Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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AI startup Revo is emerging from stealth with the aim of unifying the steps and data necessary for businesses to develop and execute go-to-market strategies. The company has $80 million from a combination seed and series A funding round co-led by Coastal Ventures and Kleiner Perkins. Revo CEO David Zhu and investor Vinod Khosla are with us now. David, I would love to start with you.
You're trying to tackle the concept that you have labeled the Frankenstack. Even though the term is new to me, the concept is something that's been discussed on this program a lot. Just explain what Revo wants to achieve here.
Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me. It's a big day for us. Look, AI is the biggest shift in enterprise software since the cloud.
But the reality is revenue teams are still stuck in, like you said, what we call the Frankenstack, which is a dozen different tools that don't really talk to each other, causing sellers to waste over 70% of their time wrangling software instead of talking to their customers. And that's really painful.
Revo is looking to fix that via one unified revenue operating system built from the ground up with AI at its core. And with this $80 million raise, we're scaling quickly to help all companies win in the age of AI.
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Chapter 2: What is the purpose of AI startup Reevo?
But more than that, the user experience can be dramatically different with the help of AI. As I like to say, in the old world of applications, users had to learn an application and they learned each vertical stack. In the new world of AI, the application learns the human and responds the way it should. It's my favorite way to think about the transition AI makes possible.
You don't have to be trained on an application like SAP or Hubstack. The application gets to know you and other humans on your team. And so it facilitates not only the function, but also workflow across people and across applications. I think it's a pretty important shift in software.
To both of you, I kind of like to end the conversation by going a little bit bigger on the world that we're in right now.
Chapter 3: How has Reevo secured funding and who are the key investors?
You know, David, if you could reflect on what it was like doing this round. There is a lot of energy behind AI right now. But at the other end of the spectrum, there is valuation concern. You know, there's no difficulty in open AI or anthropic, those kinds of frontier labs gaining capital. But there is a lot going on right now.
Would you just reflect on what the last few weeks has been like in trying to close this?
Well, you know, the fundamental difference is clear with our approach. We're AI native and purpose-built for revenue teams. And so, you know, when you talk about the old players that are trying to bolt AI onto legacy stack, it just doesn't work. What we're building with Revo is akin to how Tesla built its cars, vertically integrated with AI at its core.
This way, our AI is able to see and act across the full customer journey. So the old players are held back by their past, and the new players, to your point, don't have the depth of domain knowledge, nor the access to the full suite of first-party data to pull this vision off. So Revo's building with both. And yes, it's hard, but that's really what makes it defensible and worth doing.
Vinod, you're co-leading this round with your friends at Kleiner Perkins.
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Chapter 4: What is the concept of the 'Frankenstack' in business technology?
Again, the same question. What does the environment look like to you right now? This is a very sizable debut round. You had the conviction to do that.
Well, it was a while ago we did the seed round of 10 million. That wasn't announced. And now we just participated in the $70 million round. Obviously, we think highly of the team. But I think it's the magnitude of the opportunity this opens up for AI-native companies. I like to say most valuations won't hold up.
in the AI space, but the ones that are really high-quality companies will return disproportionate returns. In 2018, people said to me a billion-dollar valuation for OpenAI was too high. Then they said $26 billion was too high, and then $100 billion, then $300 billion, and then $500 billion were all too high. So a small percentage of the companies, I suspect much less than 5%.
will actually do extremely well and return 10, 50, 100 times their money invested. Most companies will still lose money, and I think that's why you want to back quality founders like David. David's a superstar. I'd back him in almost anything he did.
David Zhu, CEO of Revo AI, Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Khosla Ventures, and as we just discussed, co-led that round. Great to have you both on the program. Thank you.
Hello, I'm Joel Weber. And I'm Eric Balchunas. We're the hosts of the Trillions podcast from Bloomberg, a deep dive into all things ETFs and investing. Eric, what's so amazing about ETFs? It's never a dull moment.
They track everything under the sun, four new ETFs launch a day, and they take in $4 billion every day. So it's where all the money's flowing to and a lot of the innovation is happening. I call it the Silicon Valley of the investing world.
As you can hear, Eric's passionate about them. My role is to try and keep him in check and make all of this a little bit more understandable for the rest of us. Not always easy, but always worth a listen. So listen to Trillions on Apple, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts.
Want to know how Russian pranksters tricked a top government official? Or how the only copy of a Wu-Tang Clan album got auctioned for millions of dollars by the Department of Justice? The answers are out there. The trick is getting the government to share them. I'm investigative journalist Jason Leopold. I spend most of my days getting documents from the government.
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Chapter 5: How does Reevo plan to unify revenue operations with AI?
I'm attorney Matt Topping. and I fight them in court to open their files when they don't want to. From Bloomberg and No Smiling, this is Disclosure, a podcast about prying loose government secrets. To listen early and add free on Apple Podcasts, subscribe now at Bloomberg.com backslash podcast offer.