How Venios CEO Jonas Danzeisen grew Venios to $6.2M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

guys venios has just hit 350 000 per month in Revenue up from 250 000 per month a year ago they're working with over a hundred power grid operators spread across Germany Netherlands Austria Switzerland India South America powering over a million substations to help these power grid operators optimize their systems and most importantly decentralize the power grade which is more sustainable they're growing quick they might raise we'll call it two to four million here I call it a 40 to 50 million valuation we'll see what Jonas does hey folks my guest today is Jonas and sazan he's building a tool called venios that's v-e-n-i-o-s.com it's power grid real-time operating system Jonas you ready to take us to the top yeah hopefully yeah we're working on that all right so how did you get who are you selling to are you selling to governments or who's using this so so our solution is used by grid operators but dsos or dnos distribution system operators so the owners of the local Monopoly the owners of the grid the suppliers the utilities basically yeah all around the world are you focused on a particular Geo oh we started in Germany then a rather fast went into Netherlands Austria and Switzerland now we do have activities uh in in whole Europe and also first activities in South America and also in India so uh expanding because we are solving a physical problem by using it and the physical problem um is everywhere where you start to integrate Renewables uh locally into your infrastructure and so I'm a power grid operator in in the Netherlands um what am I paying you to help me with so um the the point is that um the the old infrastructure the grid is built like a champagne pyramid so this is the old perspective having the pyramid having big bottles of champagne uh filling it from the top and then it goes down now if you start to transform your arm system into a decentralized renewable system then you have uh it's like filling up the the champagne pyramid from the from the bottom line so you need to know where our glasses how full are the glasses where's some more champagne needed where do I have too much champagne and so this complexity um we help with our solution to handle and um this is uh exactly the pain we are solving so integration of EVS integration of heat pumps integration of AC AC is less a topic and the Netherlands quite a big Topic in India um integration of of PV of course decentralized generation is a big topic uh combined seating power integration and and all the decentralized um um acids because in the old world we do have big power plants called nuclear gas and now we're building this system are we transforming this system into decentralized system with small assets so understood what is this what is the average power grid operator pay you per month or per year to use your technology oh this is based on the amount of substations so in the utility domain on the Monopoly side on the infrastructure side normally you have a payment um based on on Counting points like households or industry and we do two different little um have an option to be um um referring on on the amount of substations and um it depends on how many substations you have and so basically how big is your grid so in um so what is the price per substation so what is the Presby substation um so so let me say it like this um if we uh if you have uh if you have a project volume of a hundred dollar an estimated project of 100 you have an implementation fee for the first um for the first um year and you have a SARS fee and the SAS fee is roughly 30 to 35 and the rest is implementation and the SAS fee is ongoing and it can depend if you have a small utility uh from several ten thousand Euros SAS fee up to if you are a big utility uh in India or big utility in the Netherlands to several hundred thousand um this is this is this is complex I get it you have a lot of different options but try and simplify this for my audience on average what is a power operator paying you per month or per year to user technology across all their substations are we talking 20 000 a year or two million a year 20 million a year where are you Jeff no it's between uh so it's between uh depending on the size it's between 50 to 300 300 000 per year yeah okay okay and 50 to 300 000. and if someone's paying you 300 000 per year likely how many substations do they have uh then you're in the in the area of several 10 000 substations between depending on the infrastructure quality and and what is happening um between um I would say 32 100 000 substations okay and if someone's only paying you fifty thousand dollars per year how many substations do they likely have um fully uh full rollout isn't they get should be in the area of [Music] um uh from 150 to 500 depending on the complexity of the of the infrastructure oh what's going on there YouTube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with SAS Founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews I've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built the into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out I'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for evaluation this year now the secret valuation is there's many different ways to value a SAS business so the reason you're going to see three or four different evaluations inside of your founder path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SAS company you're going to get a different valuation a VC is going to pay a different valuation private Equity Firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when I hover over here here right so the teal is what a VC would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on YouTube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points Founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 percent of their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of SAS valuation than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform I hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview and then to keep building that out so let's say I have 500 substations I'm paying you a SAS fee of 50 000 per year you're also then going to charge me an implementation fee of about what uh so so as mentioned so implementation um is um is one or uh we do have um 30 implementation 72 30 of what we don't know what percent you're taking so 30 of the ACV you just gave me if 50 000 is then you have an implementation project of roughly 150 to 200. okay got it so the setup just to go live is 150 000 and the recurring fee on the back end is fifty thousand dollars per year yeah you should have really really high net dollar retention then because after someone pays a big setup fee they never should cancel right that's it so we do have uh so we don't have a trend right shoulder is zero when did you launch the company first customer was uh we started 10 years ago okay so call it 2012 2013. 12. and since then you've had no one has started using you and then stopped using you or started you with a thousand substations and then d uh churn down to 100 substations so we um so with small customers um we um we start normally with the football out so and with big customers we normally start in one region like having having a region a and then going from A to B to C and then growing into the infrastructure uh because it's highly profitable and if you have already started with one region then it's uh relatively cheap to to uh because um we are something you can see our solution like the Enterprise service bus are kind of solution uh because we are connected to GI Geo information system to asset information system to skate our system to all the solutions that are existing at the utility and building them up a real-time virtual twin for uh planning and and for control on the infrastructure and yeah the value is so we have customers uh with return to invest of less than one year with what less than one year uh return of in West I see my my question though...