SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Team of 12 Hits $2.5m in ARR, $64m Valuation for Customer Success Tool. Can they beat Gainsight?
25 Aug 2023
Chapter 1: How did Involve.ai scale to $2.2 million in ARR?
You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom. If you'd like to subscribe, go to getlatka.com.
We've published thousands of these interviews, and if you want to sort through them quickly by revenue or churn, CAC, valuation, or other metrics, the easiest way to do that is to go to getlatka.com and use our filtering tool. It's like a big Excel sheet for all of these podcast interviews. Check it out right now at getlatka.com. As involved AI is doing $185,000 a month in revenue today.
That's up from total revenue last year of 1.5 million in total revenue in 2021. A year before that up just 250 K they slugged for four years, launched in 2017 to get that first 250 K had 16 grand left in the bank, almost shut it down. And then G recognized, oh my gosh, Verizon's got a bunch of accounts on our platform, 40 K people using it.
They landed a $1.45 million contract with rise and that spurred them to where they are today. Raised $16 million Series A last year at a $64 million post-money valuation. They still have the majority of that, over $10 million in the bank. They're not profitable yet, but only burning $90 grand a month relative to cash in the bank. Plenty of runway there. A team of 12 as they scale. Involve.ai.
It helps you understand which of your customers are likely to expand or stay flat or even churn or contract. Helps you deliver a better customer experience. Hey folks, my guest today is Guru Bhattacharya. He is, or he goes by G. He grew up in Delhi, lost his father to cancer at a young age, and this led to his first venture, a patient experience platform for doctors.
Following its success, he moved to the US, dove into AI. His goal, revolutionizing workplace, product healthcare, pet care, and finance with AI. He's doing this at Involve.ai. Gaurav, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, super excited to be here. Thanks for the opportunity. And like I was telling you, Nathan, I'm such a big fan of the podcast and it's an honor to be here.
Well, okay. Now tell me all your numbers. Tell me, you know the drill, right? So tell me a story of a customer that's using you today and what they use you for.
Yeah, sounds good. So we've had a kind of like a roller coaster journey. So I'll kind of start from the top here. So when we started Involve, we started it as a, you know, our goal was, hey, we'll start an employee experience platform. So we were like, hey, people would go and give back to the community. That's what me and my co-founder were really passionate about.
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Chapter 2: What challenges did the founder face in the early years?
2017, we started this company. We raised a little bit of seed money. We raised $1.5 million and we got to tons of users. And so we were sending millions of people around the world, do community events and volunteering events around them. But we could just never find how to monetize this. We were not able to make any money or make it a sustainable business. We got to 250,000 in annual revenue.
So that was kind of like our journey. What year was that? It took about four years. So four years of slogging and we just couldn't turn on a monetization switch.
So what year did you do 250 grand a year?
That was like year four. So that was like 2021, 2020, 2021. That's spot on.
Chapter 3: How did a $1.45 million contract change Involve.ai's trajectory?
Okay.
2021 actually. Yeah. So, so you got it.
Chapter 4: What is the significance of the $16 million Series A funding?
And then, so for our, our journey, Nathan was, you know, I had two weeks of runway left. I had like $16,000 in the bank. I had nine people in the company. And we were like, hey, I was actually writing like a goodbye email to all our users. And then my co-founder comes to me and he's like, hey, you have all of this data on our system, right? We've been collecting. We had Salesforce.
We had user data. We had Snowflake for all our users. We have AWS data. And he was like, can we analyze this to really find out like what failed? Like why did we mess up? And what kind of led to this like downfall basically? So we were like, okay, one last attempt. We're going to go back and look at all this data.
Chapter 5: How does Involve.ai leverage AI for customer success?
And we find out that we have 40,000 users from Verizon using us for free. So we were like, why are so many users from Verizon using us? And so we reached out to one of the HR leaders and we were like, hey, you know, just want to let you know we're shutting down the platform. And she was upset. She was like, don't shut it down because we rely on this. We go do all these community events.
We do our corporate social responsibility to this. So that was really cool, right? So that was a really great insight. They actually decided to pay us $1.45 million because that was in their budget of what they were spending or looking for a platform that year in 2021, which gave us enough runway to survive. We did pivot, however, into the realm of AI.
Hold on, hold on, hold on. So we can't just skip over you. So 2020, go back, you do your research. 2021, you convinced Ryzen to pay you 1.45 million. That's all money upfront in that year, 2021?
That is correct. Yep. That was 2021. Okay.
But you just told me you did 250K of revenue in 2021. So when did the 1.45 million revenue come in?
Yeah. So that was in 2021. That was november of 2021 where eisen pays us 1.45 we're not counting his annual revenue because that was just like to service the community platform which we no longer service but that was like the aha moment for us that said hey There's something here. We can look at the data that we have and come to some really strong aha moments. Can we do this for other companies?
And that's kind of what led to our current platform and what we are up to now, basically.
I see.
I just want to kind of plug that story. So that's kind of how we started.
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Chapter 6: What is the current revenue model and upselling strategy?
It's always like a week late. That's something that we have noticed and others have too. The reviews were early users who were using it. I wrote the first review because I was like, hey, I really get value out of this. And, you know, I just want to get the ball rolling. But we asked for early users to say, hey, can you please give us feedback? And if you'd like it, then post a review there.
Yeah. I mean, that's a key thing about when you launch on the stores, you've got to figure out how to get five-star reviews quickly. So after you posted, you got Ryan Laughlin to give it, Susie Pang, Paul Arambol. These are all, it sounds like active customers on the platform that you asked.
That's correct. Yep.
That's great. Okay. I love this. Um, how many, so I guess 70 folks, 70 paying customers today, you're doing $185,000 a month in revenue. That means the average customer is paying something like two to 2,500, three grand a month for the tool. What are ways that you upsell? Do you upsell on number of customers, number of seats, feature-based upselling? How do you do it?
Yeah. So we are not great at this thing. And so I'm not going to like do a good job at this. For all our products, we've been really bad at upsell motion. Basically, the customers who have bought more have been completely underpaying us. And we haven't nailed on pricing, just being very sincere here. We basically have always been all you can eat kind of pricing.
So it's like, hey, let's get all your users, unlimited users.
now we are moving into a consumption based package so we've come up with this terminology called actions when every company that we work with gets 5 000 actions with us and when they will use those actions they will have an upsell motion but it's too early for us so far we have been like pricing super simple it's like you get unlimited users you get everything and we haven't done
good pricing and packaging. Maybe something that I should learn better, watch all your other podcasts and do something good.
Well, it's just when I go to your pricing page, I see an error. It says, hello, this quiz is unavailable. So I'm curious how you're signing up people if your pricing page seems to be broken.
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