David Chevalier
- Co-Founder and CEO at Surfe
GetLatka interview
How Surfe Hit $15M ARR with 10,000 Paying Customers on Under $10M Raised (Interview with Co-Founder and CEO David Chevalier)
David Chevalier (Co-Founder and CEO of Surfe) spoke to Nathan Latka on June 23, 2026.
Surfe figures from the interview
- ARR (2026)
- $15M
- Paying Customers (2026)
- 10,000
- Total Seats (2026)
- 50,000
- Total Raised
- $10M
- Team Size (2026)
- 70
“Six 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 actually 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.”
“So we are serving 50,000 users. That's more than 10,000 paying customers.”
“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 we've reached that solely with partnerships without a sales team.”
Bio
David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, a connected revenue workspace headquartered in Paris with offices in Barcelona and New York. Chevalier, who is German despite holding a French name, co-founded the company alongside a French co-founder, and the pair deliberately built the business in English from day one, viewing it as an international company from the outset. He describes his background as that of a bootstrap founder who learned to scale through founder-led sales before transitioning to a repeatable sales motion. Chevalier bootstrapped Surfe for its first two years before raising outside capital, taking no secondary liquidity for himself across any of the funding rounds to date. He has noted that the absence of secondaries is common among European investors, though he has acknowledged that taking some personal liquidity may make sense at a future stage. Prior to the current funding structure, he and his co-founder grew the business entirely through product-led growth and CRM marketplace partnerships before hiring a sales team. Chevalier co-founded Surfe, originally called LeadJet, in 2020, launching first as a Chrome extension that connected CRMs with LinkedIn. The company reached $1 million ARR within one and a half years, grew to $4.5 million ARR by end of 2024, $9 million ARR by end of 2025, and approximately $15 million ARR by mid-2026, roughly doubling year over year. Surfe has raised under $10 million in total across a seed round of roughly $5 million and a pre-Series A expansion of another $5 million. The company serves more than 10,000 paying customers across 50,000 users, counts Google and Elastic as enterprise clients, has at least one customer paying over $1 million per year, and operates a team of approximately 70 people with 20 in sales. Approximately 40 percent of revenue comes from the United States.