SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
How Ledge Reached $1M ARR with 24 Customers Paying $3K/Month | Tal Kirschenbaum
05 Mar 2026
Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Since we don't know your current revenue, are you comfortable sharing a multiple range that you just closed at? The multiple range for us was in kind of a mid-double digit one. You mean between like 10 and 20x? No, more than that.
You told us earlier our average revenue per user per month is about $3,000 a month and say 24 customers paying that price point, breaching that million dollar ARR point. Are you guys above that at that point? Is that math accurate? We're above that. I think you left in 2022. Xero pays $2.5 billion, I think, in 2025.
If you join Melio on a one-year cliff and four-year vest, which is pretty standard in startup world, you gave up and you can't help but go try and say, man, how much did I lose? Because you know the price is $2.5 billion, right?
Chapter 2: How did Ledge achieve $1M ARR with just 24 customers?
You know, it's in the seven kind of digit range. How are you building a moat at Ledge so that when Claude releases their next announcement, you're not replaced by their B2B ERP automatic NetSuite closing tool? Hey, folks. My guest today is Tal Kirscherbaum. He's the co-founder and CEO at Ledge, an AI-native financial clothes platform.
Before founding the business, his experience includes leading M&A transactions at Meta, developing new products at Melio, the payments company. Earlier in his career, he was strategy consulting at BCG and a venture capital associate at Intel Capital. Tal, you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, absolutely. Let's do it. I get excited.
I get pitched all the time from folks saying we're financial AI software. You have so intentionally positioned you use the word closed software, which I love because my first question to these generic companies is what do you actually help folks do? So tell us more about the business. What are you selling?
We work with finance teams at mid-market enterprise-sized companies to really help them automate month-end close, which, of course, is one of the most kind of repetitive, manual, time-consuming tasks that finance teams struggle with, something that I'm also quite familiar with.
We were able to help them get a better sense of how this process is progressing for themselves, their broader team, and then actually able to help them execute it. tasks within that process by leveraging the engine that we've built and the AI agents that are built on top of it.
My research team pointed out to me, you know, one of the trending terms when you dig deep into this space are things like how to use AI with QuickBooks or how to use AI with NetSuite. I could not find even going over integrations and Intuit logo anywhere, but you do NetSuite a ton. Am I reading that right? That means you're more focused on the enterprise? Correct, correct.
We like to think of it as been market enterprise, starting at, you know, a finance team of at least five people is usually when it starts becoming a massive project, you've got to coordinate different people, you've got dependencies between different tasks, you've got data that is spread across multiple different disparate data sources.
And that is really when a solution like ours is able to add a ton of value to streamline all that data into one single place, and then to be actually able to automate it. some of those tasks by the use of AI agents. So I want to get in obviously to the growth story, how I came up with the idea of the launch and how you got to where you are today. Before we do that though, give me some context.
Somebody listening today, if they were going to sign up to Ledge, what's your average customer paying you per month or per year today? You know, it's a few thousand dollars per month. It's a monthly SaaS fee. We are not a seat-based solution. We think that at this day and age, we're helping teams become leader and much more effective.
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Chapter 3: What unique pricing strategy does Ledge use?
And specifically, we teamed up with, at the time, a partner who knew a lot about what it was that we were building, having spent time as an operator himself at Airbnb building a lot of the financial kind of backboat and infrastructure there. And so the fit that we had with him was tremendous. And we were quite fortunate, I think, in that regard. That was, I believe, closed in February of 2023.
NEA lead Melio, you know, patting you on the back saying go for it. Vertex jumped in, FJ Labs, et cetera. Most folks in a seed round are selling between 15, 20% equity. Were you sort of in that same range? Yes. Yes, we were. Okay. Okay, got it. So that would put you like you're talking like 30 pre money 40 posts sort of in that range. Yeah, that's fair to say. Interesting. Okay.
So let's now fast forward. Have you raised additional capital or you're still able to survive and grow on that initial 9 million? We have. We've recently raised over the past few months or series a not yet announcing it, though. And so Hold on, let me see if I can coax that. So let me just give you the release schedule. We're recording here January 14th.
This episode will not go out until March, until April 4th. Will you have announced by then? I don't know yet. I need to, we're right now working on kind of the plan around that as well as announcing, kind of officially announcing the latest products that will be released about month and close, as well as being able to announce some interesting, exciting logos of Cover.
Well, this will be your decision then, right? Because a lot of people will see this interview. I am happy. You have it on recording. I'm happy to embargo this part of the show until you give me permission to lease it if you're comfortable sharing how much you raised, if you want to go into that. And the new product, if not, we can avoid it altogether. It's up to you. Let's avoid it for now.
I appreciate the offer. I really do. But, you know, we want to think this through, I think, a little bit better. Okay, fair enough. My apologies for that. You're good to know. But OK, so recording us in Jan 2026 Series A, obviously, that's great. Look for the announcement coming out later. Tell us more, though, how dilution is a real thing in the software world.
How are you managing your own dilution as you go through this process? My co-founder has a very simplistic way of thinking about dilution in general as it pertains to ourselves, to founders. And it's one that I agree with, especially in principle. And that is, I would much rather have a smaller percentage of... a much greater pie than a high percentage of a smaller pie.
And so that's really the way I think about things from a personal standpoint as well. As soon as you get into being an venture-backed company, that is a one-way street that you start walking down. And that one-way street has... predefined path to it.
So every 18, 24-ish months, you raise additional capital, you undergo additional dilution, but at the same time, hopefully, you're able to continue adding value overall to the company. And as a byproduct of that, of course, personally as well, hopefully your holdings grow. I have to give a counterpoint just for the sake of argument, and you can push back.
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