How Speedsize Reached $6M ARR with 200 Customers in 2025 (Interview with Co-Founder Vlad Malanin)

Cold Open: Closest to Running Out of Money

Nathan Latka

00:00But you obviously went through a crazy story here. What's the closest you came to running out of money?

Vlad Malanin

00:04>> We were less than two months of the runaway. And some people were drafted to the army. There was the ongoing war in Ukraine where our r and d states, so we were panicking. The first decision we made is even before that happens, we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders. Like, enables your built in mechanism of survival because you know that, okay, they may have no salary in two months, but we do not have

00:29>> it already today.

Nathan Latka

00:30You're doing about $6,000,000 of revenue. If someone came and offered you a four x multiple today, so $24,000,000 all cash upfront to sell the business, do you take the deal?

Vlad Malanin

00:38>> 100% no. It's definitely worth way more than that.

Guest Introduction: Vlad Malanin, Co-Founder and CTO of Speedsize

Nathan Latka

00:41Hey, folks. My guest today is Vlad Malinen. He's an MD, PhD, and is a surgeon turned AI scientist and CTO, co founder of Speed Size today, which is an award winning startup transforming media optimization, think metadata, for 200 plus global brands. He blends tech, neuroscience, and real world impact together and is a Forbes technology council member shaping the future of AI. Vlad, you ready to take us to the top?

Vlad Malanin

01:06>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

01:07Alright. So give me a sense

What Speedsize Does: AI Media Compression

Nathan Latka

01:08or two what Speedsize does.

Vlad Malanin

01:12>> So speed size basically does something that is in one or sentence, do AI media compression, even one sentence.

Nathan Latka

01:23Yep. AI media compression, guys, transit that for those of you that are not neuroscientists. We all visit websites with ecommerce brands. More more now than ever, these ecommerce brands are not using just still images. They're using rotating, you know, you know, animated graphics for products or things that change colors when people scroll or things like that. It appears Vlad is helping make sure those pages continue to load fast. Vlad, is that accurate?

Vlad Malanin

01:47>> Yeah. It is. Because the more we live, the bigger data becomes, especially the modern rich media websites with a lot of videos, and as you mentioned, all those three sixty animations, hero videos, product videos, all that. It's not only about the fact of using that kind of media per se, it's also the fact that you need to maintain the quality, and brands care about that a lot.

Nathan Latka

02:14In terms of compression, let's jump into a real example here. You have some really big brands listed on your website. Everyone knows sort of hookah running shoes, or let's do Crocs. Everybody knows Crocs. Before we dive into the Crocs website, so you can show us sort of how they use you, how many customers are you working with today? Just total count.

Customer Count and Target Markets

Vlad Malanin

02:31>> Yeah. We have around 200 customers. And most of them, as you can imagine, they're fashion brands, clothing and apparel, this kind of industry, however, not limited. We also work with travel industry, we work with jewelry, we work with marketplaces. So all that kind of, I would say, general e commerce with a focus on fashion brands mostly.

Live Demo: We Shoes and Speedsize in Action

Nathan Latka

02:57Okay, so let's go to Crocs now. Where can I go on the Crocs website to see the thing that you're powering?

Vlad Malanin

03:03>> So Crocs specifically, don't work with their main location, so with Crocs specifically, we work with the Israel subdivision, their official retailer We Shoes.

03:16>> We Shoes is the biggest shoes retail Can

Nathan Latka

03:19you spell it?

Vlad Malanin

03:21>> Just we shoes. Eo. Al.

03:27>> Yeah. It should be like this.

Nathan Latka

03:29Okay.

Vlad Malanin

03:31>> This is one of the biggest, if not the biggest websites that sell shoes, and they use us pretty much across everything. So you picked a great

Nathan Latka

03:41So is this you? Right here, is this you?

Vlad Malanin

03:43>> Yeah. This is all us.

Nathan Latka

03:45You Okay. Pick let's dive into this example here. Like, are are they controlling all this metadata through your platform or just the image over here on the right?

Vlad Malanin

03:52>> No. So they control only the image data, so we do not work with the business data like the description, although we can possibly, and it might be a pivot in the future. So the idea is that we do the AI image analysis, so we know exactly what's on the image, and this is a part of our technology because we need to know, we need to emulate the human brain and how it perceives visual information on on

04:21>> the screen.

Team Size and Engineering Breakdown

Nathan Latka

04:22Mhmm. Tell me more about your team. You come from a deep technology background. How many people are full time today, and how many are engineers?

Vlad Malanin

04:30>> Yeah. So we had I would say that it's not the standard yet natural for me, especially, to handle the team. So two years ago, we used to be 50 people, and we decided to focus and make a leaner team. So now we are around twenty, twenty five people and a couple of contractors. And the tech subdivision out of that is around 70%. So we are mostly tech people right now. And before that when we used to

05:06>> have 50, it was less than 50% of technical people.

Pricing Model and Average Contract Value

Nathan Latka

05:10Alright, so 25 on the team today, about sixteen, seventeen of them are engineers writing real code. Explain to us how customers pay you. Right? You guys have a lot of engineers. I'm sure you have some business and marketing folks. What does your pricing look like today?

Vlad Malanin

05:25>> Yeah. So we do not work with SMBs. So our main audience is the mid markets and small enterprises and ideally big enterprises. So we do have some big brands yet not that one Fortune 100. Well, besides Philip Morris International, I guess, that lies into that category. But other than that, Googles of the world are not yet working with us. So the pricing works very simple. We have two units. One is the amount of data that you

05:59>> need to transfer in gigabytes and the amount of assets, original assets. Not all that hidden charges with transformations and all the other words that people do not understand. Just the amount of SKUs that you have on your products, you can estimate how much you need to use. That's it. The average

06:22>> customer pays us lower end 5 figures a year. It's annual contracts, so as simple as that.

Nathan Latka

06:34Can you so just to be when you say low 5 figures, is it fair to say an average contract price might be $50,000 per year?

Vlad Malanin

06:42>> A little bit lower. So 50,000 is like lower tier mid market, like to general ones. So those which are closer to the SMB category, they pay around probably 10 to 20 k a year, and mid market is probably 50 to 100 k, and small enterprises is $6.07 figures, pretty much.

Nathan Latka

07:06And don't name the obvious, don't name the customer, but what does the largest customer pay you today per year?

Vlad Malanin

07:12>> So that's the 7 figures, lower end of 7 figures, and that's our biggest values that we have.

Nathan Latka

07:22Okay. So it's fair to say you have one customer paying you more than $100,000 per year today?

Vlad Malanin

07:27>> No. We have several. Several customers paying more than that.

Nathan Latka

07:30When will you have your first million dollar per year customer?

Vlad Malanin

07:33>> So we do. The thing is that the way how we work is we rely to land and expense strategy, and customers are generally growing. And the beauty of speed size is that once they start using speed size, they open the doors for using richer media. So we have plenty of cases. Wishes is, by the way, one of them, the one that we reviewed earlier. They started using video, and you could see when you open the website,

08:02>> you could see that they're using videos. They couldn't afford this. Their general Shopify

Nathan Latka

08:06Wait. Wait. Wait. Hold on. Let me get a visual up while you tell this story. Sorry. I don't see tell me where to go to see the video. Like, you're talking about this up here at the top?

Vlad Malanin

08:15>> Yeah. You you have this one. Apparently, have also product videos. I cannot name, like, exact products what they have right now, but they started using videos. Well, you can see some reviews, whatever.

08:27>> Before that, they didn't have anything. And we have plenty of brands that use video widely on the websites, so almost every PDP, product detail page, has a video like this.

Nathan Latka

08:39So So you make this happen?

Vlad Malanin

08:41>> Yes. So what they what they what they had, and this is a general problem of Shopify specifically, Shopify limits your videos to full HD. You cannot have a video which is high resolution than that. Also, they kill the quality, they don't have the adaptive delivery, and just the overall performance is is just terrible. So when you want to have this kind of experience with full screen blowing away videos, you cannot do anything with Shopify at all.

Sales Structure and the Pivot to Partnerships

Vlad Malanin

09:13>> So with Speedsize, this is the moment where you can actually start using videos like this. Wow. And that's that's pretty much the bottleneck that we solve for such customers. They have no other options. They cannot solve this with Shopify or any other two.

Nathan Latka

09:29Mhmm. Okay. So tell me, you're mostly engineers, but you're selling expensive, you know, on average $30,000 ACV kind of contracts. How is your sales team structured? What do you set their quota at?

Vlad Malanin

09:42>> So we made a pivot, and we decided instead of heavily relying on direct sales, we decided to go focused on partnerships. So we are fully based on AWS and we are a premium partner of AWS. And AWS, since they do not have native image and video compression, AWS offers Speedsize as a solution for image and video compression as well. And we have a variety of partnerships.

10:19>> We have the agencies, which are promoting speed size, and we

Nathan Latka

10:22are Rod, really quick. Sorry. On a on AWS, I brought it up, but it looks like you don't have any reviews here, which signals to me that very few people are using it. Is this the right page for the partnership?

Vlad Malanin

10:32>> Yeah. It's it's the right it's the right page, and it's very natural for AWS Marketplace because this is just the generic requirements to become a partner. And in this case, the you cannot buy us like this. You cannot just go to the marketplace and buy us. There is no real way to buy this. So it will still redirect you.

Nathan Latka

10:54Okay. Are there any other top growth channels besides Shopify and AWS?

AWS Partnership and IBM Cloud Expansion

Vlad Malanin

11:00>> Yes. So we are right now being adopted by IBM Cloud as well, and it's early in the process as IBM also is restructuring their cloud services. They are changing their CDN and they want to become big because they kind of lost the race early in the days, even though they're a So huge

11:27>> it also looks promising. And our idea is that we want to be in the places, in the cloud suppliers, who lack the native image and video compression and delivery. So think of AWS, of course, Google Clouds, Microsoft Azure, because other suppliers like Cloudflare, Akamai already have the built in one, which is not great, but for most of the customers that works.

Revenue History: $400K to $6M ARR

Nathan Latka

11:57Mhmm. Now, Vlad, you mentioned earlier a $30,000 average price point, and you mentioned 200 customers. Can I multiply those together? That would put you about $6,000,000 of revenue today.

Vlad Malanin

12:09>> Yeah. For the contract, it's roughly that. I cannot give you the exact numbers. So rough roughly around that numbers.

Nathan Latka

12:16Okay. And if you're roughly around 6,000,000 of ARR today, what were you exactly one year ago in 2024?

Vlad Malanin

12:22>> So we started our sales in 2022, early twenty twenty two, and we were doubling the ARR since then. We had one year when we did a lot of major stuff that we decided to do. Not easy decisions because these are decisions which are red flags for the VCs. However, we decided not to deal with VCs at that point. And in 2024, we only had like 10% ARR growth. However, what we did is that we cut all

12:58>> our expenses twice and the customer acquisition costs as well in half. And we optimized everything, and we decided that we do not want to raise money from VCs, and that's because company is doing really, really well. Technology is great, and we are really good with the cash flow. Customers love us. We have a very low churn rate, and we also have a lot of growth within the customers because customers grow with us, and we also open

13:34>> them the possibilities to use more of speed sets.

Nathan Latka

13:39Within the Vlad, audience will have my audience might have some troubles trying to follow percentages. It's just it's just hard. Can you give us the real number? Your first you launched in 2022. What was your total first year sales? Do you remember?

Vlad Malanin

13:49>> Yeah. So first year sales were around like 400 k from what I remember. And so we were growing at around 3 mil we were stalling. And that year, it's from 2023 to 2024. And we also decided to optimize everything because, well, I I'm originally Ukrainian. My cofounder is Israeli. Can imagine the war started in 2022 in Ukraine, then in 2023 in Israel. So that was Yep. The that was the annoyingly trag tragicomical, I would say. Mhmm.

Nathan Latka

14:30You know, and and I hope everyone's okay, obviously. Power team. I mean, I work with a lot of Ukrainian founders who are just crushing it. Same thing with ex IDF folks from Israel. Just incredible genes and incredible blood, incredible vision, incredible founders. So to round out that story, first year sales in 2022 was $400,000 And you said you doubled in 2023 to 800,000 of ARR?

Vlad Malanin

14:54>> A little bit different. So we, 2023, we were around 1.5 mil or something like this because we started the sales somewhere late twenty twenty one, early twenty twenty two, right right before the war started in Ukraine. So we technically had some sales 2021.

Nathan Latka

15:12So Interesting. But $0.00 to $1,500,000 of ARR in about eighteen months is obviously still impressive growth. So the war starts. You're having to manage multiple priorities at this time. 2023 is 1,500,000, and then 2024, you said it was 3,000,000?

Vlad Malanin

15:30>> Something around that. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:32And you've about doubled this year at around 6,000,000 now today as we're recording.

Vlad Malanin

15:36>> Yeah. Something around that. In that kind

Nathan Latka

15:38in that that range. And you've done all this, have you bootstrapped or raised money?

Fundraising: $5M Raised, 70% Equity Retained

Vlad Malanin

15:43>> We did raise money, so we raised less what we have in ARR right now. And so we are still very effective. So me and my co founder, we have more than 70% of the equity. So we are technically pre Series A, and we didn't know whether we want to raise the Series

Nathan Latka

16:07Mhmm. I guess how much how much total have you raised between pre seed, seed, etcetera?

Vlad Malanin

16:13>> So around 5,000,000.

Nathan Latka

16:15Around 5,000,000. And what year did you raise that money?

Vlad Malanin

16:19>> So the last big round was 2023, I guess.

Nathan Latka

16:25And how much was that one?

Vlad Malanin

16:27>> So, in 2023, I guess, we raised around 2 mil, and in 2022, we raised around 3 mil, And the rest, like, all the minor investments were before that.

Nathan Latka

16:40Do you regret raising $5,000,000?

Vlad Malanin

16:45>> I wouldn't say that I regret, maybe in a way in a way that I regret in in the decisions which were forced with that kind of, fundraising. So, you know, we we got the regular VC fever, the way how they force you to spend more money and just to chase the growth, which is reasonable. However, it's very easy to make mistakes, and what we learned the hard way is that VCs are always less active in our

17:19>> case, based on our experience, than they claim to be. And in the end of the day, they care less about money that they spend on you, and they care more about the financial profits. And even if you have hard times like wartime, whatever, they're not the first people who will come to help you.

Nathan Latka

17:39Mhmm. Mhmm. Well, sounds like you're in a very sustainable place today. 6,000,000 of ARR with 25 on the team is very healthy revenue per employee. And did I hear you correctly earlier, Vlad? You said you're cash flow positive today?

Vlad Malanin

17:52>> Well, technically, we've flown that, so not to be truly positive in this case, but technically, yeah. So it's our decision whether we want to be profitable or not. I would I would put it that way.

Nathan Latka

18:07So, I mean, let me decode that. Are you spending money on variable expenses right now, like paid advertising, which you could shut off at any time to be profitable? Is that what you're saying?

Vlad Malanin

18:15>> Yeah. Pretty much that.

Nathan Latka

18:17Okay. How much are you spending on paid ads right now across all channels?

Vlad Malanin

18:21>> I don't have this information in front of me, to be honest.

Nathan Latka

18:25Okay. Is it meaningful, more than $5 a month?

Vlad Malanin

18:28>> I guess so, yeah. I don't really know, to be honest. Mostly focus on the other channels. I would say that's the biggest profits that were brought by partnerships. So this were the biggest the biggest ones that that we did.

Nathan Latka

18:49So tell me more about that. The reason I'm gonna dig here is because, you know, I interview thousands of founders, and I plot all the growth tactics they give me here on my screen. And one of them that they bring up, obviously, are app exchanges and partnerships. But many of them wait until they have scale because partnerships usually take more time, and they're very they can be expensive to execute if you're doing custom integrations. You actually

19:08chose to do this, though, scaling early on. It was one of the first growth tactics you used. Tell me more about what those partnership agreements look like and why you decided to go after those first.

Vlad Malanin

19:18>> So partnerships agreements are usually actually not that easy to do, especially with big organizations like AWS. There's a lot of bureaucracy, there's a lot of limitation, and there's a lot of frustration. So when when you hear and that marketplace is is one of them. So you cannot be a premium partner unless you have the marketplace entity. However, because we do not work with SMBs like this, and they simply do not buy the product like this on

19:53>> the marketplace. It's intended to be for the SMBs. And enterprise, they couldn't care less about the marketplaces. They want the fine tailored deals. They are very aggressive in terms of the negotiations and all that. So but it it pays off. It pays off 100%. Took us almost two years to fully enroll the proper partnerships with AWS.

AI and the Future of Media Optimization

Nathan Latka

20:19Let's talk a little bit about AI before we wrap up. We've got about a minute and a half, two minutes left here. You're obviously very technology forward. Right? Deep technological roots, great engineer. So just so just to be clear, people still have to input some kind of image into your system, and then you're making it better. I guess, why do you think that's the future? Won't people just create images from scratch using Nano Banana and other

20:40technologies?

Vlad Malanin

20:42>> We're not making images better. The thing is that every other solution makes them worse. The idea of Speedsize is not to enhance the images, the idea is to make sure that the original colors, details, the original clarity and quality of the images remains the same as the original ones. So most of our customers, they have beautiful photoshoot quality, so that's not an issue. But all the rest of the competitors, they lose the colors, they lose the

21:09>> details, images become blurry and everything, and it's not something that it looks on the screen of the website visitors.

Nathan Latka

21:19Understood. Vlad, as we we wrap up here, excited to see what you do with the business going forward. You're in control, You said you and your co founder own 70%. You're doing about $6,000,000 of revenue. If someone came and offered you a four x multiple today, so $24,000,000 all cash front to sell the business, do you take the deal?

Vlad Malanin

21:36>> 100% not.

21:40>> Not because it's a bad deal and just like an advice for that kind of technologist, this is like a very poor multiplier even today. But also that we see the potential, we see how the traction goes, how we grow the customers and everything. So it's definitely worth way more than that.

Acquisition Offer Rejected: Worth Far More Than 4x

Nathan Latka

22:00And let's let's ask a negative question then before we wrap. You obviously went through a crazy story here. What's the closest you came to running out of money?

Vlad Malanin

22:09>> I think the closest one when we were less than two months of the runaway.

Nathan Latka

22:16What year was that, and why was cash so low? What happened?

Vlad Malanin

22:20>> That was the year 2023, and that that's after the war started in Israel. And we were panicking because we we actually had an investment that year to grow the sales team in Israel. Sales team in Israel takes high salaries, in a way closer to The US salaries, not the European ones. And some people were drafted to the army, and there was the ongoing war in Ukraine where our R and D stayed, so we were panicking in

22:52>> a way, but eventually everything went well.

Nathan Latka

22:56And how so just to confirm, how low did your cash get?

Vlad Malanin

23:00>> So that's probably less than $300,000.

Nathan Latka

23:05And what were you feeling at the time? Did you know you were gonna come out of it? Were you actually nervous? Were you having conversations about shutting business down?

Vlad Malanin

23:12>> The first decision we made is even before that happens, we stopped all the salaries to both of the founders. I know that's nothing with given our salaries. We're very modest, and I had the salary lower than our developers actually. But this is the first action. And that kind of enables your built in mechanism of survival, because you know that, okay, they may have no salary in two months, but we do not have it already today. So

23:42>> it's time to act.

Nathan Latka

23:44Yep. Well, hey, incredible story, Vlad. We are obviously rooting for you. Just wrapping up here with a couple questions. How old are you?

Vlad Malanin

23:50>> I'm 35.

Nathan Latka

23:5135. And situation, married, single, kids?

Vlad Malanin

23:54>> Yeah. I'm married. I have two beautiful kids, six and seven years old, son and daughter.

Nathan Latka

23:59And where are you based today? Where are you personally building the company?

Vlad Malanin

24:03>> In New York.

Nathan Latka

24:04In New York. Alright.

Vlad Malanin

24:05>> Ukraine, Odessa, Ukraine, beautiful sea on the on the seashore of the Black Sea. And right now, I'm pursuing my future in New York.

Nathan Latka

24:14Alright. Well, very good, Vlad. As we wrap up here, if people wanna find you online, where's the best place for them to look?

Vlad Malanin

24:20>> I'm doing the detox from the social network, so the best one is the board in LinkedIn. Other than that, the speedsize.com with the blog where I occasionally do some articles.

Nathan Latka

24:32Guys, there you have it. Vlad launched speedsize.com in 2022, did $400,000 of sales his first year, more than tripled that to 1,500,000 in 2023. Today in 2025, he's doing $6,000,000 of revenue with 25 full time employees, and he's done it in a very capital efficient way. Just $5,000,000 raised to grow to 6,000,000 of ARR. That's capital efficient. Now he's gone through some hard times. Cash balance got as low as two months of runway. That was $300,000

Wrap-Up: Personal Background and Where to Find Vlad

Nathan Latka

24:59in the bank as the Ukraine war started. Him and his cofounder still managed to get through it. Today, they still retain 70% of the business as they look to scale, helping d two c brands keep their image quality extremely high on their website with fast loading times and even going deeper, enabling them to put sophisticated product videos together to increase conversion rates and increase revenue. That's why he's got 200 paying customers, many of which pay more

25:21than a $100,000 per year. Vlad, thank you for taking us to the top.

Vlad Malanin

25:25>> Thank you. Well, a pleasure.