How TitanX Reached $9.7M ARR and a $92M Valuation in 2026 (Interview with Founder and CEO Joey Gilkey)

Opening Teaser: IP Cost and Revenue Today

Nathan Latka

00:00What did you spend on the IP?

Joey Gilkey

00:01>> $1,000,200 upfront, $800

Nathan Latka

00:03seller note. What's revenue today at Titan X?

Joey Gilkey

00:05>> Today we're sitting at the time of recording this, we're at 9,700,000 ARR.

Nathan Latka

00:10What's your largest customer pay you per year today?

Joey Gilkey

00:12>> One just expanded to $4.00 6 ARR, three year contract.

Nathan Latka

00:16Oh, wow. Okay. So it's a $1,200,000 contract. Did you get creative on this acquisition? Was it 10,000,000 acquisition, a million upfront, how'd you structure it?

Joey Gilkey

00:22>> Yeah. It was a $13,000,000 acquisition. We put 7,000,000 upfront. We went growth equity. So we raised 27,000,000 and then 10,000,000 went in our pocket as secondary cash.

Introducing Joey Gilkey and TitanX

Nathan Latka

00:31Xuma, if Henry shucked some info came and offered you $200,000,000 of all cash today to sell the company, do you take it? Hey, folks. My guest today is Joey Gilkey. He's a serial entrepreneur and the founder of TitanX, a sales intelligence platform that created the phone intent category. He famously bet his entire net worth on the company, shutting down three other cash flowing businesses to focus on a proprietary model that predicts who will actually answer your

00:52cold call. Under his leadership, it's grown to millions of revenue, they just recently raised a series a. Joey, you ready to take us to the top?

Joey Gilkey

00:58>> Let's do it, brother.

Joey's Background in Enterprise Sales

Nathan Latka

00:59Alright. So tell me first, how did you get into this space? Are you an ex sales guy, or when did you launch?

Joey Gilkey

01:04>> Yeah, man. I've been in the enterprise sales world my whole career, so I started off in the fortune world.

Nathan Latka

01:08Okay. So tell me about that. When did you acquire that piece of IP? What year?

Acquiring the Phone Intent IP in August 2023

Joey Gilkey

01:12>> That was August 2023, and I acquired it for a different reason than it turned into. So I seem like a brilliant I'm more just like a brilliant idiot. Thought how I was gonna use it was I was gonna build it for my my fractional business. It was gonna be the moat around that services company. We started using it in like a licensing model at the fractional company, and then I realized pretty quickly that it was it

01:35>> was like dark magic that was heavily expensive and very slow. And if I can get my hands on it, can throw money in R and D and optimize it. Plus I knew where a lot of the bodies lived when it comes to where does unique telco data live and fraud detection data, all that kind of stuff.

Nathan Latka

01:50So why what did you spend on the IP to do? You know, was it millions of dollars or

Joey Gilkey

01:53>> 1,000,000 on the dot. Cash? $200 upfront, $800 seller. Nope. So I turned $200,000 into what is currently valued at a 100,000,000. Yeah.

Nathan Latka

02:04Okay. Well, and now we have to like, I gotta figure out where to jump around. I'm curious about so many things. So I guess why did you feel like you needed to buy the IP versus just build it from scratch? Where are the million bucks just bought you so much time?

Joey Gilkey

02:15>> It bought me a ton of time for one. For two, a lot of my competition again, the goal is to to both build the moat and pull the drawbridge up from competition. So a lot of folks in my space were starting to to look at it, see it, use it a little bit, and there were some big behemoth competitors like Memory Blue, abstract marketing and things of that nature on the like outsourced sales development world that

Why Buy IP Instead of Building From Scratch

Joey Gilkey

02:38>> were starting to their hands on it. I was like, if I'm gonna protect this and have a unique value prop, I gotta own it. And I'm gonna dictate who can use it.

Nathan Latka

02:45What what I mean, I interview a lot of folks that tell me they have proprietary data and then when you dig under the hood, all they're doing is buying other people's data. They're running an ETL process on it and then selling it back to customers. What was the actual proprietary dataset here? Was it a process or an actual dataset?

Joey Gilkey

02:58>> It is both. Right? So and it's been built upon dramatically at this point. So when I bought it, it was a tech enabled service. So there's a lot of like technology enabling humans in the loop to power it. And so for us, it was more about how do we make this scalable without having a deprecation of the quality of the outcome. So if anything, it's actually gotten faster, it's gotten cheaper. It's we can do it at

03:18>> scale at this point and it's more effective in terms of the data we're able to find now.

What Makes the Data Actually Proprietary

Nathan Latka

03:24So fast forward to today, you've grown this thing, you bought it for 200 k cash plus 800 sellers note. What's revenue today at Titan X?

Joey Gilkey

03:30>> Titan X is sitting we just did a small acquisition. We paid low 8 figures for that. And that is in the dialer space. So we acquired a company called Frontspin at the time of this going out that will be very public. So Frontspin was built for high velocity dialing. Not a very sound business, but an incredibly sound and scalable technology can scale to a million users. And we've been power users of Frontspin in a lot of

03:54>> different ways. It actually powered the call center in the early days. That's how we know so much about it. It excels in call deliverability. So anyways, today we're sitting at the time of recording this, we're in early twenty six, we're at 9,700,000 ARR.

Nathan Latka

04:06That's post acquisition. Right?

Joey Gilkey

04:08>> Post acquisition, they're contributing about 2,000,000. So for me, excuse me, well, old school. Titan X is sitting at about $7.7.0.2, 7.4 and front spends at 2.1.

Nathan Latka

04:20And did you get creative on this acquisition? If it's, know, what is it 10,000,000 acquisition, a million upfront or how do you structure it?

Joey Gilkey

04:25>> It was a $13,000,000 acquisition. We put 7,000,000 up front. We went growth equity. So we raised 27,000,000, 10 of which is primary. So that's for growth, a little bit more than 10. 7,000,000 went towards the acquiring Frontspin, 6,000,000 of that from Frontspin CEO got rolled in, and then 10,000,000 went in our pocket as secondary cash.

Nathan Latka

04:46Because I wanna first off, it's very rare to find a founder that's as transparent as Joey, so I'm gonna really push on this. One of the things that I see founders, they're just making a mistake right now is, you know, when you go out and raise external capital, people say, Nathan, you just hate VC. That's not the that's not true. What what I actually am saying is if you're gonna go give up control, take cash as

05:02well. Don't give up control and cash. So like Joey gave up some control here with the series a, but he also got paid. He got his first bite. I mean, I don't know Joey what your personal net worth is, but I imagine 10,000,000 secondary is meaningful for you.

Joey Gilkey

05:13>> Yeah. I mean, it it certainly adds some padding. I mean, I've done well in my career, but it I did bet my net worth on this So I'm basically just replenishing a lot of capital at this point but yeah, it helped.

Frontspin Acquisition and Combined ARR

Nathan Latka

05:23So let me ask you a question, you raised the 27,000,000 at what valuation?

Joey Gilkey

05:27>> Just under 100, 90 something, 92. But since then we've grown, we've added about a million to in the past month since the acquisition finished. So we're well over a 100.

Nathan Latka

05:41The reason I'm bringing this up is this is a really cool arbitrage here, mostly public companies do this, but you're doing it in the private markets. What I mean by that is when you did the 27,000,000 round at a, we'll just call it a 100,000,000 post money and you're doing 7,000,000 of ARR, that's about a 14.3 X multiple at the same time you use that money to go buy front spend, was 2,000,000 of revenue, Right? For

06:01call it, I think you said 7,000,000. Right? That's right. Is that right? That's 13. 4 x. 13. Oh, 13. Okay. Still, you're still in the money.

Joey Gilkey

06:08>> And so I wanted to give them a piece, put them on the cap table. Obviously, it's earned. So And I had a lot of criteria. I wanna control. I wanted to steer the ship. Don't touch my culture respectfully. Go after yourself if you want to. And they were like, cool. We believe in that. It was great.

Nathan Latka

06:24Guys up in, know, founder back by main gate. It looked very supportive of Joey's deal. I'll just put it that way. So update you'd also, I guess Joey say good things about UpData.

Joey Gilkey

06:32>> Oh, they're awesome. You know, that was the biggest thing is I need a partner that believed in our vision, knew our market. Like when they showed up for the first management meeting, they'd interviewed customers, done deep market research, so I became prepared.

Nathan Latka

06:43Whenever you're ready though, I will convince Trey and eventually you to take a $5,000,000 term loan from Founder Path with a with a four year IO period and an all in interest rate in a 12 to 14% range. No warrants, no PGs, no nothing.

Joey Gilkey

06:56>> Click with that. There we go.

Nathan Latka

06:57Alright. Hey. So where do you do you keep running this playbook over and over? I mean, you effectively could buy your way to a $100,000,000 of revenue just doing the same thing over and over.

Series A Structure: $27M Raise, Secondary Cash, and Valuation

Joey Gilkey

07:05>> Yeah. I mean, I look at again, this is the buy versus build risk quadrant for me. It's it's more along what's the timeline? What's our goals? When's our recap timeline? And when we're actually recap this thing again? I plan on rolling this thing two three times in terms of rolling equity over. I just really believe in the vision. It's always gonna be about the partner. It's gonna be about the valuation clearly and what the secondary looks

07:26>> like on those deals. But we have, know, with where Titan X lives today, we are an intelligence layer that lives between where people get their data from. So think ZoomInfo, Clay, Apollo, Cognism, and where they dial that. Right? So that goes through Salesforce, SEPs, and that eventually makes it to Nooks and Orem and now Frontspin. Well, we we captured the bookend there on Frontspin with with having the dialer and the intelligence layer built in. What is

07:55>> what I do believe is the future. I don't wanna be a data provider in the sense of I'm not trying to compete with ZoomInfo and those guys. I think data is a commodity. But it's how we manipulate that data, how do we use AI to really help inform better decisions, how do we close the full feedback loop of here's how I built the list, here's how it scored with Titan X, here's how it performed in the

08:10>> dialer, what does that tell me about the next list for my reps. So they will probably play an MMA play there. I've got a couple targets in mind I can't necessarily talk about. Know you're gonna ask on that front end of the bookends.

Nathan Latka

08:23How do you know how do you know I'm gonna ask you?

Joey Gilkey

08:24>> Will you listen to the show? I haven't listened. I've read your book back in the day actually when I was broke. Oh nice. Yeah that was good. I actually arbitraged a few things. I arbitraged a chrome extension back in the day off your rock. Yeah. I went and bought a chrome extension. Look at terrible reviews. Yes. The unique part about us is there's if you think about our whole model, we've got 70 plus signals that we're

08:45>> pulling in our sources. Most of which are either compliantly scraped in some ways or purchased on the private markets or it's public data. And then there's there's human elements to what we do that's impossible for added touch. Outbound dialing is regulated by FCC's TCPA guidelines, so you can't touch that. I mean, that's a very small micro thing, but we have a lot of other things.

Nathan Latka

09:09No. I think that's extremely relevant though. I mean, you just give a perfect example. When when someone comes to me and says, Nathan, you should you should invest in the company. We have proprietary data. If they can't give me an answer like you just gave, I say, guys, like, the foundation models aren't just gonna scrape this and anyone can get this easily. What's your IP? So that that makes a ton of sense. It's super interesting. Guys,

09:25remember, am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing into my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into five fifty 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 and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube, and

09:48I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. Question I've got for you, how are you getting customers today? Because when I put Titan X and Ahrefs, there's like no traffic. I think he maybe did a recent rebrand, but how are you getting customers today?

How TitanX Acquires Customers Today

Joey Gilkey

10:01>> I would say right now we're 45% inbound organic or about 9%.

Nathan Latka

10:06Wait. Where is that though? Look. I'm not seeing any. I'm seeing very little inbound organic here.

10:12Is it a different website you're getting traffic from?

Joey Gilkey

10:14>> No, titanx.io is correct. I mean we get about 9,000, 10,000 uniques a month.

Nathan Latka

10:19So maybe Ahrefs is just full of it.

Joey Gilkey

10:22>> It's full of it, yeah. Interesting. Now we probably generate, you know in our average ticket we have different customer bands, So we have three to 10 reps, 10 to 30 reps, 30 to fifty, fifty plus. Those kinda correlate to a price range of 24 k, 50 k, 90 k, and 250 k. 45% is coming through inbound, organic, that's about a 140 meetings a month just from the website with the high ACV. Outbound's our bread and butter.

10:44>> Clearly we use our own product and so about 38% comes through outbound sourcing, phone only. And then I would say the rest is a mix of paid referrals and affiliates. We're building the referral affiliate market right now. A really underutilized channel for us, but it's powerful.

Customer Bands, Pricing, and Inbound Meetings

Nathan Latka

11:01What's your highest what's your largest customer pay you per year today?

Joey Gilkey

11:04>> We're sitting at

11:08>> Well one just expanded to $4.00 6.

Nathan Latka

11:11406,000 a year.

Joey Gilkey

11:12>> Three year contract, yeah.

Nathan Latka

11:14That's great. Okay, so $4.00 6 per year or over that three years? AR, one year Each year. Oh, wow. Okay. So so it's a $1,200,000 contract.

Joey Gilkey

11:22>> Yeah. We have one right now that's they're they're a publicly traded company. They're currently at a 250,000, but they're about to expand like 1.5 ARR in a three year.

Nathan Latka

11:30What makes your sales team be able to drive that upsell revenue? Is it number of dials, number of seats, product based upselling something?

Joey Gilkey

11:35>> Yeah. It's So we're we're unique in the sense not not unique. We're we're consumption based, it's a credit model. And so we're very hands on account management, technical account management, technical solution consultant. We have a VP of customer strategy that comes from the space. So when we jump into an org like the one I'm talking about, they we got in at 02:50. We've only got one team. Currently, there's six teams I can expand to. So a

11:56>> lot of it's moving to different teams and therefore adding credit consumption. Their credit allotment goes up, but then there's also different plays. You can go up, down, sideways, you can get into their partner side, you can get into their go to market inbound side. So six is the outbound side, but then you have other channels that are other departments we can crawl our way through. They aren't over consuming, therefore it's an expansion opportunity or they're under

12:16>> consuming, it's a turn flag. And then we're just looking for different ways. And now naturally that we've acquired the dialer, now we have a whole another product line that we'll be able to add on. It

12:23gives us

12:23>> a whole another level of intelligence and signals for how they're using platform.

Nathan Latka

12:27Interesting. As we wrap up here, finish your revenue story. You launched in 2023 with the acquisition of IP. What was 2024 ending ARR?

Largest Customer and Upsell Motion

Joey Gilkey

12:34>> Well, we didn't have one because I didn't launch this till June '24. So I acquired in '23 as the IP to be the moat around the services company. I made the decision in early twenty four to sunset the services company again, it was doing mid 7 figures. And then June June first of twenty four is when we took our first dollar beta launch, 200 users. It was like a we're trying to do a PLG model like

12:55>> the first month or two I realized that's for the birds. And so we ended up going zero to 1,400,000 at the end of twenty four, and then 1.4 to whatever June, six something end of twenty five. And then now we're with the combined acquisition and the growth of '26 so far about 9.7.

Nathan Latka

13:14Really fascinating. And all that early, again, going from zero to six minute revenue that quickly, I wanna just make sure I'm not missing any learnings from you. Was there any like customer acquisition strategy you used on those early days?

Joey Gilkey

13:26>> Yeah. Mean, like, one, we do have a superpower in our tool. It's like why we have high retention is why our NRR is out the roof. It's why our magic number is a 4.1 the last quarter.

Nathan Latka

13:34What's NRR?

Joey Gilkey

13:35>> The net revenue retention. Oh, what's this?

Nathan Latka

13:36I know I 1.36. Come on. You know me. You know I know what NRR means. Shit. But you're at 100 Okay. And 30

Joey Gilkey

13:42>> Yeah. Gross dollar retention's a little low. It's like 92. We're fixing that. And then our our magic number was 4.14 versus

Nathan Latka

13:51Why do you say you're fixing the 92? Mean, that's not terrible in this segment to have 92 gross, but a 136 net.

Joey Gilkey

13:55>> I wanna see us at 97. It's my goal.

Nathan Latka

13:57Yeah. Interesting. Alright.

Joey Gilkey

13:59>> That's a little Well, hey.

Nathan Latka

14:00Finish up with prediction here. What do you guys think you'll finish 2026 with?

Joey Gilkey

14:02>> 2026, eighteen point seven.

Nathan Latka

14:04If someone came if Zoom if Henry Schuckett's Venmo came and offered you $200,000,000 of all cash today to sell the company, do you take it?

Joey Gilkey

14:09>> Absolutely not. That's why it's too long. It's so quick. Well, have, you know, part of my growth equity deals, I threw in some kickers I need.

Nathan Latka

14:15Tell me what you mean by that.

Joey Gilkey

14:17>> If we 2.5 x, I get something back. If we three x, I get something back. If I three x on a certain timeline, I get something something something back.

Nathan Latka

14:24Like you set up an ESOP pool and that gets distributed to you at certain revenue targets?

Joey Gilkey

14:28>> Yeah. Bonus structures, I get equity back, points back, so on.

Nathan Latka

14:31Super smart. This is awesome. I've learned a ton here, Joey. If people wanna follow follow you online, learn more from you, where can they

Joey Gilkey

14:36>> find you? I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. Linkedin.com/in/joegilkeandtienext.io.

Nathan Latka

14:42Guys, really interesting founding story. Had a 7 figure agency in 2023. He said, you know what? I'm using this one tool. Let me go buy the IP. Was called phone ready leads. Spent about a million bucks to do that 200 k cash up front. The rest was a seller note. Ultimately, took that 200 k and turned into a $9,000,000 ARR business, 9.7. Now today, it started off with 200 beta users and call it June 2024. He

15:00then killed that model, moved towards enterprise, and broke $1,400,000 at the end of twenty twenty four, scaled to 6,000,000 into 2025. Again, now today scaling nicely. Just did a series a of $27,000,000 at around a 100,000,000 post money valuation of which there's a large secondary component of $10,000,000. The rest went to his first or a second really acquisition of a company called Frontspin doing 2,000,000 of ARR, bought it for $13,000,000. Creative deal structure there as well.

15:23Now focused on breaking call at $1,415,000,000 bucks here in 2026. Titanx.io. If you're doing outbound and you're using phone numbers, test them out. Joey, thanks for taking us to the top.

Joey Gilkey

15:32>> Thanks, Appreciate it.

Revenue Timeline: 2024 Launch to 2026

Nathan Latka

15:33You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.