How Surfe Hit $15M ARR with 10,000 Paying Customers on Under $10M Raised (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO David Chevalier)

$15M ARR: The First Public Revenue Reveal

David Chevalier

00:00So we've built our own data platform. We've invested heavily into data enrichment, data analysis.

Nathan Latka

00:06>> And how many paying customers are you now serving today?

David Chevalier

00:10So we are serving 50,000 users. That's more than 10,000 paying customers.

Nathan Latka

00:15>> Why do you need to, you know, sell, you know, 10,000,000 worth of your business'equity?

David Chevalier

00:19Buying data from other providers is very costly. We now handle 50,000,000 data points, like, per per year. If I

Nathan Latka

00:29>> take 10,000 customers even at that low ACV of 1,500 per year, David, can I multiply those? I mean, that will put you at 15,000,000 of ARR today.

David Chevalier

00:38Yeah. You're roughly at that size. Yes.

Nathan Latka

00:40>> So is this an exclusive? It's the first time you're sharing your revenue? Now you're gonna teach us how you did it. Right?

David Chevalier

00:45Exactly. Exactly.

Meet David Chevalier, Co-Founder and CEO of Surfe

Nathan Latka

00:48>> Hey, folks. My guest today is David Chevalier. He's the cofounder and CEO of Surfe, originally Leadjet, known for founder led sales content for scaling the company from founder led into a repeatable sales motion. They are connected at revenue workspace, browser extension, etcetera, that connects to your CRM enabling one click contact capture, waterfall enrichment and conversation logging. David, you're ready to take us to top?

David Chevalier

01:12Yes. Happy to be here, Nathan. It's been really a pleasure. Six years ago when we started, I can remember your website, GetLatka, where got my first information about companies on revenue size, which we use for outreach, Founder outreach. So very excited to be here and happy to meet you.

Nathan Latka

01:33>> Well, love hearing that. Well, yeah, so tell us, did I do a good job summarizing, what are you guys selling today? What's the core product?

Core Product: From CRM Sync to Waterfall Enrichment

David Chevalier

01:39Six years ago, we started as a classic SaaS. We basically connected your CRM with a lot of other tools, LinkedIn, first and foremost. We went into really synchronization of of those platforms. Four years ago we really did a change, so we've built our own data platform. We've invested heavily into data enrichment, data analyzers as well recently, which we can talk later about. What we call a waterfall and what is famous now in the market, we started

02:09actually to build that three and a half years ago for one of our biggest clients, which is Google. And they had, of course, a few different data sources, but they didn't know how to stack them efficiently, and we helped them.

Nathan Latka

02:23>> And how many paying customers are you now serving today?

10,000 Paying Customers and 50,000 Seats

David Chevalier

02:27So we are serving 50,000 users. That's more than 10,000 paying customers.

Nathan Latka

02:33>> Do you consider that a good conversion rate from free to paid?

David Chevalier

02:35For us, customers are companies, and users are users. So we started with a lot of self-service. So we have a lot of smaller accounts, which are under, like, 10 licenses, mostly five licensers in a self-service. But now we have a fiftyfifty percent, so 50% sales led. And here we focus more on mid sized companies, which is normally for us an ARR size of 25, 30 ks, and plus.

Nathan Latka

03:04>> So just to be clear, you have 10,000 paying customers'logos that use 50,000 seats, an average of five seats per paying customer.

David Chevalier

03:11Exactly. Exactly. Yes.

Nathan Latka

03:13>> And the average that they're paying you is about 20,000 per year, or that's that's the new average, not the historical average?

Self-Serve vs Sales-Led ACV and the $15M Math

David Chevalier

03:19That's the new average. That's what we are after as the sales team. On the smaller side, as I said, it's like two and half, three licenses, so we are really talking about on a self-service more of one and a half k, something like this.

Nathan Latka

03:33>> If I take 10,000 customers even at that low ACV of 1,500 per year, David, can I multiply those? Mean, that would put you at 15,000,000 of ARR today.

David Chevalier

03:42Yeah. Roughly at that size. Yes.

Nathan Latka

03:44>> That's exciting, man. Congrats.

David Chevalier

03:47Thank you so much. I knew that this question may come because, of course, as I said at the beginning, I looked up on GetLatka the different revenue sizes, and I always wondered where do you get the revenue information because we have been quite silent about our revenue.

Nathan Latka

04:03>> So this is an exclusive? It's the first time you're sharing your revenue? Now you're going to teach us how you did it, right?

David Chevalier

04:08In France because in France more and more companies are building in public. We try to do that as well, but on the financials we have been always very

04:17>> quiet.

Nathan Latka

04:18Well, now we know. So teach us. You launched in 2020. How did you get your first 100 customers?

First 100 Customers: Bootstrap and CRM Partnerships

David Chevalier

04:24So it was all partnerships. We connected, as I said, with CRMs like HubSpot, Pipedrive, and we reached out quite early because we are Bootstrap founders. We Bootstrap for the first two years. Later took a bitter a bit of revenue, so a pre series a seat and a pre series a. But Bootstrap founders, so we needed to find revenue very effectively, and we thought, okay. Let's see if we can grow with our partners. So what we've actually

Hacking HubSpot's North Star Metric

David Chevalier

04:52done is we looked at our partners like HubSpot and Pipedrive and why are they growing, what is their North Star metric, let's say. And then we try to find a product angle how we can improve that North Star metric. So let's say, for instance, HubSpot. HubSpot's pricing plans, they work according to the number of users. So if you have more users, let's say, in your marketing hub in HubSpot, you need to pay up a higher price.

05:19And we came to them and said, hey, listen. When people use Surfe plus HubSpot from day one, you will have faster upsells because people had more contacts in a shorter time. The first 1,000,000 we've reached in one and a half years, so six years. That was quite fast, six years ago. Now I know when you're in AI native companies, you probably may reach that faster, but but big then, it it was pretty big for us, and

05:46we've reached that solely with partnerships without a sales team.

Nathan Latka

05:50>> Yeah. HubSpot looks you can go, David, why would I promote your little software startup? Right? We're a big we can just do this ourselves. Like, how did you get their attention so they would actually drive you? You were driving them customers, obviously, but how did you get the flywheel to work the other way as well, them drive you customers?

David Chevalier

06:06I would say we are not designers ourselves, but we are design lovers. So and for us, as we started with an extension, our UI UX product needed to be excellent so that people, when they start to explore the software, they have the moment right after thirty seconds. That's why our first headline was connect the CRM with the other tools like LinkedIn in, I think, sixty seconds it was back then. And this was really product led growth,

06:33a lot of the product led growth playbook which we applied here, and we've been quickly climbing up in the marketplace. So HubSpot Marketplace, Pipedrive Marketplaces, we are the number one apps here. And this in combination, so the product led growth story and climbing up in the marketplace listing, plus then the more strategic approach to a partnership, these two combined were a big success for our first growth years.

Nathan Latka

07:04>> So, couple of follow-up questions on that. I pulled these up online. So, did you launch was your first product actually this Chrome extension?

Chrome Extension, Marketplace Rankings, and First $1M

David Chevalier

07:11Yes, exactly. Chrome extension was the first product. Very niche, and then we grew out of the Chrome extension, now have our own web platform, now have an API, have an MCP.

Nathan Latka

07:23>> So 40,000 users, actually a good rating for the App Store, and then you also said you expanded this into the HubSpot AppExchange. Here, you've got 12,000 installs, also a very healthy rating. You're saying these two things, like, these were the major things driving your first million, 2,000,000 of revenue?

David Chevalier

07:38Yeah. Exactly. Exactly.

Nathan Latka

07:40>> Interesting. Okay. Take us from there. You mentioned you raised, I think when was your first outside capital and how much?

The $10M Raise: Seed and Pre-Series A

David Chevalier

07:46So we founded 2020, then probably it was 2223 where we raised a seed round of roughly 5,000,000, and then we've raised another pre series a. It was an expansion, basically, with our investors of another five. So total capital of 10,000,000.

Nathan Latka

08:05>> And why why I mean, this to me looks like something that doesn't cost a lot of money to build. It's more about art and taste and making sure your data is clean and accurate. Why do you need to, you know, sell, you know, 10,000,000 worth of your business'equity?

David Chevalier

08:17So, yeah, we are aggregating different data providers. So first of all, getting into the market and buying data from other providers is very costly. We now handle 50,000,000. We process 50,000,000 data points like per per year, so that means enrichment in our own product UI for our users. That means enrichment for our partners. So we are, for instance, behind a couple of folks, AI SDR, as I said, Pipedrive in CRM enrichment. We are now one of

Why the Money Went Into Data Quality

David Chevalier

08:50the partners of HubSpot's prospecting agent next to ZoomInfo and Apollo, which are massive brands. So for us to be the third speaks for the quality, and that's where we have invested most of the money in the quality of the data by aggregating 15 resources now on the data enrichment side, on the search side as well where we have several resources. Now offices in Paris, Barcelona which we opened this year, and New York which we opened as

09:17well. So yeah, there we, of course, need some money to grow for go to market as well, and that's where we have been investing it mostly.

Nathan Latka

09:26>> Did all that $10,000,000 go into the business, or did you offer some liquidity for yourself and early employees?

David Chevalier

09:32Yes. So we have early employees who hold a good amount of stock, which is above the average, I would say, for European companies and gets closer to American companies.

Nathan Latka

09:44>> My point being is when you raise the series a of $10,000,000, you could have said, hey. I want 1,000,000 of this to come to David personally as a secondary. What you're saying is you didn't do any secondary.

David Chevalier

09:53Didn't do any secondaries. It's also not that common with European investors. Yeah. We have that debate all the time. I think now being a founder six years in, we never took a secondary, but eventually in the future.

Nathan Latka

10:06>> Yeah. Hey. We you know, Founderpath is my fund. It's my main business. If you guys want $34,000,000, we'll allow use of funds. You guys take it as secondary, and then you slowly, from the company profits, pay back over four years, just putting it putting it in your ear.

Growth Story: $4.5M in 2024 to $9M in 2025 to $15M

David Chevalier

10:20Yes. I I I will definitely recognize that. For us, at the moment, we grow the business very healthy. So the question is if we if we wanna take a next round.

Nathan Latka

10:30>> Fill in the growth story for us. We know 1,500,000 of ARR in the first year, that's 2021. We know you're around $15,000,000 today, but fill in the middle. When did you break $5,000,000 of ARR?

David Chevalier

10:41That was we had a party, Christmas party, where we reached 4.5, which was the year before last year. So it was '24, right? Yes, end of twenty Last year's growth was our API has a big part of the growth story. We developed this API, I think, a bit ahead of the market, at least in our sales intelligence market. We developed it three years ago, three and a half years ago, and it's now at it's very robust.

11:12It's like, for high scale companies, and that's where we have invested most of the money, and that's where we've been seeing growth last year, especially and that API growth is from from partners. We enabled for our users that they can buy credits and product.

Nathan Latka

11:27>> So what did you finish December 2025 with? Do remember?

David Chevalier

11:32Last year was $99,000,000 roughly, bit bit more than that.

Nathan Latka

11:37>> Okay. So, I mean, you're on I mean, it's impressive. I mean, you're basically growing a 100% year over year in a very competitive space.

David Chevalier

11:44Yes. It is, as I said, mostly because of the API motion plus the recent track record on the enterprise side. Yeah. As I said, we have Google as a client. We recently signed Elastic as a client, Elasticsearch, which is pretty big name for us. So, yeah, I think these two two motions, and we have 20 people now on the sales team.

Nathan Latka

12:09>> How many are total at your team today? How many are full time?

David Chevalier

12:11Ah, 70 roughly. 65 to 70.

Nathan Latka

12:14>> Okay. 20 in sales. Do they carry a quota or no?

David Chevalier

12:17They carry quota roughly seven to 800 k, yeah, per year.

Inside the API Built Three Years Ahead of the Market

Nathan Latka

12:22>> Interesting. I wanna go deeper on something that you've done ahead of the market, which is the API you keep referencing. I want people to visually see it. So here it is. This is off of your LinkedIn. Walk us through you said this is where most of your investment is happening. Why is this expensive to build?

David Chevalier

12:36I mean, first of all, you need to understand what you need to pull from providers. What are the individual providers strengths in terms of coverage, in terms of accuracy, in terms of industry specific markets. You also need to look at the input data. So is the input data rich enough or do we need to do some pre enrichment? Then we do some pre enrichment until we have a rich enough input data to then go to our

13:05providers and then basically take the first provider who is the best for your particular search. So that's the waterfall behind our API endpoints for enrichment. That's not easy to build and maintain, especially the big scale where you also look at speed. Speed is very critical for these partners because, of course, when they offer something like this in their own product, you don't want to have your users to complain and support because of the loading times.

Nathan Latka

13:37>> You're doing 15,000,000 a year of revenue today. What percent of that revenue would you say actually comes from usage happening via people using it like we're seeing on the screen?

A Third of Revenue From API, Credits, and MCP

David Chevalier

13:46It's now roughly a third, and that combines API, that combines credits in product, and recently, MCP. MCP is very new. It's better, so we don't have yet much revenue on the MCP side, but we see some customers and partners using the MCP. For instance, Dust is one of the companies who get companies towards AI readiness. They have been using our MCP, and companies who are using Dust are using our MCP, but it's very new stuff. It's

14:21very much embedded.

Nathan Latka

14:23>> Since these, like, API consumption models are growing so fast, David, in terms of how users are actually using you, why do you still have per user per month, like, per seat pricing on your website?

David Chevalier

14:33Yes. Because as I said, still a good portion of our revenue is in the license component. Mhmm. So that's per per per seat per month. We will we're adding also some some usage based credits on top of that. We are supporting sales teams which, like, operates with 1,300 reps. It's not that the reps will fade away from one day to another. They have certain workflows, and these certain workflows are still captured in our product UI, which

Per-Seat Pricing and the $1M-a-Year Customer

David Chevalier

15:05they are dependent on. Some of them, sure, use Clued and get to a certain level with it, but then often they see when you are working on a table Claude breaks when you have more than 500 lines in a table, for instance. So that's why they need to have still a platform where it just can go deeper and they can have more enhancement. They can run 5,000 contacts through that, for instance. Mhmm. Mhmm. So that's that's

15:34why we we we still see this high usage on the on the product UI side.

Nathan Latka

15:38>> What's your largest customer pay you per year today, including seat based plus credit upgrades?

David Chevalier

15:43Yeah. So they pay more than a million per year.

Nathan Latka

15:46>> Oh, wow. So you have a million per year customer already. That's impressive.

David Chevalier

15:49Yeah. Yeah. Wow. That's That's that's the biggest. And we we had a long time one outlier, one big customer, and and then over the years now we get we get several. So we have now a good amount of customers who are above 100 k and another customer which is also shy of 1,000,000.

Nathan Latka

16:11>> There must be something in the water in Paris. Know, there's another successful company. You know, Ben and Greg and and their co founder launched Full and Rich, which feels like it's in the same space. Why didn't you guys did you guys know each other? Why didn't you guys just partner up?

David Chevalier

16:21We know each other. We respect each other. We sometimes go against each other as well in certain deals, but, yeah, very respectful. I think the whole

Nathan Latka

16:31>> That that's what I don't understand, by way. Sorry to kick off, but, I just like, if I'm ZoomInfo or somebody, right, and I'm saying, okay, there's David at Surfe. There's Ben and Greg at Fullenrich. Right? They say they have better quality data, but ultimately, you're all buying the same data. It's just you're running different workflows on the data. That's my understanding. Right? Someone listening today, if they want the best data and they just wanna pay for

16:51>> one platform, what is the actual alpha? Like, why should they pick you guys versus Full Enrich versus ZoomInfo directly?

Surfe vs Full Enrich vs ZoomInfo: Where the Alpha Is

David Chevalier

16:58Yeah. So first of all, I would always go for a waterfall provider. When we came into the market and we built the product not because we wanted to build this product or this company, we built it because we had our own pain point. And for us, it was tough to find the right data provider and the right tool or product to sync our different flows, so we've built it ourselves, and we said we want to bring

17:24transparency into this market.

Nathan Latka

17:25>> Do you do you list anywhere, by the way? Do you list anywhere all the providers that you ingest and run waterfall on?

David Chevalier

17:31Yeah. In our product. You see the product UI. So if you enrich something, you see all the different providers where we go through each provider one by one if the first fails.

Nathan Latka

17:40>> Can you name a few?

David Chevalier

17:41So Forager, Prospeo are one of those, yeah, which we which we work on.

Nathan Latka

17:48>> Why don't those guys like, guess, what I'm saying is why don't aren't those guys in a better position to build what you guys have since they own the data directly? Like, that's where I'm trying to figure out where the alpha comes in here.

David Chevalier

17:58Where the alpha really comes from is in the the data model. So it's about, as I said before, look at the input data, what needs to be done in terms of pre enrichment, look at the output, what you want to have, which provider do you need to call first for having the most successful output. All these things come together doing live benchmarking. Every month, we do that, and we check, okay, one of the providers are not

18:24performing, and then it gets out of our waterfall. I mean, we're six years old, so we have been seeing a lot of sales workflow data from the CRMs, from our providers going through our system. So we know what closes and and what what things or why things are not closing. And this data we've kind of cleaned, ingested into our models, and this is what we call now recommendation. To be meaningful, you need to do all this

18:52pre work and data analysis and ingestion into your model to generate an alpha.

Nathan Latka

18:58>> And I think this visual does a really good job of it. Right? David is saying we ingest a lot of good data, but it's all mixed up. We have a really good process to sort it, arrange it, present it to you visually in a meaningful way, and then build a big beautiful house, which is equivalent to your ARR growing.

Raw Stones Into a Katana: The Data Team's Edge

David Chevalier

19:11Yes. So for instance, our data team often described it as, you know, we get a lot of big raw stones. They get delivered to us. And over a lot of different processes, we make a katana swirl out of it. So it's really about this part, and we have a big data team who does that daily, and that's really where you generate alpha at the end of the day.

Lemlist at $50M and the Ecosystem Partnership

Nathan Latka

19:35>> Yeah. Was just with Shaul and that whole team of at Lemlist. You they just broke $50,000,000 of ARR. I imagine you guys have coffee together. If he says, listen, David, we gotta get together, man. 50,000,000 of ARR plus 15,000,000 of ARR is 75,000,000 plus we can plug you into all of our other products. What is there a deal that's gonna go down or what?

David Chevalier

19:52We have a partnership already. So that you basically, yeah, can add contacts to a to a lam less cadence. And of course, we exchange regularly about the market and how we see the market. We have similar customers. We started, everyone has the same kind of French logos as customers, as testimonials because we supported each other. And I think the ecosystem was feeding from each other and helping, especially in the early days, and that's what still is

20:24is today. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

20:25>> I love that. I love that. Well, hey. Heck of a story. Excited to see what you do next. David, if people wanna follow you online, where can they find you?

David Chevalier

20:32LinkedIn. Few conferences now in in The US. We will be at the HubSpot Unbound, probably Dreamforce, and the Clay Sculpt. So if you're one of those conferences, let's let's meet up.

Nathan Latka

20:47>> Guys, there we have it. Surfe launched in twenty twenty twenty twenty as a a Chrome extension, eventually building direct partnerships with Pipedrive and HubSpot got them their first 100 customers and 1,500,000 of ARR. Since then, they've gone to 4,500,000 at 2024, celebrated at the Christmas party that year, which is why David remembers. Doubled to 9,000,000 of ARR last year, now already at 15,000,000 of ARR this year, on track to double again in a very competitive space.

21:13>> They've done this in a very capital efficient way, under $10,000,000 raised against 15,000,000 of ARR. That's the definition of being creative and scaling with their team of 70 people. 20 in sales, they already have customers paying a million dollars per year, which is pretty impressive. Again, waterfall enrichment at scale, new MCP, new API pricing model coming up soon, but catch him at an event. And, David, thank you for taking us to the top.

David Chevalier

21:37Thank you so much. This was really lovely. I must say you're very sharp in your questions, and that was really lovely. So thank you for inviting me.