How Safebooks AI Reached $1.5M ARR with 15 Enterprise Customers in 2026 (Interview with CEO Ahikam Kaufman)

Teaser: Largest Customer and Exit Background

Nathan Latka

00:00I think that was a $360,000,000 acquisition by Intuit, in 2019. Is my timeline right?

Ahikam Kaufman

00:05>> Actually, it was close to $400,000,000.

Nathan Latka

00:07How many millionaires did you make?

Ahikam Kaufman

00:09>> At least 10.

Nathan Latka

00:10Are you comfortable sharing what's the largest company pay you? Do you have any million dollar per year accounts?

Ahikam Kaufman

00:14>> I would say our largest engagement is around $300,000 right now. In q two of twenty fourteen, when we sold the company to Intuit, we were like the largest M and A deal according to The Wall Street Journal by coincidence.

Nathan Latka

00:26Are you comfortable sharing what you personally took home when you exited into it?

Ahikam Kaufman

00:29>> Very large audience. I I would prefer not to share that if that's okay.

Nathan Latka

00:33That's totally okay. How many paying customers are you working with now today at Safebooks?

Ahikam Kaufman

00:37>> So we have about 15 paying customers. You have to understand we are selling powerful data and automation platform for the office of the CFO.

Guest Introduction and Company Overview

Nathan Latka

00:45You got $3,000,000 of extra roaming around. I wanna invest. Hey, folks. My guest today is Ahikam Kaufman. He is a veteran fintech executive who cofounded Chex, which was acquired by Intuit and served an executive at HP and Mercury Interactive. Today, he's building Safebooks AI, which uses agentic revenue integrity to autonomously ensure financial data accuracy for enterprises. Ahikam, you ready to take us to the top?

Ahikam Kaufman

01:09>> Yeah. Hopefully.

What Safebooks AI Sells: The Kindergartner Explanation

Nathan Latka

01:10Alright. That is a mouthful, but it's important work. Give it to me like a kindergartner. What are you selling today?

Ahikam Kaufman

01:15>> What we are basically selling is the ability to understand your financial data across system, validate it, check it, and replace significant manual work, which today is being done by accountants. One of the challenges in the office of the CFO is there is a gap between what an accountant is trained to do and what he needs to do, which is basically check his data across multiple systems in real time across structured and unstructured data. And we now

01:41>> using the benefits and power of AI, we can fully automate that work.

Nathan Latka

01:45Let me give let's play a game here. I'm gonna do old and then you're gonna tell me the new way to do it using your technology. Okay. Old way. I do invoices via bill.com. I have a fractional CFO. I pay 3,000, bucks a month. They go into my QuickBooks at the end of each month. They close everything out. They integrate bill. They integrate my bank accounts, you know, via Plaid or Soft Edge or Teller. They close

02:04the books. That's the old way. The new way is what?

ICP and Enterprise Use Case: Quote to Cash

Ahikam Kaufman

02:07>> Sorry. So that's like a great example, but doesn't fit our ICP. We're catering to large enterprises, companies, public companies who need to execute governance across their data. Though for the most part, they're not using the, the platform you mentioned, and they're using a software for those systems. And the way they do business and transact the business, where we currently focus, which is order to cash and revenue and billing integrity, is very, very cumbersome, manual, and processed

02:35>> through multiple systems like CRM, billing, coding, ERP, and so on.

Nathan Latka

02:39So I did it on purpose. Right? I, can you give me an example just like I did? So instead of using CRM or CPQ, actually tell the story of the actual, like an actual example of what you're replacing.

Ahikam Kaufman

02:48>> Right. So think about a company issuing a quote for a product or service, right, which then translates into a contract. The contract has many terms. It's complex. The contract is not fully accurately captured by the CRM which may lead into leads into billing discrepancies or errors and then there's a human in the loop in finance that manually checks the data across all these systems and across the document, right? That happens when you close the deal. Then

03:18>> maybe you have to charge the customer extra for all kind of extra usage. So he goes back to the document, he changes stuff. Then maybe the sales organization, they changed some of the terms with the customer. So again, the data is wrong. And today, all of that work has to be done by people where they are logging into the disparate systems, checking the data, checking the documents, which is always the source of truth. And we now

03:44>> can replace it with agents who see the data end to end, and it has to be end to end. That's part of our secret sauce. And when they see the data end to end, that they understand it, they know exactly where the discrepancies are and how to remediate it.

Nathan Latka

03:57So this sounds to me more like it is, you know, there's an industry that's well known called quote to cash. You're effectively making that system way more efficient using artificial intelligence and agents.

Target Customer Size and CFO Pain Points

Ahikam Kaufman

04:07>> Yes. We're focusing on billing and revenue integrity, but almost the same use cases exist in procure to pay and in payroll. These are like the the main three engines that leads most of the company's money flow or cash flow. So yeah.

Nathan Latka

04:22Are these companies that need at least, you know, $1,001,000,000 of revenue before they feel this problem and pay you? Or is it bigger, 500,000,000 revenue or more?

Ahikam Kaufman

04:28>> When I'd like to think that companies that starts to exceed like $2.02, $300,000,000 in revenues would significantly feel the pain because they would have to cope with multiple offerings, multiple products, data structure which is very different between one system to another and a lot of transactional volume in their day to day business. So on a monthly, quarterly, actually on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly basis, they have to check verify their revenue data. The reason they need

04:57>> to do it is for three or four very critical reasons. It's customer facing data, right? If you're wrong in your billing, it's not a pleasant experience with your customer. You need to check it for compliance purposes. Then you have to deploy people. Now the industry is facing an accountant shortage. It's not happening in real time. People can make mistake. Even if you offshore this work, we see significant amount of mistakes in each company we're working with.

Pricing and ACV Structure

Ahikam Kaufman

05:22>> And it's all natural in you.

Nathan Latka

05:24I think the product suite now is super clear. Thanks for that. When a customer does sign up and use you, on average, what are they paying you per month or per year to use the technology?

Ahikam Kaufman

05:32>> I'd like to think that the initial use case we start with, it's around the way we kind of sell it, it's the cost of a single resource, a final resource. So it's, I would say it's around like a 100, a $125,000 for the the initial starter use case. And then each use case has its own ROI, so you can justify that and charge more. But what we are now doing, which is pretty amazing, we are now

05:58>> releasing a capability which allow the customer using AI to prompt and configure his own use cases. So the more work the customer can do, IT can do on the platform serving their customers, the more they can benefit from the system without adding additional cost. Because we don't talk by

Nathan Latka

06:14using data. Gut tells me because you're adding so much extra product value that you have upsold customers way above the $125,000 ACV without naming obviously the customer name for confidentiality reasons. Are you comfortable sharing what's the largest company pay you? Do you have any million dollar per year accounts?

Go-to-Market Timeline and First Paying Customer

Ahikam Kaufman

06:29>> You know, we just started to go to market like about less than a year ago. So, but we do have, you know, I would say our largest engagement is around $300,000 right now. Okay. But we do see the potential because they continue again, companies continue to suffer. We are now seeing a significant reduction in stock prices, which will force companies to be more efficient and try to remove the human in the loop as much as possible.

06:55>> So I think

Nathan Latka

06:56So I think I'm just to be clear on the growth story. It sounds like 2025 was your first paying customer. When did you write the first line of code for the platform? What year?

Ahikam Kaufman

07:04>> So we actually started first line of code probably around June, July 2023. But the thing is, is that in order to do what we are doing today, we actually started from the foundation and the foundation was to build a sophisticated proprietary graph database that for the first time connects and links automatically using AI all the various data sources in the office of the CFO. That was never done before. And that allows us to easily alter it

07:32>> because we provide the agents the end to end view on how the transaction behaves across systems and linking it to the source of tools which is always a document.

Funding History and Seed Round

Nathan Latka

07:40How did you fund the business between 2023 and 2025? I know you had obviously a big exit in the past. Did you self fund it or did you boot you know, raise capital?

Ahikam Kaufman

07:48>> We raised a $15,000,000 seed in like two chunks from like six, seven funds, early very early stage fund, but we raised, like, $50,000,000.

Nathan Latka

07:58Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into 550 software companies so far, again at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com, and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply

08:20and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube, and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. We gotta get your backstory here because you're an impressive founder, Ahikam. I mean, you've done this before going all the way back to 2014 and, ScanModal, but I think the big one that most people will know you by will be the Czech story. I think that was a $360,000,000 acquisition by Intuit,

Prior Company: Check and the Intuit Acquisition

Nathan Latka

08:41in 2019. Is my timeline right?

Ahikam Kaufman

08:43>> Actually, it was close to $400,000,000, but, yeah, that was yeah. And funny enough, in Q2 of twenty fourteen, when we sold the company to Intuit, we were like the largest M and A deal according to The Wall Street Journal by coincidence, but at that time, these type of deals were pretty big or considered considered pretty pretty big. Big.

Nathan Latka

09:02You spent a big chunk of your life on this, launched in 2007, you're you're in it for twelve, thirteen years. Give me some context on that business. I did you raise capital there as well, or did you bootstrap?

Ahikam Kaufman

09:10>> So, you know, at Chek, we were trying to actually, it's interesting to share. So at Czech we wanted to help people organize their personal data, right? And we started that in 2007. And then we realized we decided to focus on finance, personal financial management data. And in order to do personal financial management data at the time, Plaid did not exist. So we decided to create our own data foundation and our own links to the banks in

09:36>> order to be in a position where whatever product we build on top of it, it will lay on a very structured set of data.

Nathan Latka

09:45I'm just to be clear on that, just to make an analogy. This was before Plaid and SaltEdge and Teller, these iPass tools.

Ahikam Kaufman

09:51>> Totally. You had a company then called the Yodlee and maybe another company, and but we decided to create our own data foundation, which is by the way was adopted by Intuit and using Intuit that same technology is using Intuit is using today for their bank fees. So we decided to create our own, and that was a tough decision. Why? Because we knew that consumers eventually will have to rely on our data for their personal financial management

10:16>> decisions, and that data has to be super reliable. At that time we had a competitor called Mint, which was a very popular mobile application, but they bought their data. So they relied on a third party data infrastructure again before the plot days, was less reliable causing a lot of mistakes. But so we spent like a year in the garage building our own data foundation. And only once we did that, we started to build the application on

10:41>> top that would serve you with the value you need like you know seeing all your data from all your banks and credit cards and being able then to see all kind of anomalies in your data or fees or charges like that. And then on top of that we build a payment platform allowing you to pay your bills from these connections. Because we own the connection or the bank feed, we could do like a two way interaction

11:04>> with the bank or the credit card and actually use that use that connection in order to trigger the payment. So the investment in data which caused us to launch the product later than our competitors, but launch a more robust product. That what also inspired us when we when we started to work on Safebooks. Because the idea is that you can reliably bring or create a financial data lake, which creates like kind of a unified data set

11:33>> for all the financial systems and link the data together. Because in finance it's all about the linking. You want to make sure that the quote is connected to the opportunity in Salesforce, which connects to the right set of invoices or billing, how you bill the customer. And only when you do that, you can actually ask the data questions and check the data. So that's what we did back at the day at InCheck. And yeah, that's what

11:56>> works for us very well.

Nathan Latka

11:57And I believe you chose to go down the venture route, right? I think you raised about 50,000,000 at that business before exiting. Is that right?

Ahikam Kaufman

12:03>> So, yes. So to your point, we raised the initial seed in 2007 from a group of private investors. And then we raised our A from a VC called P and we raised our B from a fund called Morgan Tyler. Now it's called Canva, and we raised our Series C from Nello Ventures. Doug Carlisle at the time was a partner, he retired since then, and he decided to fund us and gave us $25,000,000 in December 2013, and

12:34>> we paid it back in June 2014.

Nathan Latka

12:36Good return for you're his best friend now, I imagine.

Ahikam Kaufman

12:38>> He retired since then, but I think I put in my LinkedIn, they published a post, this was like one of their highest IRR because you know, when you return, when you do like three or four x, which that's what they did over the course of like six to eight months. It's like yeah.

Nathan Latka

12:54How did you personally manage your own dilution at that business? Are you comfortable sharing how much you owned before you exited it?

Ahikam Kaufman

12:59>> I think we were two founders and each of us had like, you know, between five to 10% of the company. You know, I think our employees also did very well. And, you know, I think it's all about how do you distribute the equity with your employees. By the way, one of the things you learn when you sell a company is that at some point in time it becomes too late. You can't reverse these decisions. So you

13:25>> have from the get go, you have to decide how you're going to compensate in your founding team your staff member so when the time comes they benefit from the results. You can't repair it afterwards. So we had that and again we raised like $60,000,000 of which back then was a lot of money. So we got diluted but that's fine because I we you know you really what you're really passionate about is building working with a great

Managing Dilution and Making Employees Millionaires

Ahikam Kaufman

13:48>> team but you need obviously to fund and the the more team members you add at that time obviously you couldn't do vibe coding they had to hire people to write code. So the more the more team you have, it's it's easier to get things done for the most part. And, obviously, also to market the platform and so on and so forth.

Nathan Latka

14:06I come I'm asking that these next couple of questions not because I, you know, I want you to necessarily brag about it or I'm interested in your personal finances, but I think what you did is something that other founders should aspire to in terms of, you know, not always raising at the highest valuation, managing dilution, taking care of your team and employees at the end. Are you comfortable sharing at exit? How many millionaires did you make?

Ahikam Kaufman

14:26>> I'd like to, you know, we we were not like a super large team or probably about 80 people at the time, but I'd like to think at least 10, at least 10, like the founding team members became it was like a life, definitely a life changing event. By the way, one one thing to keep in mind when you sell a company, smart buyers and Intuit is definitely a smart buyer. And I have all the appreciation in

14:50>> the world for this company for many, many reasons. And you know, the way they build products and the way they execute is second to none in the B2C and the B2SMB market. But the acquirer will appropriate, let's say 90% of the fund to the shareholders of the company, founders and employees included, and then typically 10% for retention. And we also took that retention chart, which at the time was an additional $25,000,000 and we fully deployed it

15:21>> across the board to people telling them the following, listen, we can actually we have an opportunity now to remediate you so you will feel if you even if you are not part of the founding team, you've done a great job over the last year because you only joined a year ago, we give you that money, that allocation of the retention because of the future work you're going to do for the combined business. So we were able

15:42>> to actually make additional team members very positively impacted by the transaction, you know, allowing them to focus on not worrying about the future, to focus about the integration, focus about the new products and offerings that we're going to create and and that worked very well for us actually. Most of them are stayed until this very day.

Nathan Latka

16:02That's amazing to hear. Love hearing that. And look, again, you don't have to answer this. A personal question, but I do think it helps founders understand when there is a company that sells for $360,000,000, and they read that in a headline today, and the company's raised 50,000,000. You're always wondering, I wonder what the founder made. Are you comfortable sharing what you personally took home when you exited into it?

Ahikam Kaufman

16:19>> I actually you have a lot very large audience, so I I I would prefer not to share that if that's okay.

Nathan Latka

16:26That's totally okay.

Ahikam Kaufman

16:27>> How do know I have a large audience? You you listen to a couple?

16:29>> I I I listen to many of your podcasts, but I think, you know, I know your content reaches a lot of people. I heard it from many people. So yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:38That's fair enough. I won't push you.

Ahikam Kaufman

16:40>> I think your passion about SaaS and hopefully now AI is like has created a dent in the in the market. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

16:47Well, that's very kind of you. I think you're probably giving me too much credit. But the reason I bring all that up is you were able to raise that round for your new company in 2023 because you created a great outcome for investors. You're a proven founder. You're a proven entrepreneur. You've now closed that seed round, total $15,000,000. You mentioned your first paying customer was in 2025. How many paying customers are you working with now today

17:08at Safebooks?

Ahikam Kaufman

17:09>> So we have about 15 paying customers. You have to understand that in the we'll look, we're selling, I think, a super powerful data and automation platform for the office of the CFO. And sometimes again, each company has its own processes to make sure that the AI doesn't like go crazy, right? Although I think what we do in AI is very, very different than the models out there. We don't have any hallucinations. Our accuracy rate is 98%.

17:39>> We actually develop tools allowing our customers to run their own UATs to understand the, the level of qualities that we provide.

Current ARR and Customer Count at Safebooks AI

Nathan Latka

17:47But, of course, is you setting up a private Rag database for each co like a data lake for each customer that signs up with you and are just talking to that Rag DB to do a little Right. Bit

Ahikam Kaufman

17:56>> That's exactly what we do. And on top of that, we augment the results with rules that allow us to make sure that we understand that the results are on track and if something is not on track because all the enterprise data is very structured I can understand the outcome based on the various data points I'm looking at. So I can understand for example that let's say I'm pulling a data point from a contract and I now

18:22>> compare it to your billing and compare it to the LP I can see in various places how that data was captured and whether that amount make sense or not. So whatever the AI is pulling out and decides whether there is like an issue here that needs to be, I can check it with other sources of data in the enterprise. So because the data is structured, I can augment the results with rules and checkpoints to make sure

18:46>> that it resonates or it doesn't resonate.

Nathan Latka

18:48Have you crossed a million dollars of ARR at this point?

Ahikam Kaufman

18:50>> Yeah, we crossed a million dollars of ARR. We're about at like 1.5. Again, we we just started to sell last year. Every engagement is kind of significant. Significant. And, yeah, we would like to go from here.

2026 Revenue Goal and Market Outlook

Nathan Latka

19:03What is your prediction? What would you like to end 2026 at in terms of ARR?

Ahikam Kaufman

19:07>> I think 2026 is going to be the the year for AI in the enterprise. I think we can triple our business by the end Get that

19:14>> get up to 4.5 of ARR.

Competitive Moat: Proprietary Graph Database

Nathan Latka

19:15Hey. As we wrap up here, I know you're short on time. You know, public markets literally today are getting crushed, in terms of the SaaS companies. When you're building a tool like this, you know, if people don't know you well I mean, I know you at this point, but if they didn't know you're a successful entrepreneur, you've in tech a long time, they might go, he's just building another AI wrapper.

19:30Directly from your mouth, what is your deepest moat that would prevent Claude, Code, or any of these other tools from launching something that would, you know, cause your customers to churn?

Ahikam Kaufman

19:38>> Right. So we actually, this is like feedback at the time we heard from one of the largest VC fund on the planet where they said that in order to allow AI to run successfully in the enterprise, you have to provide them with reliable data. We have created unique technology exactly like I explained, like creating the foundation of data. So we created a unique we built this unique graph technology allowing us to pull all the data from

20:06>> the various sources and normalize the data in a way that allows AI to operate across all the data. You can't just one AI on each and every system in the office of the CFO. You have to give it the context of the end to end data from all the systems that participate in the business process. As again, as I said, whether it's like the quoting system, the CRM, the billing, the ERP, the banks, whatever. Only when

20:29>> you give the AI the full context and you await for him the full context, he can provide. And that's why you can't build it with any other tool.

Nathan Latka

20:36What I'm hearing you say is you have real process IP, you know, the ETL process transform load. When you then normalize the dataset, only then can you start to talk to it and get real value from it. However, we're seeing, you know, folks like DeepMind at Google put out things like AlphaFold, which has a very, I mean, a very complex thing to sort of, you know, codify and decodify protein strands. Why couldn't they apply that very

20:57complex sort of structure to, to what you've done and, you know, replicate the ETL process?

Ahikam Kaufman

21:02>> Yeah. I think uniquely in finance, you have to be able to create an auditory, which is a virtual for, I would say since accounting existed for five hundred years, that was a virtual term. Meaning, how can you show the start and the end of each transaction? Now we created that. That capability requires you to develop unique technology or ETL capabilities that we created with the graph. So this is not about the systems that can see multiple

21:30>> data sources in there. And you have to create that, you have to link the data and provide a level of accuracy to Corporate Finance which has to deal with again leakage issue, compliance issues, and also the visibility to the auditor that no other approach can provide.

Nathan Latka

21:45Which was approved by John Smith and sort of this, what you're saying is like this spider web is actually your IP, your ability to tell the story.

Audit Trail and Enterprise Trust

Ahikam Kaufman

21:52>> Exactly. But more than that, in the fa, in the world of the office of the CFO, you have to be able to demonstrate that you can link the data. What I mean by that, you have to provide the customer the audit trail to make sure, because let's say you have the most sophisticated models that looks across various data structures and give you an insight. You cannot predict if on the next anomaly you will be able to

22:17>> identify the same insight. Because we connect the data, we have the we can we can actually show the predictability or we can show the, the quality of the insights that we're going to provide because the data is linked. So you have, you have to first physically link the data to make the customer and also his audit comfortable that we see everything linked.

Nathan Latka

22:38Icom, you got you got $3,000,000 of extra rooming around. I wanna invest.

Ahikam Kaufman

22:42>> Let's talk after this call.

Nathan Latka

22:43You have my No.

22:44I love it. It's tough. Right? It's when I when you push on these things, start to understand who's the rapper and who's got Real IP. I mean, it's clear I mean, this is

Ahikam Kaufman

22:51>> It's real IP. It's unique technology. We are actually doing additional crazy things that I didn't talk about because we have to keep some of the moat under the hood for now. But it's really crazy. And I think for the first time, we're solving a very complex problem in the office of the CFO which is the complexity of the data across system and the in the natural gap between the ability of accountant to deal with data and

23:14>> the complexity of the data. Because accountants need to make accounting decisions not data decisions.

Nathan Latka

23:18Ahikam, on that note, if people wanna follow your story here in twenty twenty six, twenty twenty seven, where's the best place for them to find you online?

Where to Follow Ahikam Kaufman

Ahikam Kaufman

23:24>> Ahikam at Safebooks AI or LinkedIn. Ahikam Kaufman Safebooks.

Nathan Latka

23:28Guys, booking, billing, and revenue all align. This guy knows what he's doing. You better pay attention. Sold his first company for $3.60, almost $400,000,000 to Intuit. Now he's at it again. He's got first line of code built for safebooks.ai in 2023. Raised a small 4,000,000 round. 2024 kept growing, raised a little more. In 2025, closed their $15,000,000 seed round and launched their first paying customer. We love celebrating paying customers. Now today, 15 paying customers passed $1,500,000

23:54of ARR. We're recording in February 2026. His goal over the next eleven months, break $4,500,000 of ARR. He believes he can do it. He's got the cash. He's got the vision. Graph technology, again, agentic revenue, integrity, big customers paying $300,000 per year. Check it out at Safebooks AI. Ahikam, thanks for taking us to the top.

Ahikam Kaufman

24:10>> Thank you so much for having me today.

Nathan Latka

24:12You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.