James Isilay
- Founder and CEO at Cognism
GetLatka interviews
How Cognism Reached $71M ARR and Avoided Scaling Crises from Zero to 70 Million (Interview with Founder and CEO James Isilay)
James Isilay (Founder and CEO of Cognism) spoke to Nathan Latka on March 28, 2024.
Cognism figures from the interview
- ARR
- $71M
- Series C Raise
- $87.5M
- Valuation
- $436M
- Total Funding
- $129M
- Year Founded
- 2015
“So yeah, we've gone from zero and now we're at 71,000,000 AAR.”
“The first two hires I ever made were terrible, like, the SDRs. They didn't work out at all.”
“Seventy two percent of founders report that the entrepreneurial journey affected their mental health. Thirty seven report suffering from anxiety and thirty six percent from burnout.”
How Cognism Reached $52M ARR and Its First $1M Customer in 2023 (Interview with CEO James Isilay)
James Isilay (CEO and Founder of Cognism) spoke to Nathan Latka on March 17, 2023.
Cognism figures from the interview
- ARR (March 2023)
- $52M
- Revenue Growth (2023)
- 100%+ per year
- Largest Customer (March 2023)
- $1M
- Funding Round, Closing (March 2023)
- $50M
- Kaspr ARR at Acquisition (2022)
- $2.2M
“It's, organic now. I mean, we bought a company called Kaspr, which is a PLG, like focused business, last year. And so that, when we looked at it, was 1,500,000 ARR, and now it's, like around about 5,000,000 ARR.”
“When we actually ended up acquiring them, were about 2,200,000 So we paid 20,000,000 at the time.”
“I mean, I think we're mostly focused on organic growth right now. Like, we've been growing like over 100% per year. Most of that is organic. So right now, we're focused on organic growth. We wanna be the best in like international contact data provider in world.”