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Founder Interview

How VideaHealth Reached $1.4M Revenue Rolling FDA-Cleared Dental AI Into Hundreds of Practices (Interview with CEO Florian Hillen)

Interview Date
May 25, 2022
Interviewee
Florian HillenCEO and Founder
Watch
Watch the full interview

Company Metrics at Interview Time

Revenue (2022)

$1.4M

Total Funding Raised

$26M

Team Size (2022)

30

Practices Installed (2022)

300+

Price Per Practice (2022)

$400 per month

Historical Snapshot

These numbers were reported by Florian Hillen during his interview with Nathan Latka in May 2022 and are a historical snapshot, not current figures. See VideaHealth’s current numbers.

Key Takeaways

  • 01VideaHealth raised a $20M Series A from Spark Capital in May 2022, bringing total funding to over $26M
  • 02The company had approximately 300 practices already installed on its platform as of the interview
  • 03Each practice pays between $400 and $800 per month on minimum one-year contracts
  • 04VideaHealth targets rolling out to 3,000 practices within 12 to 14 months of the interview
  • 05The company obtained FDA clearance for its cavity detection algorithm, a key milestone enabling its core SaaS sales motion
  • 06Clinical studies showed the AI reduces missed cavities by 43% and reduces over-diagnosis errors by 15%
  • 07The team stood at 30 people with a goal to reach 60 to 70 by end of 2022
  • 08Florian Hillen founded VideaHealth in late 2018 after AI research at MIT and Harvard
  • 09The company's primary customers are dental service organizations (DSOs) that operate large chains of practices
  • 10Frederic Kerrest, author of Zero to IPO, is an angel investor in VideaHealth

Company Metrics at Time of Interview

MetricValueSource
Revenue (2022)$1.4MFounder interview, May 2022
Total Funding Raised$26MFounder interview, May 2022
Series A Round (2022)$20MFounder interview, May 2022
Seed Round (2019)$5.4MFounder interview, May 2022
Pre-Seed Round (MIT) (2018)$50KFounder interview, May 2022
Team Size (2022)30Founder interview, May 2022
Practices Installed (2022)300+Founder interview, May 2022
Price Per Practice (low end) (2022)$400 per monthFounder interview, May 2022
Price Per Practice (high end) (2022)$800 per monthFounder interview, May 2022
Minimum Contract Length1 yearFounder interview, May 2022
Year Founded2018Founder interview, May 2022
Missed Cavity Reduction (clinical study)43%Founder interview, May 2022
Over-diagnosis Error Reduction (clinical study)15%Founder interview, May 2022

Growth Breakdown

Revenue

Florian Hillen reported $1.4M in revenue as of the interview in May 2022. The company had previously generated revenue from insurance claim adjudication and paid pilots while awaiting FDA clearance, but the focus at interview time had shifted to a repeatable SaaS motion from practice-level subscriptions.

Customers and Practices

VideaHealth had approximately 300 practices already installed on its platform at the time of the interview, with signed contracts covering a path to 3,000 practices across dozens of DSOs. The rollout to those contracted practices was the primary operational focus.

Team

The company had 30 full-time employees at interview time, with a stated goal of reaching 60 to 70 people by the end of 2022. Hiring was split roughly equally between engineering and product on one side and commercial functions on the other.

Funding

VideaHealth raised a $20M Series A led by Spark Capital in May 2022, bringing total funding to over $26M. Prior rounds included a $50K check from MIT, a $5.4M Seed round in September 2019 led by Pillar VC and Zetta Ventures, and a pre-seed round. Frederic Kerrest also participated as an angel investor.

Growth Strategy

FDA Clearance as a Sales Unlock

Obtaining FDA clearance for the cavity detection algorithm was the pivotal event that enabled VideaHealth to pursue its core SaaS sales motion at scale. Prior to clearance, the company was limited in how aggressively it could sell the primary product.

Enterprise DSO Focus

Rather than selling to individual dentists, VideaHealth targets dental service organizations that operate hundreds or thousands of practices. Signing a single DSO can unlock a large number of practice-level subscriptions in one deal.

Insurance Adjudication as a Revenue Bridge

While awaiting FDA approval, the company generated revenue by helping insurance companies automatically adjudicate dental claims, a use case that did not require FDA clearance. This kept the business funded and the team learning without diluting equity.

Clinical Evidence and Regulatory Credibility

Publishing clinical study results showing a 43% reduction in missed cavities and a 15% reduction in over-diagnosis errors gave VideaHealth third-party validation that resonated with enterprise buyers and supported the FDA clearance process.

Customer Success and Rollout Execution

With contracts already signed for up to 3,000 practices, the company's near-term growth lever was execution: deploying the software across contracted sites and investing in customer success to retain and expand those accounts.

Best Quotes

So our Yes, dentists could be our customer and they are, but the major customer really are dental chains. They're called DSOs, dentist service organisations. And so you can imagine that they have actually up to thousand practices or even more, right? And then they employ the dentists. And so those are really our primary customers, so more enterprise level actually.
we just recently announced that we obtained FDA clearance for our cavity detection algorithm. And so there, there was a regulator body, a third body, right? FDA, which doesn't care about revenue or anything. They care about clinical advocacy, right? And so what we paid attention to is that actually we are reducing the errors as well. So in our clinical study, we have shown that we reduce the missed cavities by forty three percent, which is huge, right? But at the same time, we reduced the errors by fifteen percent.
So the price ranges really, know, goes from 400 to $800, so to say, per month Per month? Per Yep. Exactly. But but it is like it's it's it's it's per month, but usually it's longer term contracts, right? We usually have minimum of one year contract or something.
We decide to raise. It's just if you if you build AI products as well as in a regulatory environment, it's just really, really hard to bootstrap. Right? So so that's why we raised in total, like, over 26,000,000 right now by by Spark Capital, Zetaventures, Pillar VC. Phenomenal investors.
The last raise was a 20,000,000 raise by Spark Capital, and that was two months ago.
We have 30 people and now are growing this. Just hired an amazing director of talent actually. It was awesome. So yeah. So we we want to to to get to a healthy sixty, seventy people end of this year.
That honestly, can just do what you really want to do. Like you have a lot when you're early and young, you have like dreams and everyone tells you that that's like too complex. You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't study medicine and computer science and start a company here and so on. And you can just do it. Just because others don't do it doesn't mean you cannot do it.

What Happened Next

This interview captured VideaHealth at a pivotal moment in May 2022, just after closing a $20M Series A and receiving FDA clearance for its core cavity detection algorithm. The figures here reflect what Florian Hillen reported at that time and are a historical snapshot. Visit the VideaHealth company profile on GetLatka for current revenue, team size, and other up-to-date metrics.

View VideaHealth’s current profile and metrics

Full Transcript

Introduction and Background

Nathan Latka

00:00Hey, folks. My guest today is Florian Hillen. He's the founder and CEO of VideaHealth, a dental AI company. Prior to VideaHealth, Florian conducted AI research at the intersection of engineering and social science at MIT's Institute for Data Systems and Society, as well as at Harvard Business School. He also worked with McKinsey and Company and founded NINU, a digital health tech startup. He holds two master's degrees from MIT in computer science and technology policy and

00:21a bachelor's degree in management technology. He completed the first German state exam in medicine as well. Florian, you ready to

Florian Hillen

00:26>> take us to the top?

00:28>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

00:29Are also a dentist?

Florian Hillen

00:32>> I'm not. I'm not. But the first two years of med school were with dentists in Germany. So I had to learn all of that as well.

Nathan Latka

00:39I see. Okay. So that's where like the dentist part of this comes in,

Florian Hillen

00:43>> That's right. That's right. Exactly.

What VideaHealth Does and Who the Customers Are

Nathan Latka

00:44Okay. So what is VideaHealth? When customers pay for Are these dentists that are paying you directly? And if so, what do they get when they pay?

Florian Hillen

00:52>> Yeah. So our Yes, dentists could be our customer and they are, but the major customer really are dental chains. They're called DSOs, dentist service organisations. And so you can imagine that they have actually up to thousand practices or even more, right? And then they employ the dentists. And so those are really our primary customers, so more enterprise level actually. But what do they get? So we are the leading provider of diagnostic AI platform. We call it

01:15>> Videa Assist. And that means every time you, Nathan, go to the dentist and you get your general cleanup and you get x rays, our software takes these x rays in and then diagnosis and treatment plans them for you. And so we ensure that the dentist hygienist, the entire team, you know, doesn't miss any treatments, has a higher accuracy in diagnosis, as well as increases what we call the case acceptance rate. So it means that you as

01:38>> a patient get a second opinion right there from the AI, right? And so with that, we can increase the case acceptance rate for treatments, which on the one side helps you as a patient to get the right treatment earlier. And downstream, you don't have costly procedures like crowns or implants or root canals. And for the patient, it's great. For the dentist, it's great as well because he can do the lucrative treatment now and not maybe

02:02>> in two years.

Nathan Latka

02:04Obviously, every DSO is gonna wanna upsell me, the patient in that dentist chair, right? And if they use Videa and Videa helps them upsell better, every DSO is gonna fall in love with you. In fact, they love you more if you help them upsell more. So, aren't you very incentivized to make sure the dentist can upsell something to the client in the seat? And if so, isn't that not a great experience for the patient?

Florian Hillen

02:29>> So I get your point, but that actually is not what we are seeing in the market really. The problem is more that dentists, especially younger dentists, are primarily going to the DSOs, they just got off dentists who would have a lot of that. So they go to these dental chains, right? Because they cannot afford their own practice. And they actually very insecure at this point to really do the right diagnosis. So what they are doing is

02:51>> actually over diagnosing. And what I mean by this is they are, you and Nathan maybe have five cavities, let's say, and you need like five fillings. They maybe showed you just two and three are skipped. That's literally what we have in the statistics, right? And so those three cavities, they come back and hunt you down the line, but then they are not any more cost effective fillings and small procedures, but then they may become crowns. So

03:12>> what we really try to do is not to, we don't give a treatment recommendation for this Over treatments are more classified as like for this diagnosis, the cavity, you can do a crown or filling. That is in the hands of the dentist, but we want to make sure that they don't miss anything where you could do earlier on a less invasive procedure.

Nathan Latka

03:30Oh, what's going on there, YouTube? Good to see you guys. Now imagine this. You love watching these interviews with SaaS founders, but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2,807 interviews I've done manually. Saves you a lot of time. Well, we've done this. We've built it into the beautiful interface inside of Founderpath. Check this out. I'll show you how you can access this in a second, but you log in, you connect

03:53your Stripe account, you see your valuation real time, you can see what it it changed over the past eighty eight days and even set goals for valuation this year. Now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a SaaS business. So the reason you're gonna see three or four different valuations inside of your Founderpath dashboard, this is all free by the way, is because depending on who's doing the buying of your SaaS company, you're

04:17gonna get a different valuation. A VC is gonna pay a different valuation, Private equity firm is different. If you're gonna 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, 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

04:39is not built off random data. Again, you guys hear these interviews on YouTube. All these datas are built from real time valuation data points founder share with us on the show. So traction 1,200,000 seed round three point seven raise. They sold 22% of their business. Go in here and filter by the event. Maybe you only wanna see companies that have sold the whole business. Well, here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the

05:03multiple. Maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round. We'll 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 dataset of SaaS valuations than what you can get now inside of Founderpath. And we're thrilled to bring it to you. All right, we're gonna go back to the YouTube video here in

05:27a second, but if you wanna check this tool out, if you wanna jump in and sign up, you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link. This link, founderpath.com/products/valuations. Or if you go to founderpath.com and hover over products, click on get your valuation 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. Alright. Let's

05:53jump back into the interview. And that's really the way went to the dentist, I was very frustrating because my aunt is an actual dentist in Ohio, but she's not the dentist I go to. The dentist I went to here in Austin, I sat down in the chair and they go, You need like these seven things done. It's all preventative maintenance and it's gonna cost $5,000. And I'm like, Screw you. I'm not, that's ridiculous. And by the

06:13way, you just lost all my trust. I'm never coming back. They tried to upsell me $5,000. And I know for a fact, because I asked my aunt because I had the pictures. I asked my aunt if this was accurate or not. She's like, don't need all this. So then I lost total trust.

Florian Hillen

06:25>> Yeah. I'm a bit biased. No, but Nathan, that's exactly what we're experiencing a lot as well. And so funny enough, everyone in my team and our company, we actually, we have a company internal link where we analyze for fun, like our x rays before we get any treatments. We actually have a lot of our engineers with exactly your experience and our AI then out of the seven, Mike actually had the same experience than you, they identified

FDA Clearance and Clinical Study Results

Florian Hillen

06:49>> three as being legit and the other four as being just way too early stage that you would do anything about it. And so for us, actually, you're bringing up a really great point because we just recently announced that we obtained FDA clearance for our cavity detection algorithm. And so there, there was a regulator body, a third body, right? FDA, which doesn't care about revenue or anything. They care about clinical advocacy, right? And so what we paid

07:13>> attention to is that actually we are reducing the errors as well. So in our clinical study, we have shown that we reduce the missed cavities by forty three percent, which is huge, right? But at the same time, we reduced the errors by fifteen percent. So that means actually, if your dentist would have used our AI, you wouldn't have seen these seven cavities where So you need all of we actually elevate really the And that's pretty important.

07:35>> Maybe that's my clinical background, but that's actually pretty important to our mission.

Nathan Latka

07:39No, that makes a lot of sense. And so And I think the use case is clear. My audience understands the product clearly. Help me understand pricing. So what do one of these DSOs pay you per month or per year on average?

Pricing Model and Contract Structure

Florian Hillen

07:50>> So the price ranges really, know, goes from 400 to $800, so to say, per month Per month? Per Yep. Exactly. But but it is like it's it's just all pricing. So it's it's it's it's per month, but usually it's longer term contracts, right? We usually have minimum of one year contract or something.

Nathan Latka

08:10And how many practices are on the platform today?

Florian Hillen

08:13>> Well, so we don't disclose complete numbers because we're literally onboarding every day, so I actually wouldn't even know. But like we have, we have right now dozens of DSOs which together accumulate over 3,000 offices.

Nathan Latka

08:24So that's an area practice, right?

Florian Hillen

08:26>> That's right. I use those interchangeably or you can use the patient.

Current Practice Count and Rollout Plans

Nathan Latka

08:30Okay. Okay. So just to be clear, you said each practice you charge between 400 and 800 depending on what software level they want, etcetera. Then you said across a couple dozen DSOs, you've got about 3,000 practices right now and you're onboarding fast.

Florian Hillen

08:44>> Yeah. And then we also have other aspects. Like, we also have partnerships. Like, some of this is not yet public, etcetera, where we are trying to get to to also practices which maybe are not part of a DSO, but they are more like seeing a mom and pop shop. Right?

Nathan Latka

08:59What right trying to now is success you've had already so far. So you've already installed across 3,000 practices and you're expanding rapidly.

Florian Hillen

09:08>> That's right. Yeah, exactly. We are not right now installed in 3,000. We are getting there right now. We are rolling it out to 3,000. That's why we're doing it. And that should be in the next Our goal is to do that in the next twelve months.

Nathan Latka

09:19Okay. But so that's why I ask these questions very specifically, right? So how many are you already in? Or are you guys or you're pre it's by the by the way, Florian, it's fine if you're early.

Florian Hillen

09:29>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

09:29That's fine. You don't have to, like, hide that. It's cool. So you just got clearance. Are you guys pre install you don't have any install installations yet?

Florian Hillen

09:37>> No. We have, like, about, I don't know, three digits or so right now.

Nathan Latka

09:41Oh, okay. Got it. So call between a couple hundred and a thousand, and you're scanning

Florian Hillen

09:44>> Exactly. And now we are trying to get to to 3,000 in the next twelve to fourteen months. That's really awful.

Nathan Latka

09:51And you've already signed those contracts. It's just about getting it installed. Right?

Florian Hillen

09:54>> That's right. It's all rolling out. Exactly. Right. It's like a lot Our focus right now, Nathan, is, you know, customer success and, you know, support, really.

Nathan Latka

10:03Yep. Yep. No. Okay. That makes sense. Alright. Put this on a timeline for me. When did you write the first line of code for this?

Company Timeline and First Line of Code

Florian Hillen

10:09>> Wow. The first line of code was really research to to some extent when when I was at at MIT and Harvard, which is 2016. And then 2018, published a paper about it and I started the company then at the end of twenty eighteen. Now Yeah. I'm free So the end of twenty eighteen, I founded the company. And yeah, that's actually really when we started because in the beginning it was like, to be honest, when we went

10:31>> to the FDA for instance, right, to get this cleared, like they never had any They had no experience with dentists or dentistry whatsoever. They were familiar with like chest x rays and mammography, right? You maybe have heard these algorithms flying around, but they had no clue about dentistry. So there was really a time when you needed to educate them.

Fundraising History and Total Capital Raised

Nathan Latka

10:49Mhmm. Now have you boot have you bootstrapped the company or did you decide to raise?

Florian Hillen

10:53>> We decide to raise. It's just if you if you build AI products as well as in a regulatory environment, it's just really, really hard to bootstrap. Right? So so that's why we raised in total, like, over 26,000,000 right now by by Spark Capital, Zetaventures, Pillar VC. Phenomenal investors.

Nathan Latka

11:09When was the last raise?

Florian Hillen

11:10>> The last raise was a 20,000,000 raise by Spark Capital, and that was two months ago.

Nathan Latka

11:15Okay. Got it. So 20,000,000 just down. What was that? Your a?

Florian Hillen

11:18>> Yeah. That was our series a. Yeah. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

11:20Interesting. And then just fill out that history for us. So when and how much was the the pre seed or the seed?

Florian Hillen

11:25>> So the first check was actually from from MIT directly. So it was like when I found a company. And then and then and then we had a pre seed of a million.

Nathan Latka

11:34What was that size from MIT?

Florian Hillen

11:36>> That was 50,000.

Nathan Latka

11:37That was like Oh, okay.

Florian Hillen

11:38>> No. No. That was like when you were you just graduated from MIT, you had like all these ideas, you know, and you were like, let's go for it and so on.

Nathan Latka

11:46But then then the pre seed was a million, then the seed was 5.4 by Pillar and Zetta, and and then recently the series a for 20,000,000.

11:54Wait. Sorry. When was this million seed?

Florian Hillen

11:57>> That was in well, that was also in also in 2018, and then the the the seed round, the 5,400,000 was in in September 2019.

Nathan Latka

12:08Got it. $5.4 million. Okay. And so where did most of that 5,400,000 go? Was it really towards getting the approval, the FDA approval? The most of

Florian Hillen

12:15>> the C tranche of 5.4 was product development. Exactly building up a team, right? That's like that's really where you build like the early stage team, the product, the FDA approval. Also that was all the time where we did like a lot of paid pilots, testing the product and so on. And now the series A money, the 20,000,000 is really about like, sure, continuously to fast product development. And we have like an entire product roadmap and execute

12:42>> on that. So we absolutely focus on hiring more engineering product design, all across that. But then also, now sustaining, we just talked about the rollout, right? Sustaining our current clients and expanding to other clients, setting up customer success, commercial marketing, etcetera. So it's kind of like very classic stages to some extent.

Series A Valuation Discussion

Nathan Latka

13:00And yeah, speaking of classic, I mean, most folks closing in Series A pre this most recent downturn, right, were selling between sort of 1015% of the business in that raise. Were you guys sort of in that same standard range?

Florian Hillen

13:11>> Yeah, overall. Like we were in the standard range, right? We didn't have evaluation disclosed, but it was very healthy.

Nathan Latka

13:18Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, again, if you're selling 10 to 15%, which is pretty standard at series a and you raise 20,000,000, you're flirting with call a 100 north of a 150,000,000 valuation.

Florian Hillen

13:26>> Yeah. I mean, I I don't comment on it, but, like, you you probably know the the things. It's interesting though, you just commented on this. Right? There are lots of lots of companies right now, which I I I think like we have a very we have a very bright future. So we we race at the right time and and also we have a really great pipeline. So to say we have really high growth right now. So

13:46>> that's awesome. But it is interesting how the VC market crashed just in the last four months. So I'm I'm very curious how this will

Nathan Latka

13:51Yeah. No. Mean, close

Florian Hillen

13:52>> you on this closed,

13:53>> you certainly closed at the right time.

Nathan Latka

13:54Now, obviously, you didn't know the market was gonna crash, so you can consider But it hey, it pays to be lucky sometimes.

Florian Hillen

14:00>> Right, right. I mean, you saw a little bit six months ago, right, with the public markets. But overall

Nathan Latka

14:04Oh, come on. Yeah. But no one- mean, nothing was Washington until really like a month ago. It's real- I mean, anyway, it's more than a month, you know.

Florian Hillen

14:11>> I agree to add there.

Nathan Latka

14:11Yeah. I mean, unless you think you're like super special and saw all this coming before everyone else, you'd be a very rich hedge fund manager right now if you did.

Florian Hillen

14:17>> Yeah. Exactly. No. No. I'm I'm also not that's not my expertise. My expertise is building teams and companies and not so much, you know, like that's that's just one part of the job. Right? That's not all our job.

Nathan Latka

14:26Tell me more about the team today. How many folks are full time?

Team Size and Hiring Plans

Florian Hillen

14:29>> We have 30 people and now are growing this. Just hired an amazing director of talent actually. It was awesome. So yeah. So we we want to to to get to a healthy sixty, seventy people end of this year. So that's our goal. And honestly, is a little bit equally. We just talked about this. A little bit equally split honestly between engineering product and then commercial.

Nathan Latka

14:50Right. Very cool. And then you just mentioned fast growth. I mean, you were talking earlier about number of practices. You said you're in several 100 now, but call it less than a thousand, but you've got contracts up to like 3,000. You're doing the rollout over the next twelve months. But if we take that 300, you know, a couple 100 right now that you're already installed in times your smallest per practice price of $400. Right? You have

15:10bigger ones at 800 per practice. But at your smallest, that would mean you're doing north of $120,000 of MRR today. Is that accurate?

Florian Hillen

15:16>> Yeah. You're really fast. It might be. I mean, wouldn't disclose right now revenue, but like we are in a healthy we are in a healthy series a range. Let me put it this way. You know? And and the fast growth is exactly to that. Right? Because for us, we absolutely incentivize right now to roll this out through as many practices as we can as fast as as we can. Right?

Nathan Latka

15:35Yeah. Sorry. I don't I'm not asking you to share No. What what your actual revenue is right now. I'm just multiplying a majority gave me. So you said 300 practice hundreds of practices, but not a thousand yet. And at least $400 per practice. 400 times three 100 is a $120,000 in MRR at least. So you're above that.

Revenue Discussion and SaaS Motion

Florian Hillen

15:50>> That's around it. That's around it. Cool.

Nathan Latka

15:53And then and then when you say again, I haven't raised recently. Right? So when you say healthy growth for series a, I mean, what are folks looking for right now? Are you talking 300% year over year growth the past twelve months?

Florian Hillen

16:04>> Yeah. I mean, that is difficult because like our You were right, like there, for instance, you know, in the last year or so, eleven months ago, like we were not able to sell so aggressively as we can now because we didn't have the FDA approval. That like is very technical now, but in the end we have a medical device. So there are limitations of how quickly you can sell.

Nathan Latka

16:21Oh, there's physical component to this.

Florian Hillen

16:23>> No, but it's a medical Software as a medical device is actually now a new category. So it's a software only product. But now actually, since a couple of years, there's actually a category at the FDA, which is software as a medical device.

Nathan Latka

16:36Okay. But you don't just to be clear, you don't sell a piece of hardware?

Florian Hillen

16:38>> No. No. But when I say I know what you mean because like medical device is a little bit misleading. Right? But here, I really mean just the algorithm is a medical device.

Nathan Latka

16:48I see. I see. Yeah. No. That makes sense. Exactly.

Florian Hillen

16:50>> Okay. That's quite interesting. It's very new.

Nathan Latka

16:52Well, I mean, so were you basically exact I mean, just to calculate growth, Were you basically pre revenue exactly one year ago? You were still getting approved. Right?

Florian Hillen

16:59>> Yeah, one year ago we had revenue because we actually, we didn't talk about another side of a business, but we also work with insurance companies to automatically adjudicate their claims. And that doesn't require FDA approval so that you can work already. And they are also on the practice side, there are products you can sell without FDA approval, but it's just not our core business. So we did have healthy revenue, but really now it goes into the

17:24>> SaaS repeatable business motion, if you know what I mean, right? And not like, you know, high paid pilots and all of this, right?

Nathan Latka

17:32I mean, but if we just I love how you arbitraged your initial cash flow there with the insurance business, which is great while you're waiting for the approval. But I

Florian Hillen

17:37>> mean, just talking about

Nathan Latka

17:38the pure SaaS motion, a year ago, I mean, you're doing under $20 or $30,000 bucks a month in revenue. I mean, it's peanuts, right?

Florian Hillen

17:44>> Yeah. A year ago we were peanuts in revenue.

Nathan Latka

17:47Yeah. I mean, you're bigger than that now, obviously.

Florian Hillen

17:49>> We are bigger than that now. I mean, we had certainly healthy numbers nonetheless, like absolutely, you know, six, seven digits in terms of like revenue from pilots and all of that. But the thing is I'm discounting this a little bit. Like that helped us a lot in in fundraising and all of that. And even like that was healthy revenue even which which helped us to substantiate our seat round. But for me, I what I really want

18:11>> to get to as much, and this is really what we've hit, you know, now a couple of months ago, is this SaaS revenue, you know? Like not the, hey, the one time big chunks, like, you know, we had pilots of several 100 k, but

18:26>> the SaaS repeatable revenue, this repeatable motion, and that's like that's the golden grail because then you can, like, double down on that, if that makes sense.

Nathan Latka

18:33Of course.

Florian Hillen

18:34>> Everything else is more like almost like service. It's almost feels like more that you've been doing a service company, you know?

Nathan Latka

18:39Yeah. Which is, by way, there's nothing wrong with that to get stuff It helps you preserve equity as a founder. Makes a lot of sense.

Florian Hillen

18:46>> And you can build a great product by the way, because like that's how you learn, right?

Growth Rate and FDA as a Sales Constraint

Nathan Latka

18:50That's right. That's right. Yep. Exactly. In terms of growth, obviously, you your your your your ass is on the line now. Right? Series A raised, you've gotta go. It's there's no, like, slow growth. You can't grow 70% year over year. That would be a failure for what you've raised. You've gotta be way bigger than that. So, I mean, can you get above, you know, $5 or $6,000,000 of ARR this year? Like, how aggressive do you think you can

19:09be this year?

Florian Hillen

19:10>> Yeah. I mean, we are pretty aggressive. I mean, we also have We were very diligent about who we choose as a Series A investor. So we are in a fortunate position to choose a little bit. And we we took Spark Capital because they are phenomenal. And, you know, coming in as Series A, they have built amazing SaaS companies, Kata, etcetera, which I think are great. And and and that's, you know, we we aligned there on our

19:35>> expectations. But that's exactly the growth we are we are streaming towards.

Nathan Latka

19:38Alright. Very cool. Let's wrap up, Florian, with the famous five. Number one, last book that you read.

Florian Hillen

19:44>> Zero to IPO from Frederic Kerrest, who's actually an angel investor in our company.

19:48>> Very funny, Richard.

Famous Five: Books, Mentors, and Tools

Nathan Latka

19:49Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?

Florian Hillen

19:53>> Freddie, actually. He is my mentor and I called him a couple of times actually.

Nathan Latka

19:56Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building Videa?

Florian Hillen

20:02>> It's so it's not the most used tool, but I really like Miro.

Nathan Latka

20:06Miro. Yep.

Florian Hillen

20:07>> I know.

20:09>> The visual app whiteboard.

Nathan Latka

20:10That's right. Number four. How many hours of sleep do get every night?

Florian Hillen

20:16>> Five to six. Six. Six. Alright. And what's sleep? Actually try to really always minimum have more than six because I think sleep is actually I think that's like that's the most important component. I would cut on everything else except sleep.

Nathan Latka

20:28Totally. And what's your situation? Married, single, kids?

Florian Hillen

20:32>> Girlfriend, partner. But Okay. Not married, single kids. Also an entrepreneur. So that's that's fun.

Nathan Latka

20:38And and, Florian, how old are you?

Florian Hillen

20:40>> I'm 29.

20:41>> 29.

Nathan Latka

20:42Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 30 or sorry, when you were

Advice to Younger Self and Closing Thoughts

Florian Hillen

20:49>> That honestly, can just do what you really want to do. Like you have a lot when you're early and young, you have like dreams and everyone tells you that that's like too complex. You shouldn't do that. You shouldn't study medicine and computer science and start a company here and so on. And you can just do it. Just because others don't do it doesn't mean you cannot do it.

Nathan Latka

21:07Guys, videa.ai started off as a research project in school, now scaling nicely. He's raised, just raised a 20,000,000 series A scaling out to what's called DSOs. These are dentist shops basically, right? So they're helping dentists understand, is that cavity, does it need treatment now? Does it not need treatment? They're FDA approved. A lot of AI here, 30 folks on the team scaling nicely there across and already installed several 100 practices. Each practice pays between

21:30400 and $800 a month. They've got a clear path to getting install base up to 3,000 practices here by the end of this year. We'll see what happens. Florian, thanks for taking us to the top.

Florian Hillen

21:38>> Awesome. Thank you so much.

Nathan Latka

21:41One 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

22:06Central. 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

22:28fundraise, a big sale, a big profitability statement or something 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

22:50up 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, but I do it so that we can all learn. We have to counter those people.

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