SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
From $500K to $1.5M ARR: Bootstrapping VR SaaS for Trade Skills
31 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is Skillveri and how does it redefine vocational training?
What are your largest software contracts there? Currently, it's at 350k for the largest contract. There are very costly methods to rate how you welded or how you painted separately on the field.
So we want to add some AI grading tools for the real world so that a student, when they move from the simulation to the lab that they have in the school or when they go back to work at some point, they should be able to use an AI tool from us which would grade them objectively on how well they have painted or how well they have welded.
If someone came to you today and offered you $4 million all cash up front to sell the business, would you exit? No. I see a lot of growth right now. Hey, folks. My guest today is Sabari Nir. He is the co-founder and CEO of Skillvery, V-R-I dot com, where they're redefining vocational training through XR simulations.
He started his career in deep tech before moving into product management, and now he's building immersive solutions to bridge global skill gaps. He's also the prime minister's champions of change panel on that panel on ed tech and skills. Sabari, you ready to
take us to the top yes so all right so take us in the product first i'm going to share a screen here and go to your website but but tell us what we're looking at here what does the company sell what do you do so we sell virtual reality and mixed reality simulations that uh run on either a meta quest or a pico headset together hold that up close to the camera so the audience can see it i didn't realize you had an example yeah very cool so it's like a vr set
It is, but you could pair it up with real-world tools like a spray-pinching gun or a welding gun. That's awesome. So are you mainly then selling to companies that do a lot of welding who are onboarding and training hundreds of employees? Yes, we have two major channels, I would say. We have the industry, which does their own in-house training for their staff.
But we also have a larger set of customers from the high schools and community colleges, which have a CTE program. So that's where it's more popular in the U.S., In Europe and in Asia, it's more popular with the industries. I see. Very cool. And so how do you price this, right? So if a school buys, I guess, give me your sample customer. What do they look like?
So one example could be a high school in a place called Modesto, California. and so they have a SAS version of our product which means that they own the headsets like these and they use the controllers that come standard with the VR headsets to use the product but they are looking at doing an upgrade to have one of these spray guns and the welding guns added to their program so
Typically, we are possibly the only one in this space who have a SaaS option as well.
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Chapter 2: How does Skillveri price its VR training software?
We compete with well-established large corporations that sell costly one-time purchase simulations, which cost upwards of like $35,000. We have something starting at around $4,000 as a software subscription. So $4,000 just gets me the software. How many headsets does that get me? that can, at the starting version of the product, that can power up to five headsets.
And you could additionally buy these hardware add-ons, the welding gun or the spray painting gun that I showed. So that adds the immersive feel and touch and feel of the real trade. If you look at total revenue last year in 2024, what percent came from software versus your hardware sales? It's currently about 60-40 mix, 60% from software, 40% from hardware plus software packages.
So we have a significant recurring revenue component coming from the software packages, but some schools enhance it by having a one-time purchase of the hardware alone. Or sometimes they do like a full package. So we have very advanced simulations that sell upwards of $25,000 per set. But that includes the hardware and a perpetual license of the software. Interesting.
And I guess, are you comfortable sharing the largest package you've ever sold? Like today, the largest customer you support. Don't name them, obviously, for confidentiality reasons. But what are your largest software contracts? Are these $50,000 per year contracts or $5 million per year contracts? Currently, it's at $350,000 for the largest contract.
So we would like to take it up to about a million dollars, of course, yes. That's great. Now, a customer paying you $350,000 per year is your outlier. That's your big kahuna, your big whale. What's the average customer, though, paying you for just your software annually?
Typically a school would either go in for a subscription as low as $4,000 that I mentioned or a typical one would be about $15,000 to $20,000 every year. It varies from school district to district and what kind of skills that they want. Okay. Okay. You keep using sort of schools as your example.
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Chapter 3: What is the customer base for Skillveri's products?
Is it fair to say that as your primary customer, you're selling mainly to schools? Yes. In the U.S., the schools, high schools, and sometimes middle schools which have a CTE program, those are the ones which are primarily used. Sometimes community colleges. And in the U.S., it's very rare in industry. We have only four or five industrial customers right now, but that's also changing. Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. OK, so four to five industry customers, meaning you're branching out from just selling to schools, but that's in the early days. How many customers today are you serving with your software? In the US, it's about 100 schools, which means about 500 installations. Typically, a school will have a minimum of five installations. Some of them may have 20 or 30.
Is an installation equivalent to like a seat, a single person using the software at a time? The license is linked to a device, but a device can be used by as many students as they want. So there is no limit on the number of uses, but there's a limit on the number of devices.
Okay, so when you say 100 schools and 500 installs, an average of five installs per school, and install is the software on one headset, that headset can be moved from a body to a body. So more than five people can use it, but only five at a time, at a single time, can use it. Yeah, this is typically how it looks. So you would have a school which has multiple screens.
and one student would be using it. Four or five other students would be watching what the student is doing and they would get a feel of what is this person doing and what kind of scores are that person doing. So they would take turns every 30 minutes to 40 minutes. So by the time they get their turn, they would have observed the other people, and there would be a sense of competition as well.
So if I got 70 out of 100 in my attempt, my peer would want to have at least 71. So it encourages more and more practice in a very gamified manner. Yeah, that makes sense. Now, you mentioned 100 schools and $15,000 average annual contract value. If I multiply those, I get about a $1.5 million software run rate for your company.
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Chapter 4: How does Skillveri achieve revenue growth through hardware and software?
Is that accurate? Yeah, that's that's where we are currently at. But we're looking at. So we are only 100 schools in the US 250 other customers globally worldwide. But we're looking at there are about 26,000 schools in the US which have a city program. There are 1000 community colleges which have a city program. And so the scope to grow is much larger.
So we have earlier, we used to do only direct selling. Now we have about 10 resellers covering about 35 of the 50 states in the US. And so we hope to grow to 2000 schools at an average of $5,000 minimum per school. So we are looking at growing to $10 million ARR. It's a steep growth, but that's what we believe should be possible.
I want to talk more about how you expand in the United States using those 10 resellers. I also want to talk more about how you funded the company, Bootstrap versus VC or not, and then also just more about how the hardware and software work together. Before we do that, though, I just want to make sure I have your growth sort of accurate.
So if you're at a 1.5 million run rate today in 2025, are you comfortable sharing what revenue was in 2024? It was about 0.5. Okay, and when was your first year of revenue? When did you launch this thing? Yeah, so what we are talking about now is our pivoted form of business. So we had an earlier life before the advent of virtual reality.
We built a lot of hardware ourselves, and we started in 2012. That's when you were doing hardware. Yes. And we then just before the pandemic, we had switched over to the we pivoted to the software mode, which allowed customers in the US to buy the headsets off Amazon or wherever and then just load our software onto it.
And we had to pivot because we were facing problems during the pandemic here in India with our revenues going down. close to zero because we were not able to ship these products out. And our investors at that point of time were very India-centric, impact-centered investors. So they wanted out. So we gave them an exit.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Skillveri face during the COVID-19 pandemic?
So the promoters bought back the company and then- What year was that, 2021? Yes, 2021. And how much did you have to pay them to buy them out? We paid them, you know, is it okay if I don't disclose that amount? Well, can you maybe share a range? There's other people listening that might want to copy your strategy in terms of buying out some of their investors so they can learn from you.
Okay, so we paid about 50% of what we had. Okay, so if they put in $2, you bought them out for $1? Yeah, yeah. Okay, got it, got it. And, I mean, are we talking, like, before that, had you raised, like, I guess, how much had you raised? Was it just an angel round or a series A, B, C?
It was back then called a Series A. It was $1.2 million, but back then, this is 2016, back then it was called a Series A. Now I see seed rounds at $5 million. That was 2016, you said, the Series A? Yeah. Okay. Got it. And that was, so the all in capital you'd raised before you bought anyone out was 1.2 million into the company.
You bought them out for 50% of that amount in 2021 because your revenues crashed to zero because of COVID you were pivoting. And then you scaled back up with your software product and hardware product in 2024 to 500 K of revenue. Now you're at a one, but you expect to do about 1.5 million today here in 2025. Yeah, that's good. Very cool. Very cool.
And you're going to stay bootstrapped going forward or any plans to raise? So it's we're keeping it open right now for whatever business we have been pursuing right now with the current set of products. We don't want to raise money for that. But we are also looking at adding some adjacent products. Can you just hold up the headset one more time there?
This is the generic one people can buy on Amazon, right?
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Chapter 6: Why did Sabari Nair buy out investors in 2021?
Yeah. What's the brand? Can you put the logo to the camera? What's the brand called here? So this has a metal logo up here. It is a, what's the meta. So it's the meta VR headset. Yeah. But what does that retail for? So this one retails for about $500, but there is a $300 version that also works. This is a Pico headset. So we are kind of agnostic to the hardware. Okay.
So you, just to be clear, you will work with any of these on my screen right now, the meta quest. And then what's the other one? Pico. Yeah. We go virtual. This one. Yes. The ICO. OK, cool. So these are the two soft the hardwares that you recommend to your audience. You know, the schools, if they want to get five units for their classroom. Yeah. OK, great. Very cool.
So and no plans to move back into the hardware space. You already did that back in 2012, 2013 and realized you didn't want to do that anymore. So you moved into software, right?
Chapter 7: How does Skillveri utilize reseller partnerships for market expansion?
we voted the software and then we realized that there is a certain value to hardware as an accessory, as an upgrade. So then we came back to hardware, which we made it very differently. So earlier we had huge bulky hardware, but then now we have all these smaller ones, which. So what is that? What is that? What do you sell that for that you're holding right now?
So this one would sell for 2,500 one time. So they just paid once and they, they have it forever. And you're building that yourself. That's like an extension that works with your software on the meta headset. Yes. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Interesting.
So if a school is buying for their program, right, to train welders, right, or a community college, and they need five of those extension welding sets plus five headsets, they're going to pay about five headsets times 500 a pop is 2,500. Plus they need five of those welding extensions that you just showed at, I think you said 2,500 a pop, right? So that's 12,500. So now we're up to like 15 grand.
And then they spend about another 15 grand for an annual thing on your software. So it's about 30K all in for a school to get started. Is that accurate?
not necessarily so what some schools do is to the software would still work with without the hardware extension so they can they could still work with this so they would buy five headsets uh and then they may buy two or three of those uh extensions So they would get the beginners to work on just the controllers.
And then as they progress on the lessons, they would get them the hardware extensions. I see. Very interesting. Tell me more about how you grew, right? My audience loves growth stories that they maybe can learn from. You mentioned that you obviously founded in India.
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Chapter 8: What are the future goals for Skillveri's growth?
You've expanded in the US. You have a large presence in the US. And you have that presence through using a reseller program. Some people will hire full-time employees in India. Why did you go the reseller route? And how did you find those first 10 resellers? So word of mouth was how we found the resellers.
So we had a couple of resellers before and we found challenges with onboarding of customers. So one of the bigger challenges with a tech like this is that unless somebody wears it and then feels the immersive experience,
method of how we are using this tool it doesn't it doesn't sound different from any of my competitors products so most of my competitors have tech from maybe 10 15 years back and so for example we use mixed reality quite a lot so you wear the headset you see virtual equipment in front of you but you also see the surroundings and you can walk around with the headset which is wireless
So some of these things, if we try to do without a reseller, what would happen is that they would think that... This is just like one of the competitor products. So they may not have had great success with that. So it can't be better than that is a typical refrain we keep hearing. But the moment they wear the headset and try it, they are totally wowed. So that all makes sense to me.
My specific question is, how did you how are you finding and incentivizing these resellers to sell your product? Can you maybe name like what's the website of one of your top resellers in the U.S. ? So there's one company called Learning Labs. So these are typically smaller companies which operate in three, four, or five states. This site, Learning Labs? No, Learning Labs.
LLI is how they are called. these guys. Yeah. Yeah. These guys. Yes. Okay. So they heard about you, your word of mouth. They said, we love your product. You said, okay, let's, let's incentivize you. Why don't you sell more of our products into the U S do what, you know, you don't have to share their specific deal, but in general, how are you paying resellers to take the time to sell your product?
So typically we would handhold them. We would run some workshops to train them on how to, uh, how to demonstrate our product, how to highlight the benefits that this has over the other people. Also about we have different scales of how much effort they put and how much commission they make. So if we are assisting them very actively, then the commission is less.
But if they're doing it entirely on their own, which they have started doing now, then they get a much higher commission. What's the range? What's the low? What's the high? So it could range from something like 3%, 4% to as high as 20%. Okay, got it.
So if one of these folks, you know, sells a $100,000 package and requires very little help from you, you might pay them, you know, 10%, 11%, 12%, you know, up to 20% potentially, $20,000 on a $100,000 sale. Yeah. I see. Very cool. And how many, you said there's 10 resellers like Learning Labs that you're working with? Yes. Yes.
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