SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Deep Fake Tech Pivoted from $0 Last Year, $24m Raised, CEO teases new round
19 May 2021
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
We are good now if we want to raise the round that we want.
Anyone can say that, but raising capital, in my opinion, is not something to be celebrated. You're deluding yourself. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka. Now, if you're hearing this, it means you're not currently on our subscriber feed. To subscribe, go to getlatka.com. When you subscribe, you won't hear ads like this one. You'll get the full interviews.
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We got to grow faster. Minimum is 100% over the past several years.
Or bootstrap founders like Vivek of QuestionPro. When I started the company, it was not cool to raise. Or Looker CEO Frank Behan before Google acquired his company for $2.6 billion.
We want to see a real pervasive data culture, and then the rest flows behind that.
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My guest today is Gil Perry. He's a CEO and co-founder of DID, which he established in 2017 with his friends and fellow co-founder, DOO. He's brought experience as a manager and developer in corporate startups and environments. Gil has commanding experience in a special forces unit of the Israeli Defense Forces.
He holds a BSc degree in computer science from Tel Aviv University, where he focuses on computer vision and image processing. Gil, you ready to take us to the top? Yes, great to be here. Yeah, I'm excited for this. So talk to us, for folks that haven't heard about DID, what does the business do?
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Chapter 2: What is D-ID and what does the company do?
Basically protection from face recognition.
Yes. Got it. What does that mean from face recognition? Like as they're walking around downtown New York or as they're on their computer, someone's spying on them through their webcam or what?
Everything. They have the photos of their employees. So if the photos are leaked, some of the photos are actually out there shown on the website. So no one will be able to use it to identify this employee once he's walking outside in the streets.
I see. Okay. So BlackRock was first customer back in 2017. And then fast forward today, how many customers are you working with?
So quite a few customers. It's now growing very fast. Again, can't mention the specific number because we are a private company, but I can tell you that in the past months, we are closing quite a few deals and we have hundreds of basically calls, companies that are interested in the product. Mainly from the media and entertainment market.
Can we put a range on the number of customers? Are we talking 10 customers, 100, or 1,000 customers?
We are talking about dozens of customers.
Between 10 and 100 customers. Highly focused on a core set of customers and focuses expanding ACV with them versus trying to go sign up thousands of new low ARPU customers.
Well, yeah, we are focusing on the big companies more.
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Chapter 3: How did D-ID pivot from privacy protection to media and entertainment?
So we are 24, mainly deep learning and computer vision experts.
How many of them are engineers?
So 13, 14 are engineers. Heavy tech, yeah. Yeah, and now we are growing fast. So basically we are building a bigger sales team in the US and Israel. So we are now growing fast.
You keep saying you're growing fast and you're getting lots of calls and all this stuff, but it doesn't really mean much to me if we can't somehow quantify it. What does growing fast mean to you?
Growing fast means that basically there is bigger demand and we need to build teams for customer support, customer success, sales.
What does the sales team look like? Are there any quota-carrying reps today?
Yeah, so we basically have a salesperson, a biz dev, and several marketers.
But only one.
One salesperson right now. Yeah. Oh, interesting. Okay, so that's something where you will invest more time and energy and money over the next year, scaling out that AE to build out a team.
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Chapter 4: What are the challenges and opportunities in the synthetic media landscape?
For a minute. In two months, with one customer, we got 80 million animations. This is dozens of new, dozens of... Basically, millions of new customers that have joined MyHeritage because of our product. This is a lot of success just for one of our customers. Their app, MyHeritage app, because of our technology, was first placed in the app store, in the free apps, in 22 countries.
Above Facebook, TikTok, Instagram.
This isn't your business. This is someone else's business and they're your customer, correct?
I don't know. It's our business because we are receiving payments for the API calls.
Yeah, but you don't own that company. They pay you for the API calls. That's like me saying Tesla is a customer and they're the highest value. He's worth billions of dollars. So we're worth billions of dollars. It's a great thing. You don't own that equity over there.
Right. But basically, I'm happy when my customers are happy.
Well, of course, every founder is, but it's not your company. Right. So the question is, how much is that utility value worth to that customer? Are you making more money because you help them rank so high? Right. You're getting more API calls.
Of course. Yeah. All this success, it's not Tesla are succeeding anyway, right? But my heritage, this success is because of the use of our technology. And these are API calls to using our technology.
And that's the main way you're capturing that value is you have a rate that you charge per number of calls.
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Chapter 5: What are the revenue models for D-ID's AI face platform?
So you can do that this year? Did you actually take the historical product to zero revenue or are there still lingering revenue from that that you're supporting?
No, we still have revenue from that product, but we are focusing on the new one because the differences here are higher than what you mentioned, basically. We've crossed our goals for this year in the first, basically very fast.
I'm surprised you have demand to go raise. You said a couple of dozens of millions. So 24, 30, I'm surprised you have demand from VCs right now. I'm going to put another 24 to 36 million on top of the 24 you've already raised. If you started from zero and haven't broken a million on this new product line yet.
So I didn't tell like how much we sold until today. I didn't specify how much we sold until today, but I said on the new product, can you break a million dollars in revenue this year?
And you said, yes.
we might have crossed it already. So I don't want to get into the details of the specific numbers, but it's going well with a new product.
Okay, very well. Gil, look, I'm rooting for you. I hope it goes well. With that in mind, let's wrap up here with the famous five. Number one, what's your favorite book? No Rules Rules, the book about Netflix culture. Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying?
So maybe it's a bit corny, but Elon Musk, but I think I've been following him way before people, most of the people heard this name.
Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building DID?
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