How Zeliot Connected Services Pvt Ltd CEO Anup Naik grew Zeliot Connected Services Pvt Ltd to $3.9M revenue and 100 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is a new nike along with his partners co-founded zeliott in april 2018. he comes with experience of working with the founder very closely in his previous slim stint as an iot startup called cookie he's been fairly successful in embedding his philosophy of running a startup with the hybrid thought process i.e bringing revenue from customers by delivering value from day one and also look to raise money from a good investor but the money raised should be mainly used for bringing a new innovative product to market zealiot offers connected mobility platform to enterprises and oems and noop ready to take the top yes absolutely nathan good to go all right so what kinds of oems and enterprises are paying for your technology today so nathan as i mean you already read out connected mobility platform is something which vehicles use right it could be any kind of vehicles it could be a car or a bus or a truck or a two-wheeler whatever it is right so the typical oems who pay for us are the ones who manufacture this the enterprises segment falls under the people who use it for their own business let's say logistic companies right logistics companies have the entire business model revolves around vehicles so those are the typical enterprises who pay us for using our software and on the oem side who manufacture these vehicles let's say the likes of royal enfield for bikes right indian major indian two-wheeler famous globally as well maruti suzuki you might have heard of it right so these kind of companies who uh you know kind of typically use our connected mobility platform as part of their core offering got it so vehicle manufacturers pay for your technology so they can add connective mobility to their vehicles yes they can and what do they pay you per month on average to use your technology so that is something which differs from a customer to customer there is no standard rates right it depends on the kind of model that they they work with us typical sas costing is somewhere around a dollar or so but you can't you know really hold on to that dollar or so per what per vehicle per month per month right okay but now that differs very very uh significantly based on the kind of customers that we onboard and the kind of offerings that they want to offer to their customers so nuke do they keep paying a dollar even after they manufactured it if that car is still driving or they only pay a dollar the month they manufacture the car absolutely the subscription starts the day the vehicle goes to the customer right and they pay for the life of the vehicle i see okay do they pay for the life up front do they pay each month they pay each month i think as i said it depends it really depends on the kind of engagement that we enter into typically they pay each month as and when the vehicle is used and how many cars today are out there on the roads using your oem technology or your mobility technology so see we we come from india right zelia predominantly operates in india where connected mobility is yet to take off so currently roughly about a hundred thousand devices are using this right but the actual significant numbers will only uh you know rise as we go ahead this next couple of years is very very very important for connected mobility and so just to be clear you have with zelia installed a hundred thousand vehicles on the road today see hundred thousand vehicles are using our software and you and your chart and you charge a dollar per vehicle per month so you're doing about a hundred thousand dollars in revenue per month yes the average revenue run rate has been close to a hundred thousand dollars per month oh what do you mean the average over what period of time so see this is a subscription revenue right so when we started the last year we started roughly you know some sixty seventy thousand dollars mark and by end of the year we were able to you know close it at about a little over a hundred thousand dollars a month so just to be clear in december of 2021 this last december you hit about a hundred thousand a month in revenue so yes again a small change indian no financial year is march 2021 2022 rather right so we operate from april to march 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 it 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 valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this 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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 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 a 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 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 so you just hit a hundred thousand dollars a month in revenue up from 60 000 a month a year ago yeah kind of yes why kind of why not yes so the exact figures vary right that's the reason kind of let's say it could be somewhere around forty five thousand forty eight thousand right today it could be somewhere 100 and three hundred and four thousand so i'm not giving you exact figures i'm giving you the average because well it's not an average you're still giving me a range right so you did somewhere around forty eight thousand dollars a month in revenue a year ago now you're over a hundred thousand so more than more than a hundred percent year year-over-year growth have you done this bootstrapped or did you raise capital so we very very recently closed uh on our street around with bosch in march till then we were bootstrapped we have raised some debt funding debt funding of close to 150 000 all right so recently we closed uh in a kind of a seed round with robert bosch how much did you raise so around 500 000 dollars and most folks in their seat round are selling 10 to 20 percent of the business what valuation did you raise at so we sold around 14 of the business okay around 14 so that means your valuation was around 4.5 million five yes 4.5 million correct 4.5 okay got it and why'd you decide to raise equity it sounds like you already are familiar with debt why not keep using debt okay so one of the predominant reasons the kind of company from whom we raised the funding right we being mobility startup we being you know autonomous vehicle related startup bosch plays a significant role in the roadmap of the company so bosch is a global player probably the best known name in the automotive industry right having them on your capital having them as your partners gives you many much more strategic value than just money that's the reason the valuation is a little lesser than probably what we would have anticipated but it's a fair bargain because the kind of the thought process and the strategic value boss brings to the table and how and when you raise the debt financing you raised that last year uh over the period of three years okay so when did you launch the company what year 2018 april when we launched right we have taken small amount of that every time uh whenever we needed it right we have a partner company called i triangle who you know kind of supplies the telematics device or the iot devices so kind of we raised entire debt from them we did not go outside of them what collateral are they lending against the physical installation of the oem hardware or your software revenue no no there is no collateral there is an interest rate that we pay them because the money has been borrowed in small instances or small let's say intervals every time that we have never given them any...