, like we were doing I mean, we got the first customer in like 2016, and then they trickle in because you're not really commercially available. You're kind of doing it in states you have access to where you have licensing, and you've got to get customers. It's sort of a parallel path. As you get more licenses in different states, you add customers, it so takes a while to get the engine going because of the licensing schemes you [16:16] >> have to have in place. [16:17] And Marwan, do you remember the first year you did $1,000,000 in revenue? [16:22] >> That was like '20 I don't actually remember. Maybe 2017? [16:28] That's a big moment. That's a big year. [16:30] >> Yeah. [16:33] >> I actually tell my friends when they start businesses that the most important things in life when you're building a business is first customer, first 100, first 1,000, first 10,000. If you think of them like multiples of 10, these are amazing moments. On the revenue side, first million, first 10, and it goes like that. It's a good way of measuring the milestones. It's like you have kids, you know, they go through through stages. Same thing with startups. [16:58] Yeah. No. I I totally understand. When did you guys pass the $10,000,000 run rate? [17:02] >> Yeah. I can't disclose. [17:04] Oh, you can't go past it. You can just say just a million in 2017. That's as much as you can give me. [17:10] >> I Let's put it this way. It's scalable product with a scalable platform. And, you know, what I can say is we pretty much doubled the number of accounts on the platform like every year. [17:21] Mhmm. No, that's great. And people can do the math if you've doubled every year since 2017, obviously. You can't double forever, but that's a nice growth rate. Talk to me. You have chosen not to bootstrap. You raised some capital. How much total have you raised today? [17:34] >> About $120,000,000 so far. [17:36] And why do you need to raise all that capital to build this? Obviously, you're getting very diluted as you do that. [17:40] >> Yeah, I mean, this is a very heavy infrastructure play. You've got to have licenses. You've got to have fairly heavy duty technology that you need to build to automate payment processing in multiple countries. You've to plug into accounting systems all around the world. You've to have fraud and risk and security, so there's a big build here, and that build is not cheap to do, And so it requires infrastructure to and when you have infrastructure, you're building [18:05] >> out, you got to have capital you raised to do that. [18:08] When was the last run of capital? [18:11] >> We did that last year, August last year. [18:15] What was that? Your Series C? [18:17] >> Series C. [18:18] Yeah, interesting. Okay, so 31,000,000 raised there, Series C. Once you're on the venture track, I mean, you're basically making a funding announcement every 12. Do you want to tell us anything? [18:29] >> That's a really good question, that a good segue. We announced actually today a relationship with Repay, we Repay is a public company, and we're teaming up with them to do cross border payments for them, and we're working with them on issuing cards, and they decided to invest money in the company. So strategics kind of come in all the time, and part of that, there's investments. So that's one that happened today since this [18:56] >> is Nice, there we go, some breaking news, that's good stuff. [18:58] Now, when, you know, when you're raising a Series C, most founders, you're selling between, call it, like sort of 5 to 10%, maybe sometimes 15% of the business. Were you sort of in that range? [19:08] >> It's classical venture cycle in terms of dilution. [19:12] Yeah. And so why, you know, you made the very public decision to get in bed with Goldman Sachs, right, which decreases your ability to drive competition if you ever want to bring other capital partners to the table because Goldman's a big elephant in the room. Why was that the right decision? [19:25] >> Well, Goldman led my Series B, a strategic round. They actually led it. So they've been a partner with us for a long period of time, and we work with them. Essentially, the investment is strategic to them. So that's the context of the relationship we have with them. It's not specific to lending. [19:46] You feed them any data? [19:47] >> What's that? [19:48] Do you feed them any data? I imagine they were drooling over the data set you sit on. [19:53] >> We work with them on a variety of projects, actually, so it's not just to be clear, the relationship with them is multifaceted. It's not necessarily related to lending. [20:07] Interesting. Yeah. I mean, this is a big question that anyone doing embedded finance that's partnering with a larger bank is going have to go through as a founder. Almost every bank will ask for like an API feed, something behind the scenes that gives them really unique access to data, and you have to decide where you want to draw the line. [20:22] >> Know, part of the makeup of the business we have is rich data, and so we make sure that we use the data to automate lending decisions, to automate payment experiences, to make sure that you don't have to go through hoops to get what you want. And as part of that makeup, we work with partners that kind of have the same mentality to servicing customers. [20:42] Yep. Do you guys think you can break $20,000,000 this year in revenue, or is that going have to wait until next year? [20:48] >> I just have to reiterate, we're not in a position, unfortunately, to disclose anything on the financials. [20:56] If I take numbers you've already given me, 300,000 customers times we asked earlier, you said, yeah, $20 a month on each of them sounds about right. I mean, we can sort of back in. You're not this high, but that would put you at $6,000,000 a month in revenue. [21:09] >> I think you probably have a calculator somewhere ready to go. You're very good with numbers, so people can do the math. Can't disclose. [21:17] Well, no, but those are just numbers you gave. Mean, said 300,000 customers and you said you make 20 per customer. I mean, obviously there's something there that's not adding up because that math doesn't work. [21:28] >> There are all kinds of customers on the platform. Some are active in the month, some are not. [21:33] I see. [21:34] >> It's not exactly straight math like that, but you know, you could, I mean, it's not, I just repeat, it's not a platform that is small in size. [21:43] Yep. Yep. Tell me more as we wrap up. [21:45] >> Customers around the world. [21:47] Yeah. Tell me more as we wrap up a little bit about your team. So how many folks total these days? [21:52] >> We're 160 almost folks in the company. [21:58] Heavy and how many engineers? [22:00] >> I can't disclose that. But like, I mean, it's a technology product build, so a good chunk of that is engineering and product, and that's like the way tech is built out. It's heavy on engineering. [22:11] Mhmm. Yeah. I mean, this is what some people say we're heavy on engineering. They have two engineers, and I go, you're full of So, I mean, are you talking like more than 50% of your team is engineers, sixty, seventy engineers? [22:20] >> I mean, it's a good chunk of it. It's not two people, let's put it this way. [22:26] Do you use in terms of growing your base, obviously, like an outbound model, high touch model doesn't seem like it would work because this is more like a high volume, low ARPU approach. Do you have any inside salespeople that have a quota? [22:39] >> We do, and they're mainly the type of customers we acquire are inbound. So the traditional model you were mentioning is more outbound oriented. That's better for enterprise customers. For this market, the type of customers coming in are more inbound oriented. [22:59] And as we wrap up before the famous five here, how does a founder like you think about churn? Where you're not it's not a SaaS fee where they stop paying. It's more like a tracking how much GMV per month. If they go up, it's expansion. If they do none, then it's churn. Like, how do you think about that? [23:13] >> Yeah, it's a different concept because this is transactional business models, it's not like a subscription, so I don't actually have churn and that I cancelled my service this month. What we have is active and inactive customers, and the active and inactive ratios are a function of your invoice cycles. So for example, some customers are on a weekly invoice cycles, they pay every week, some are on a monthly, some are quarterly, some are occasional, so that the [23:43] >> system adapts to the invoicing cycles that happen between customers and their payees. [23:50] Yep. Yep. That makes a lot of sense. Interesting. Okay, cool. Anything else about the business that you think we should chat about that I haven't asked about? [23:57] >> I think the market B2B is a really hot market and it's going to be hot for a long period of time. And that's because this is an industry that has not seen innovation for such a long time that all these manual processes need to be completely reimagined. And there's an opportunity to do that with a very different experience than when you get to that. And that's why we created Veem. [24:19] Yeah, let's take off your Founder hat for a second and just put your angel investor, you're analyzing the market. Just fintech right now is just hot, frothy, hot, totally irrational. What do you think companies that are like Veem, right? What revenue do you think they have to hit to where they could probably go get a billion dollar valuation today? I'm assuming a very irrational answer here, but I'm curious of your thoughts. [24:42] >> It depends on what segment you're inside fintech. There's a whole bunch of segments. [24:47] Let's do SMB fintech, embedded finance, SMB products. I mean, of like what you've built. [24:52] >> Yeah, generally it's multiple revenue and growth, it's the combination of the two. If you have revenue but slow growth, you get lower sort of multiple. If you have revenue and high growth, you get higher multiples. So to get to that billion range, you got to do like, call it, it depends on the growth rates, but somewhere 20x, 30x multiples these days. Some companies are 50x multiples of revenue, but if you can hit the growth path really [25:17] >> hard, then you command multiples that are fairly attractive these days. How long this is going to stay, that's hard to tell. That's just macro dynamics around the public markets and the valuations we're seeing in the private markets are kind of in sync with public or getting there. But I'd say this, fintech is hot now. It's going to be hot for a while, and the reason why it's going to be hot for a while because this is [25:42] >> a market that has not seen change for decades. Just been baking for a while, and now it's a hot thing and a sexy thing, but that's because there hasn't been a whole lot going on in the past thirty years, forty years. [25:56] Marwan, would this be an accurate statement? You sort of feel like companies that are maybe in your space, fintech, SMB focus, they probably need to be around like $30,000,000 to $40,000,000 in revenue growing 70 to 100% year over year to crack that billion dollar sort of valuation mark? [26:12] >> That's that's a good sort of a way to think of the market these days. [26:17] Yeah. So are you gonna be raising at a billion dollar valuation next year? [26:23] >> We'll see. You'll you'll find an announcement. [26:27] Alright, guys. Marwan, good stuff. Let's wrap up with the famous five. Number one, favorite book? [26:32] >> I have The Innovator's Dilemma. [26:35] Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? [26:39] >> I love what Jeff Bezos did with Amazon. [26:42] Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Veem? [26:46] >> AWS. It's been really good. [26:49] Number four, how many hours of sleep do you get for each night? [26:53] >> Six hours. [26:54] Okay. And situation, married, single kids? [26:56] >> I'm married. [26:57] Any kiddos? [26:58] >> And I have two kids. [27:00] Nice. How old are you? [27:02] >> I am 49. [27:04] 49 years young. Take us home your last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. Something, say again. Something you wish you knew back when you were 20 years old. [27:13] >> Something I wish I knew about when I was 20 years old. [27:16] Like when you were 20, just something you wish you knew. [27:21] >> I wish I knew how to code more efficiently because I would would would write a whole bunch of stuff that I think is really cool. Let's just, like, do it and and see what happens in the market. Find talent in that direction is super interesting. [27:40] Guys, Marwan was frustrated in 2014. He launched Veem, took him three years to break a million bucks in revenue, but he did it in 2017, has basically been doubling ever since. He's now got over 300,000 SMBs that use his platform using three specific tools. He's got foreign exchange, they make 0.25 to 2% there. They've got credit card feeds and deposit funds real time to your debit card, 1% to 2.9% there. Capital programs, which he's pretty excited [28:04] about. Obviously, there's an APR there, but it's all focused on helping SMBs access capital, move money faster so they can focus on doing what they love, which is building their business. He's doing this with a team of 160 people, about $100,000,000 raised as he looks to continue to scale. Marwan, thanks for taking us to the top. [28:18] >> Thank you, Nathan. Have a good day. [28:21] One more thing before you go. We 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 [28:46] Central. Additionally, remember these recorded founder interviews go live. We release them here on YouTube every day at 2PM Central. To make sure you don't miss any of that, make sure you click the subscribe button below here on YouTube, the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live. I wouldn't want you to miss breaking news in the SaaS world, whether it's an acquisition, a big [29:09] fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or else. I don't want you to miss it. Additionally, if you want to take this conversation deeper and further, we have by far the largest private Slack community for B2B SaaS founders. You want to get in there. We've probably talked about your tool if you're running a company or your firm if you're investing. You can go in there and quickly search and see what people are saying. Sign up [29:30] for that at nathanlatka.com/slack. In the meantime, I'm hanging out with you here on YouTube. I'll be in the comments for the next thirty minutes. Feel free to let me know what you thought about this episode. And if you enjoyed it, click the thumbs up. We get a lot of haters that are mad at how aggressive I am on these shows, I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people. We got [29:50] to push them away. Click the thumbs up below to counter them and know that I appreciate your guys'support. Alright, I'll be in the comments. See you.
Data and Sources
All figures on this page are taken directly from interviews or are estimates from public sources and proprietary models. Not financial advice. Read full disclaimer.
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