Carl Turner
- Founder and CEO at SwipeBy
GetLatka interview
How SwipeBy Hit $3.5M ARR at 400% YoY Growth With Zero Ad Spend (Interview with Founder and CEO Carl Turner)
Carl Turner (Founder and CEO of SwipeBy) spoke to Nathan Latka on May 12, 2026.
SwipeBy figures from the interview
- ARR (2026)
- $3.5M
- YoY Growth (2026)
- 400%
- Team Size (2026)
- 25
- Paid Ads Spend (2026)
- $0
- Debt Raised (Founderpath) (2026)
- $450K
“What swipe by just is, is the AI marketing department for Main Street. We take real time data and then help a business owner that has no time doing social media, doing remarketing, doing reputation management. You can think about us as a super boring agency, just that there is no one actually in the agency and it's AI.”
“We we are right now at, like, $3.5M ARR.”
“We are exclusively selling door to door. We are a solar company, a pest control company, a roofing company. Right? Like and it's incredibly scalable.”
Bio
Carl Turner is the founder and CEO of SwipeBy (swipe.by), an AI marketing platform for small and medium-sized brick-and-mortar businesses. Originally from Berlin, Germany, Turner studied finance and computer science at Wake Forest University. Before founding SwipeBy, he worked with Google and other companies, building the technical and commercial background he now applies to SwipeBy's architecture and go-to-market strategy. Turner describes himself as having failed twice with SwipeBy before finding the current product-market fit, crediting a loyal pool of angel investors, family office backers, and high-net-worth individuals who continued to support his vision through multiple pivots. He has taken non-dilutive revenue-based financing from Stripe and later $450,000 from Founderpath at a 16-month payback, deliberately avoiding dilutive equity rounds to preserve ownership. He has received VC term sheets but has not yet closed an institutional equity round, and is actively negotiating toward a target valuation of $60 75 million. SwipeBy, which Turner built to solve the marketing pain point of time-starved restaurant owners, provides AI-driven social media management, phone answering with voice cloning, reputation management, remarketing, free websites, free online ordering, and loyalty programs. As of the interview, SwipeBy is at approximately $3.5 million ARR, growing at roughly 400% year-over-year, with a team of over 25 full-time employees including three engineers plus Turner. The company sells exclusively door-to-door with no paid marketing spend, targeting an average ACV of approximately $6,000 per restaurant location.