SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
Voice AI Company Raises $17m at $80m Valuation, 50x Revenue Multiple, Scaling Fast with NDR of 120%
11 Jan 2022
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Yep. So I mean, we can take $40,000 ACV, 70-ish customers. I mean, you guys are doing like 250 grand a month right now on revenue, something like that. I cannot disclose that information at all. I'm just multiplying your numbers. You are listening to Conversations with Nathan Latka, where I sit down and interview the top SaaS founders, like Eric Wan from Zoom.
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Hey folks, my guest today is Surabhi Rathore. She's the CEO and co-founder of Symbol.ai, the company's bringing to life provision for a programmable platform that empowers developers and businesses to monitor, act, and comply with voice video conversations at scale in their products and workflows without building their own in-house data science expertise.
Surabhi, are you ready to take us to the top? Do it.
Chapter 2: Who is the guest and what is their company about?
Let's do it. All right. I'm stoked that you're here. If people want to follow along, it's SYMBL.AI. Who are you selling to? We're selling to developers and businesses that are really bullish on expanding their brand to go beyond communications and use the power of AI machine learning to build awesome next-generation experiences that delights their users in conversations.
And how did you discover that this was a problem? We were working in the conversation AI space, both me and my co-founder before at Amdocs, and continuously over and over again came across chatbots, but nothing for calls, which actually connects humans together.
And we just wanted to put together a platform that enables and empowers people to maximize value information from human-to-human conversations and not just human-to-machine. And that's how we started. Well, there's so much audio and video data like this being created every day. It's a powerful space to be in. What do you charge for this?
What's the average customer paying you per month to use the tech? So ACVs depend upon whether you're a developer or you're an enterprise doing committed volumes.
We have, you can just start pay as you go without any commitment all the way from like 0.058 per minute, which is like super cheap for anyone to get started with all the capabilities, not just speech to text, but also intelligence, insights, analytics, all included. You said 0.05 cents? 0.05, uh, 0.05 dollars. Uh, 0.0. Yeah. So 5 cents. Yeah. 5 cents. Okay. Just making sure. Yeah.
So all the way from 5 cents to all the way to, you know, committed volume deals of a hundred to a hundred K depending upon what's your tiers. Uh, so we charge based on volume and usage. I see. And, and so the volume is quantified by minutes. Is that right? That's right. Yeah. Okay. And what about, is there a seat based upsell motion or no? Do you upsell based off number of seats or no? No.
So we truly believe in peanut butter your intelligence all over the products that you have. So you only pay based on usage and irrespective of how many seats, how many products you apply, it doesn't matter. At the end of the day, it's the number of minutes which are analyzed by the platform that people get charged on. Okay. And interesting. I think it don't obviously name the customer.
It's private information, but their largest account, are we talking like $100,000 ACV or do you have a million? More than that. Not a million, but yeah, $150,000, $200,000. Wow. Okay. I mean, do you see a path to having, you know, million dollar customers in 2022, 2023? Absolutely. Super bullish about it. And actually talking to a few customers about that. Really interesting.
And so again, it's nice because you've natural upsell based off just number of minutes. It's really simple. Talk to me about day one. When did you guys launch the business? May 2018. May 2018. Okay.
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Chapter 3: Who are the target customers for Symbol.ai?
And how'd you get the first customer? Do you remember? Yes. LinkedIn cold outreach. Wow. Give me like the verbiage. What was the copy? Nothing. It was, hey, we're building conversation intelligence system that will automate meeting notes out of your platform.
Very, very focused on their particular use case that they were going to solve for and got a meeting, took a phone call, followed by a meeting demo, and then boom, pilot signed. Wow. Okay. That was number one. How many customers today? Today we have customers in higher double digits. Double digits, you said? High double digits, yes. When do you think you can pass 100? Soon.
Probably first quarter of the next year. Okay, so you're talking like 70, 80 customers and something like that. Yeah. Where are you getting new customers? Still LinkedIn Outreach? No, no, no. That was way back. You never know. Sometimes it works, you know? Yeah, we focus a lot on generating content and just SEO organic signups through developer hackathons, community events, all of that.
So our entire motion is kind of like product led acquisition. That's kind of what we do. So developers sign up on the platform, get activated, try, we see whether they are from which domains, are they activated? Have they qualified from a product usage? And then either we reach out to them or get reached out by their product teams. And that's how we get connected on meetings with them.
Fascinating. And today, like across all your customers, how many, like, I don't know what the right word is, but how many minutes are you managing per month? We are doing millions of minutes. And we've been doing that since I think the last
seven, eight months, specifically once products matured post-COVID and implemented some of the key use cases that are giving value in accessibility, compliance, or call tracking, which are the most important ones. Since then, we've really taken off on the minutes consumption. Are we talking like 3 million minutes a month or like 30 million minutes per month? No, no, not 30 yet, between 5 to 10.
5 to 10. I want to get a sense of growth rate. How many more minutes are you adding per month
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Chapter 4: How does Symbol.ai charge for its services?
I would say 20% is kind of like our average growth. Wow. Okay. I mean, that's pretty impressive. Yes. Which is why we raised the Series A. Okay. So tell me about that. When was the Series A? Yeah. We just closed, I think a couple of weeks back, a $17 million Series A, which was led by Great Point Ventures. Really pumped to work with Really and got them from there.
And they have scaled massive enterprise-scale companies. So yeah, super pumped. And why do you need the capital? Because obviously there's dilution associated with it. There is. And that's a great question because like, that's always something that we think about as entrepreneurs is like, we take the capital for growth as opposed to really surviving.
That has always been like one of our motives that we see an opportunity in It's already working. Can we double down on the investment in our developer evangelism or relations that we are doing? We're already writing pieces of content that's getting great action. Can we actually do it 10x times? So things like that is always an opportunity of growth for companies.
And I think timing is so critical based on where we are today, where businesses have started to realize that transcription is not good enough. They need something more than that. And that's what we're bringing to the table, which makes this time really exciting. Thank you.
Many of you guys listening have built incredible SaaS tools to help other founders, specific industries really get value or make some system easier. The problem is you can't help your clients until they import some portion of their data. And you've considered on your Trello board and your Sprint timelines spending weeks building a CSV importer for certain data sets.
You're spying right now because you know I'm right. And either you do it and you waste engineering time or you don't do it and your customers have a horrible time getting onboarded. And listen, let's face the facts. Your ability to give value to your customers sometimes is very dependent on their ability to get you their data. Once you have the data, everything is really smooth.
Well, this exact problem probably explains why Flatfile is growing so quick. They've raised over $44 million and they do exactly this. The data onboarding platform for your marketing teams, your engineering teams, they enable you to get usable data faster so you can focus on what matters most to your business.
And the fastest growing companies like my friend ClickUp, Zeb, multi-billion dollar valuation, they all use Flatfile. Now flat file reached out. They wanted to sponsor. I said, you got a good deal for us. And they do for anyone listening, any, anyone that's part of the top entrepreneurs community or get Latka.
You can get a deal now to get started today at Nathan Latka.com forward slash flat file. And they make it so easy by the way, their onboarding is beautiful. You don't have to commit to a bunch of stuff. You can actually see a demo live instantly right now. Check it out. Nathan Latka.com forward slash flat file.
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Chapter 5: What was the process of acquiring the first customer?
I have more charisma. I'm doing all the podcast interviews. Well, you haven't met him yet. So we'll take that for the next time, probably. That's funny. I'll let you go and tell him 60-40. That's so funny. I'm sure he's a great guy. So okay, cool. So you split for people to get the start. You're growing now.
Now, a lot of founders that are doing the kind of raises you're doing always ask me, Nathan, what's a standard ESOP pool that we should be setting up? I imagine you guys set one up. How much is your ESOP pool today? We did. We did a 10-10% at our previous rounds, but this round specifically, we set up actually 15%.
We set up a higher ESOP one at this time because this is a great time to get awesome people in the company. And we wanted to make sure not just we get great people inside, but also incentivize the people which are inside the company. It's really important that people inside the company continue to get their ESOPs refreshed and I think, with their years of contribution.
And we have some awesome people that have completed two years, three years. How many folks full-time now? 54. Wow. Okay. And what's the split between, like, how many engineers? 80% engineers still. We are just building out our go-to-market team, which is a big...
thing that we took on after our series a, that was one of the biggest, um, uh, motivations of investment that those dollars, uh, 80% is engineering and 60% of the overall company actually is in India. Uh, so we are split between India and Seattle. So yeah, 60, 65% in India, 30, 35% in the U S which part India, Pune, Chennai, Bangalore. Yeah.
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Chapter 6: How has the customer base grown since launching?
Yeah. So Pune is majority of the team. We have some people in Bangalore, some people in New Delhi. And here in the US, we are mainly centered in Seattle and we have some people in the Bay Area, some people in Boulder. So kind of split like that. That's amazing.
And then going back to, I know I asked you what like highest customers are and sort of total number of minutes per month, but what would you say like the sweet spot is? What's the average customer paying you per month? I think 30 to 40K is like a great area for people to kind of get started. ACV, annual. Yeah, yeah.
And that way, it's very comfortable for them to get started by that amount and start seeing the value at a very small percentage of conversation data they have and then go from there and keep incrementing it. There are some folks which already know the use cases and they usually start at 200K above because they exactly know how to start. This is the volume that I want to implement.
And that's how I go ahead and get started. But for the folks that are trying to experiment with the use cases for them, that is a good sweet spot. Yep. Yep. So I mean, we can take $40,000 ACV, 70-ish customers. I mean, you guys are doing like 250 grand a month right now on revenue, something like that. I cannot disclose that information at all. I'm just multiplying your numbers.
I did not share the previous numbers and the later numbers. So yeah. Yeah. No, you did share those numbers. You said you had something between 50 and 100 customers and a $40,000 average. We can multiply, right? But those 5,200 are split in between pay-as-you-go, committed volumes, all across. Okay, so 40,000 is not an average then?
Yeah, I mean, average across committed customers, not across pay-as-you-go customers. Those are the two different kind of customers that we have. So developers which are already upgrading from the platform, they sign up for a different amount because they are just experimenting. And then these are the other customers. I see. that basically we sign committed volume deals with.
It's a pretty similar Twilio model. So it's base revenue and that there's a variable revenue. You can't be far though, sorry, from a $3 million run, right? You've got to be flirting with it. I cannot disclose that information. I'm sorry. I'm going to be a pain here, but yeah, no.
What revenue multiple, you shared valuation on the Series A. I'm curious because I like these benchmarks, like 10X, 20X, 50X. What was the revenue multiple? Revenue multiple was, yeah, 50X. 5-0. Yeah. Does it make you nervous growing into that valuation or no, you're ready for it? No, totally ready for it. I think it's a lot about the opportunity that lies in front of us that we can tap into.
It was all a function of manpower. Like this round was so exciting because we had a bunch of pipeline, but no one to actually, we have literally one sales guy, like that's insane. And we grew from like $0 in revenue to where we are right now with the last kind of like 12 months. Oh, so you had no revenue this same time in 2020? At 2020, same time, we were doing like peanuts. Like 5K a month?
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Chapter 7: What is the significance of the recent funding round?
That is, absolutely. Yeah. What was the second most important metric? Just like revenue growth. Yeah, absolutely. Revenue growth is an important number for us. And obviously, number of developers on the platform. I think that also is really critical. All right, Serby, let's wrap up with the famous five here. Number one, favorite business book? Hard Things About Hard Things.
Number two, is there a CEO you're following or studying? Jennifer Tejada, Page of Duty. Ah, yes. Number three, what's your favorite online tool for building the business? Notion. And number four, how many hours of sleep do you get every night? Six. Six. Okay. That's not horrible. And what's your situation? Married, single kids? I am married. My husband lives in Sydney, Australia. Oh, wow. Okay.
Any kids? No. Okay. And do you mind me asking how old you are? I'm 34. 34. Last question. Something you wish you knew when you were 20. Start a company right now. Don't wait until you're 32. Okay. Guys, symbol.ai, helping you guys make more sense of all the video data you're capturing during COVID, post-COVID, organize it, pay per minute, analyze.
They've got over, you know, caught between 50 and 100 customers already on the platform, scaling nicely, doing like 5, 10 grand a month in revenue like a year ago. Now well over that. Did a $17 million Series A recently at a 50X revenue multiple.
She's going to hate that I'm saying this, but if it's a 50X multiple and an 80 million valuation because they sold 10 to 20% that we can back into revenue of about 1.5 million run right about a year ago. She's going to smile and hate me for that. She can't comment, but check them out. I'm very bullish on these guys. Serby, thank you for taking us to the top. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Nathan.
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