How Tive Hit $100M Annual Run Rate with 1,300 Customers and a $545M Valuation (Interview with CEO Krenar Komoni)

Intro and $100M Revenue Milestone

Nathan Latka

00:00Alright. In this episode, you're gonna see how a strange founder built a weird piece of hardware in his basement and turned it into a $540,000,000 business that's totally taking over the supply chain industry. He's got over 1,300 paying customers, and the biggest ones pay him a fortune. Today, he's adding over $10,000,000 of new annual revenue per quarter. Incredible growth. And he's got a bold vision for how to use AI and agents to automate the entire supply

00:24chain. But it wasn't always this easy. Watch until the end, and you'll see exactly how to get your first 100 customers the easy way, how to set your AE quota targets so you don't screw up your economics, and lastly, the genius way to price your products so you finally get your first million dollar per year customer. Here's the CEO of tive.com. Krenar, are ready to take us to the top? I can't bury the lead.

00:44>> I reached

00:44out literally hours ago because you posted on LinkedIn that you hit a massive revenue milestone. What was the milestone? And then we'll jump into your story.

Hitting $100M Booked Annual Run Rate

Krenar Komoni

00:50>> Yeah. Huge milestone last week. We hit a 100,000,000 of booked annual run rates. That's awesome. So it's just amazing. We will do very confident. We'll do 100,000,000 records.

00:59>> Year over year.

Nathan Latka

01:00What were you one year ago?

Krenar Komoni

01:01>> So one year ago, we're at 67, so we'll do at least, looks like a 100 this year.

Nathan Latka

01:06Be clear,

Revenue History: 2020 to 2026

Nathan Latka

01:07>> if we

01:07take MRR from December 2025, you're at a 67,000,000 run rate then.

Krenar Komoni

01:11>> No. December MRR. So 67 was the whole recognized revenue of the whole 2025. The December MRR, I don't know the exact number on top of my head, but I know we closed the year in check because we do January. It's fiscal year. It was at 89,000,000 of booked annual run rate. So we went from 89 to 100 between January 31 and Growth then. And, guys, you wanna listen to

Nathan Latka

01:34this whole interview because he's building something that's really interesting. You're seeing the world of AI. Anyone that has a data moat really wins. And one way to build an impressive data moat is to have a SaaS plus business model. We have IoT plus SaaS. He has we're gonna get into it in a second, but, tive, what are sorry. Not tive. Krenar, why don't you explain your business model? What are you selling?

How the Business Model Works

Krenar Komoni

01:49>> So it's pretty straightforward. Customers come to us. They wanna know what's happening with their shipping all over the world, whether it's strawberries, blueberries, servers, electronics, gaming consoles. Oh, hold what on we do is we sell them these trackers where they, I wanna hold it up. And, oh, you see the you're opening up the website too. That's awesome. So what they do is they buy these trackers. So they sign up a contract. It's an annual contract, and

02:12>> they say, hey. I wanna buy 1,200 of these, and they commit to them and then also

Nathan Latka

02:16sign up So for where does that get installed?

02:18>> Does it

02:18get installed on a truck? Like, turn around a little bit. Okay. So is there a camera on there?

Krenar Komoni

02:21>> Yeah. So what we do what we do that customers do is they take this. They press the button right there. This turns on. They peel the sticker on the back. Most of the time, they peel the sticker, and they open the trailer or the container when it's open already, it's at the dock. They load it up the trailer and the container with, let's say, pallets of servers, pallets of electronics, pallets of gaming consoles, pallets of vacuum

02:45>> cleaners, whatever it is. They take this tracker and they place it usually on the last pallet. Sometimes they hide it because they don't want anybody to see it. Then they close the trailer, this thing is on, it's transmitting in real time using cellular connectivity. So two g, four g, five g connectivity all over the world. So it tells customers where the shipment is in real time, but also it's telling its condition. Is it hot? Is it

03:09>> wet? Is it cold? Did somebody open the trailer? There's a little light sensor right there. Did this get dropped? There's a shock sensor. There's also an orientation sensor to see if something's tilted. So all of that data on top of location is being fed into our platform, and then customers log in and see and monitor their shipments. So now they know, are those berries above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for more than an hour? Are those vaccines on

03:33>> a tarmac somewhere sitting at 90 degrees Fahrenheit? And they were able to immediately call a logistics company, call the carrier, call the trucking company, and act on it. And we saved so many shipments, especially even to these days with theft. We catch like, we have a story recently with this company. The guy literally with his wife was driving trying to found the the driver who was stealing the like, there was just a truck full of metal,

04:00>> and they called the guy at the truck stop and called the police.

Nathan Latka

04:02How much data exhaust are

04:04you generating from one of those devices?

Krenar Komoni

04:05>> If I took

Nathan Latka

04:06all the unstructured data and structured it a JSON file, how many rows of data points would I get just from that one tracker and one truck shipment?

Krenar Komoni

04:13>> Per ping, I would say at least around 12 to 15. So think of x y z of accelerometer, then you get temperature, then you get humidity, you get shock if it happens, light, and then location. You have GPS. You have WiFi positioning. You have also cellular towers that we get. So there's around 15 or so points per ping. And then people can be pinging every five minutes, every 30. So if you do the math, we're we've

04:40>> collected billions and billions

Nathan Latka

04:42of run rating on that? Like, you

Krenar Komoni

04:44>> if you do last 05/12/2026,

Nathan Latka

04:46if you just look at last month, how many individual I don't know what the right usage metric is. Is it number how many total pings you captured across all customers? Is it number of installed devices, number truck trips? What's the critical metric for you?

Krenar Komoni

04:57>> A few.

Nathan Latka

04:58Go for it. The more

04:59>> you can

04:59show us, the better. The more we can learn.

Krenar Komoni

05:01>> Okay. I'll

05:02This is you're gonna

05:02>> do that.

Nathan Latka

05:03This is so cool. Guys, while he's breaking that up again, what we're gonna sort of go with on this is we're going back to his basement in 2007 when he had this idea all the way up to, you know, now a 100,000,000 run rate. You know, this is not just software. Obviously, there's production involved, IoT. I'll ask him if he's manufacturing these himself, if he's making money on the hardware, if he's subsidizing at the start just

05:19to get the long term subscription contracts. We'll dive into all of that.

Krenar Komoni

05:22>> Yeah. So I think some of this is maybe not great to share or not as a little confidential.

05:28I appreciate it.

05:28>> Let me see if I any data point No. I would really focus on

Nathan Latka

05:33moving on that blue graph. You told

Krenar Komoni

05:34>> us when you passed

Nathan Latka

05:35a 100 k of ARR. When you put put your point on the graph where you passed a million of ARR? What year?

Krenar Komoni

05:39>> Right. The oh, million? It was in 2020 around, I would say 10,000,000. This time here. Now you're making equizzing me. 10,000,000. It was 2,500,000 in 2020 in dollars, 2020. It was in 2021 sometime.

05:58>> Yeah.

Nathan Latka

05:59I was So sorry. You went from 1,000,000 in 2020 to 10,000,000 in 2021?

Krenar Komoni

06:03>> Yeah. It was at the end of twenty nineteen, I would say early twenty twenty, we crossed that 1,000,000 right here and then by end of twenty twenty one or mid like call it Q3, Q4, twenty twenty one, we went to 10,000,000 of book. We were growing very fast at that time because we signed up to really large the revenues. And then if if you happen, revenues were pretty exciting too. I'll I'll wanna share them.

Data Generated Per Tracker Per Ping

Nathan Latka

06:27When did you just finish the revenue story real quick and then I wanna get you backstory in your basement. When did you break 50,000,000?

Krenar Komoni

06:33>> The revenue. So revenue in 2020 so let's go this way. We'll do 100 this year. 67,000,000 last year. 45 in 2024. 29,000,000 in 2023 revenue. 19, almost 20,000,000 in 2022, 10,000,000 in 2021. So that's when we did 10,000,000 of actual revenue, 2,500,000 of revenue in 2020, and February I take you back to your basement

Nathan Latka

07:01when you launched you can stop screen sharing. What were you you were watching your father-in-law, or how did you get this idea?

Krenar Komoni

07:07>> So my background is in tech. I used to work for startups, but primarily doing chip design, RF chip design, two g, three g, four g, radios. And then I worked for an MIT startup where we build the world's most efficient base stations that go on cell towers. Fell in love with wireless. Fell in love with radio frequencies.

Nathan Latka

07:24Guys, 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 and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube,

07:47and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com.

Krenar Komoni

07:52>> Back in 2015, I got met my wife. I got married to my wife in 2010. So She married before you were rich. Few years. Hanging on. Oh, that's for sure. I'm not rich yet. I'm still a founder. Still a pretty poor founder living on salary, which is great, but I think I

Nathan Latka

08:09Why is that? You haven't done a secondary? Any kind of secondary? Okay.

Krenar Komoni

08:12>> I did, but small. Being transparent, few $100,000. So maybe helped a little bit with the mortgage. A lot founders are

Nathan Latka

08:19scared to ask for that. They're like, you know, they're growing.

Krenar Komoni

08:21>> They end up with a

08:22>> 100,000,000 of revenue, but they're broke because they didn't never did a secondary.

Nathan Latka

08:25What gave you the courage to ask for that?

Krenar Komoni

08:26>> Just coach other founders.

08:28>> I would say one of my investors actually encouraged me quite a bit on series a one, which gave me that courage. Otherwise, I wouldn't have the courage. And then from there, built that courage to ask a little bit more. But, yeah, it was from two Sigma Ventures. He got Billy Ilchef. He put a term sheet and he's like, Krenar, I think you should take a little bit off the table. That's awesome.

Nathan Latka

08:46So Okay. Tell us more of the story. So, yeah, when I have your LinkedIn up here.

Revenue Milestones Timeline

Krenar Komoni

08:50>> In 2015, I'm I'm, with my father-in-law, and, obviously, I've known him for a few years now. But after this WiLux experience and knowing where the technology was going, he was always on the phone trying to figure out where his truck drivers are. I'm trying to have dinner, and he would get up off the table at 10PM, at 8PM. And I'm like, why can't this guy just sit? What he's doing is trying to figure out where the

09:12>> truck drivers are. Did they load? Did they offload? Did they unload the shipments? I'm like, you know what? His name is. I'm like, I'll build a GPS tracker for fun and put it in your trucks. And he's like, go ahead. And he's like, there's a lot of companies asking me. I don't wanna pay $50 a month. I'm like, okay. You can pay me $19.99.

First Customer at $19.99 Per Month

Nathan Latka

09:28Your first customer was your father-in-law paying $19 a month.

Krenar Komoni

09:32>> Correct. On a truck. But I pivoted pretty fast from there. So that's the story. And then his friend wanted to track his trucks too. So this guy, Rasimy, had, like, 10 trucks. So I started tracking his trucks. So right now, I'm tracking roughly 30 trucks in Worcester, Massachusetts. They're paying me around 19 I wanted that $0.99 So it's like $19.99 a month on the invoices that I would make up myself. But what I realized is on

Origin Story: Father-in-Law and the First Tracker

Krenar Komoni

09:57>> the back of the shipment, on the back of the truck, one truck driver, Tony, showed me that there was this temperature sensor. And he would be hauling fish and scallops and lobsters from New Bedford, Mass. And he's like, I said, hey, bring me this sensor that's on the back of the truck. He brought it to me and I said, How do they get the date out of it? He said, Well, at the end of the shipment,

10:17>> somebody takes this temperature logger, plugs into a computer, sometimes into a printer, and then sees what the temperature was and then decides whether they take this load or not. I'm like, Wow, I got it. So, I said, you know what I want to do? I want to take this tracker that I built, put a battery, make it really low power, and put it on the back of the truck. Being an engineer, I thought that if I

10:39>> designed the best tracker in the world, the longest lasting tracker on a battery, I'm just gonna win. And what happened is we didn't fully win because And it was I tried to sell it for a $100 to make, almost a $150 to make, and I would sell it for a $150 $200 and then I would charge customers $50 a month. And I realized one thing, it's not all about product market fit. It's product market price fit.

11:05>> And I learned a big lesson there, and then took myself and my VP of technology, Martin. We went to China, which actually we're going into Just like right after this week. Yes. It does. So we're going, and it was the same guy. We went to China in '20, like around '18, I think, yeah, early twenty eighteen, and we've met every manufacturer out there that can make a tracker. And we built the world's first single use two

11:30>> gs tracker that we sold for $29.

11:47>> Not particularly. What we had is a we have patents. We have patents on the overall solution and the system that obviously does an amazing job at making sure that the battery power of the trackers last as long as possible. And then when we went to China, what we wanted to do is find a partner there that actually would listen and work with us so we could teach them a little bit of these things because we wanted

12:09>> to move very fast. We didn't have the time to engineer and design everything on our own. We wanted a partner in China so we could do this cycle very quick. But yeah, that would be, I would say, the proprietary thing that we had in the beginning is power consumption and a system way making battery life long last longer. Think of it, if something's stuck in customs, then change the ping rate. If you're going from ocean to

12:34>> road, change the ping rate. So having that configuration change based on the events that are happening is a pattern that we have. Tell me how other products

Nathan Latka

12:42that strategy after your friends and family shipping scallops? Right? Going from 2.5 to 10,000,000 of revenue, what was your growth tactic there?

Cold Calling as the Growth Engine

Krenar Komoni

12:50>> I think the biggest lesson that I learned going from being a technical founder, I thought that, like I told you, that my my product was the best, then it would sell itself, and it didn't. And in 2018, when we're struggling quite a bit, I hired two out of college kids, and what we started to is just cold calling. And we started cold calling, cold calling, cold calling. And what I realized, was cold email, cold call, cold

13:14>> email, cold call. And I learned so much about products. I learned so much about what customers want. I learned that's where I learned that our the trackers cost a lot of money. We need to build something new. And I learned that SDRs or BDRs, whatever you wanna call, that that frontline, that spear is actually the heartbeat of the company. And I think many founders forget that, many entrepreneurs forget that. I respect that job more than any

13:42>> other job since 2018 because that's where the pulse of everything is. And then what I learned is I wanna learn as much from that feedback and then build it and then hire great AEs that listen to that same feedback to the customer and then just grow and grow and grow and grow. That's that's how we grew. Okay.

Growth Motions Today: AEs, SDRs, Paid Search

Nathan Latka

14:01But what other growth motions are you using today? Is it just sort of AESDRs or something else? Like what?

Krenar Komoni

14:06>> Marketing too. Quite a bit. I mean, I personally do a lot. I try and do a lot on social media, but the marketing team does a they've done a really good job on paid search. So Google, LinkedIn, we're dabbling quite a bit on Facebook right now. And then quite a bit of SEO. I didn't ask you this,

Nathan Latka

14:25but Are you still at, like, $20 a truck per tracker? Or what's your average ACV these days?

Krenar Komoni

14:31>> Call it in the I probably call it in the $40 range, maybe more. I

Nathan Latka

14:37guess if you roll that out, imagine you're selling to huge companies that are like, what would one logo pay you per year on average? Because they're buying for hundreds of thousands of trucks. Right?

Krenar Komoni

14:45>> So we have only 1,300 logos. So it depends on the customer. There's customers who buy one thing we do really well is we can accommodate the customers who are going to buy two trackers a week, let's say 100 trackers a year. Obviously, we don't want to get as many of those customers, but if they come in and they want to buy, they're very welcome. So we have customers who buy a 100 trackers a year, and then

15:09>> we have

Nathan Latka

15:10customers who buy 100 customer yet? Let's go. Oh, yeah. Nice.

Krenar Komoni

15:15>> I think we have around nine or yeah.

Nathan Latka

15:18It's That are million plus

Krenar Komoni

15:20>> customers.

Nathan Latka

15:21What makes them what allows your sales reps to upsell or give that much value to them? Is it just number of trucks basically and number of trackers?

Krenar Komoni

15:27>> That's the easy one. Yeah. I would say just expansion that way because they keep growing and growing. Think of a logistics company, and then they just getting more customers into this and more customers and more customers. Or if you're a customer that you're shipping products, you say, okay, I'm gonna start in this region and you open up another region, another region, you go global. Or you start tracking for just one product of yours and then you

15:48>> expand into all the products. Mhmm. It's pretty exciting on the growth side. Land and expand. So 60% of our new ARR is expansion, and forty five forty five

Land and Expand: 60% of New ARR from Existing Customers

Nathan Latka

16:00I've got about six minutes left. I wanna spend three minutes on how you've capitalized business and then three minutes on your future products. Like, how are you thinking about AI and and your world? So let's start on the capital side. I know you've raised rounds. When was the first round?

Krenar Komoni

16:11>> First round was in November 2000 and Wow. Okay. Wait. This goes

Nathan Latka

16:18way back. When did you write the first sign of code for this thing?

Krenar Komoni

16:21>> June '20 what was the first round of code?

Nathan Latka

16:22Are we talking, like, 500 from friends and family?

Krenar Komoni

16:25>> Nothing. It was me working and taking half of the money to pay mortgage and food and So that around money. You put in 50 k,

Nathan Latka

16:33100 And

Krenar Komoni

16:34>> then I did that over yeah. Probably around there And for for the 18 then I raised from Hyperplane Ventures and Bolt, which was a hardware incubator in Boston, and Hyperplane Ventures is in Boston, and the video raised, I think, $250k. And then we did another round of 200 k when we got into Techstars, and so we got into Techstars in 2017. So this was end of twenty sixteen and then early twenty seventeen. And then in

17:01>> May 2017, raised our first seed round. I think it was

Nathan Latka

17:05$3,000,000. Like, looking back now, was that the right decision to raise that 3,000,000 seed at that time?

Krenar Komoni

17:10>> I think so. Yes. But I I think maybe we could have spent it better. I think we were What did waste money on? On on spend there. But I don't think we wasted it particularly, but we were building a lot of things around software. We were we hired a lot of software engineers, which was exciting because we kind of got the architecture right in the back end and all of that, but we didn't have no customers.

$10K Left in the Bank and the Down Round

Krenar Komoni

17:33>> No customers. I think getting that's where I learned that lesson, then we almost ran out of money in 2018, and that's where I had to lay off. We went from like 16 people down to six or yeah, six or seven people. And that was a tough time and then we almost ran out of money in July 2019. We had $10,000 to $20,000 in the bank and then I had to raise a convertible note of a

17:58>> secured convertible note and got $100,000 at a down round.

Nathan Latka

18:03Wait. How brutal was that? Like, down round, like it was a million 8 a million valuation or what?

Krenar Komoni

18:08>> It was from 21 down to It was not great.

Nathan Latka

18:11Interesting. So so Yeah. Who priced the 21,000,000? Techstars? Oh, no. The 3,000,000 seed?

Krenar Komoni

18:17>> The 3,000,000, it was between Next. And the conference.

Nathan Latka

18:20That's wild story. 10 left in the bank. Did you ever seriously consider shutting the company down?

Krenar Komoni

18:25>> No. So that one thing that I realized is I believe in when in the in the darkest moments of my life, and I would say tive, the thing that kept me going is what I realized is I would start tive again even if it went bankrupt. And that mindset came to me. Like, I was walking and running and all over Massachusetts trying to, like, just figure out what I'm gonna do.

Nathan Latka

18:51Where do you see the future of your space going? I mean, can you build a brain for these trucks to tell them where to turn and how to drive and how to avoid weather? And shouldn't you just be running these transportation companies yourself? You have all the data.

AI Agents and the Autonomous Supply Chain Vision

Krenar Komoni

19:01>> Yeah. So this is where the world's going, and I think it's very exciting. We're really tracking what we're doing as you know, we're tracking the shipments on the trucks, a lot of shippers and customers know where these shipments are now. But the beauty is with artificial intelligence and finally with agents, I believe that autonomous supply chain is finally becoming something that's going to become a reality. When I started this company, you have these visions in your

19:25>> head, like insights are gonna happen, automated things are gonna be calling, and people don't have to be on the phone calls and emails and spreadsheets. But now with agents, if you asked me seven months ago, I'd be like, I don't know. But after Opus came out in February, it's real. There is no doubt about that anymore. And where the world's going is, think of it this way, every package, every shipment, we will know what's happening with

19:50>> it, is gonna speak. AI agents are gonna know what actions to take based on those, whether it's email, whether it's phone call, they're gonna talk to other companies'agents and resolve any issues. Then finally, humans are going to just look at dashboards if there's any challenges that they need to meet and go and tackle. But otherwise, agents are going to solve. Then at the end, the shipment's going make it from point A to point B autonomously,

20:14>> and the shipment's gonna make it on time and in full with full of coordination, and the world's gonna be a better place and more efficient than it is today. And that's why Are you actively we're really running any tests internally to, like, to test

Nathan Latka

20:26this vision, or are we not there terms of hardware or software or agents or models or what?

Krenar Komoni

20:31>> Well, right now, we've actively built workflows so that we can automatically do things so that actually, think of it as a shipment speaking and then based on where it is and what's happening, there's workflows and based on milestones, those workflows trigger things and the next step right now that we're doing is AI agents that make phone calls and then based on that, then, we're going to take other actions. It's it's part of the vision but I'm

20:56>> very confident that in six months, twelve months, especially in twenty four, thirty six months, we're gonna get to 2,030, I think, autonomous supply chains out there. I believe Tive's gonna be the company that's gonna be the one that generates all

Nathan Latka

21:10the So what will your headline what will your website headline be if five years from now?

Krenar Komoni

21:14>> It's actually gonna change in around thirty to days or so, and Tive Intelligence is gonna be a big piece there, which I'm sharing A lot of new info. Shared with anybody. So yeah. So Tive Intelligence is gonna be there, and that that's gonna start being the headline. Well, hey. Sorry.

Nathan Latka

21:32Keep You take your time with your he's wrestling with Cameron just because he took this call last minute. He's in his brother's, I think, apartment, or something or garage or something in New York. So we appreciate it, Krenar. Great. I just wanna follow your story as you as you bring this vision to life. Where can I find you online?

Closing and Where to Find Krenar

Krenar Komoni

21:48>> tive.com and on LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka

21:49Guys, what story. Broke a $100,000,000 of revenue today. Again, helping back to his father-in-law who he was charging $19 a month with a little thing in his back of his truck to track his truck back in 2015. First line of code, 2016, he put in a 100 k. By 2017, $3,000,000 seed round at a 20,000,000 valuation. First 80 hired in 2018. By 2019, he got 30 trucks going around Massachusetts at 20, bucks a pop, 250 k

22:12of ARR. Fast forward a couple years to 2023. Right? They've got $29,000,000 of revenue. They end up doing a series c in '24 out of $40,000,000, and then fast forward again to today. Series c one in 2025, $20,000,000, 525,000,000 pre money, and about 67,000,000 of total revenue collected in 2025, but ending that year at an $89,000,000 run rate. Now at a $100,000,000 run rate, 300 folks as he's tries to figure out how do we finally bring

22:37autonomous supply chain to the world en masse. He's doing it with all of his live trackers. He's growing with, 32 AEs, 11 SDRs, paid search, Google, LinkedIn, 1,300 customers, nine of which this is crazy. Nine of which paying more than a million dollars per year. That's how you know he's building something valuable. Alright. Krenar, thank you for taking us to the top. You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.