Top Founders

Fastest Growing AI Company Ever? CEO Reveals Revenue

Siva Surendra, CEO of Lyzr, ended 2024 with $0 in revenue. Eighteen months later his AI agent company closed Q2 2026 at $12M ARR, is adding $1–3M of new ARR every month, runs at 95% gross margin, and is on track for $30M by year-end. Potentially $50M if one federal government deal lands. In this interview Siva reveals how Lyzr went from $650K ARR in September 2025 to $12M in nine months (20x), why investors paid a 76x ARR multiple on his $8M Series A led by Rocketship with Accenture Ventures, and how his valuation jumped from $50M to $250M in just four months. He also explains why he built an AI SDR to $4M in contracted ARR in three months and then shut it down, how he beat Palantir on a $2M federal contract with a 10-day prototype, and why he says a $400M acquisition offer would be too low. You'll hear the numbers behind the enterprise AI playbook: 32 enterprise customers paying $250K–$1M each, 80,000 builders on the platform, 400 inbound leads a month converting at 60%, and Lyzr Optimus (a sovereign, on-premise AI appliance priced from $10K to $1M that supports 10,000 concurrent users and costs 95% less than frontier APIs like OpenAI and Anthropic). Siva is now raising a $100M Series B.

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$30/Night Rooms Make Him $60,000 Per Day | PadSplit CEO Atticus LeBlanc

Atticus LeBlanc, CEO of PadSplit, rents furnished rooms for under $30 a night, has 25,000 of them filled tonight, and owns none of the real estate. PadSplit is the largest co-living marketplace in the US: 82 units at the end of 2018, 34,000 today, over $250M a year in rent flowing through the platform, and 70% growth three years in a row. In this interview, Nathan Latka breaks down the marketplace business model behind it: an 8% take rate (roughly $60,000 per day), the 10-day rent clawback that funds customer acquisition, an 8-day average room refill time, and a 9.5-month average stay where 25% of tenants stay 12+ months. Atticus also explains why he chose the Airbnb model over owning property like Invitation Homes, how real estate investors and small landlords earn higher yields renting by the room, and how a crowdfunding partner is buying up performing PadSplit homes. On the funding side: 77 investor meetings for his 2021 Series B and one yes, $40M in total equity raised, and a new Orix credit facility that landed after he got the company near break-even. He answers "hell no" to a $150M all-cash offer and explains why. Topics: affordable housing, co-living, real estate investing, rental property, proptech, marketplace business model, two-sided marketplace, take rate, venture capital vs debt financing, public benefit corporation, bootstrapping to break-even, Atlanta startups. Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch?sub_confirmation=1 Subscribe on iTunes: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/top-founders/id1023761733 Subscribe on Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/3AA9buFn8oxJf8WSDOUks5 Looking for funding? Visit https://founderpath.com/

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Doctor Strikes it Rich with AI Tool, $10m ARR in 6 Months | TJMLabs CEO Jonathan Adly

Jonathan Adly spent 15 years as a licensed pharmacist before writing the first line of code for TJM Labs in November 2024 — and 18 months later he's at $25M ARR, 40% EBITDA, 450 pharmacies, and $100M raised without ever making a pitch deck. His pharmacy AI agents cost $45,000 a year, replace 2–3 human technicians each, and now fill 500,000 prescriptions every day. In this episode he breaks down the $1M → $15M → $25M ARR run, why he took a $75M Series B from Elephant while already profitable, how he values an AI company at 15X+ off public comps, and the napkin math from 450 pharmacies to a $1.8B opportunity.

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This Ugly Website Does $106M/Year (866,000 Pay For It)

Vadim Yasinovsky, co-founder of pdfFiller and CEO of airSlate (parent of pdfFiller, signNow, DocHub, US Legal Forms, airSlate Flow), breaks down how a plain-looking PDF editor page became a $106M/year product with 866,000 paying customers — inside a company doing $200M in revenue across 1.1 million customers at an average of $180/year. He raised just $150M total (last round: $52M at a $1.25B valuation in June 2022) and now says the company is optimistically worth $800M — despite doubling revenue since. He bought signNow at $3M and grew it to $35M. He built an SEO machine on 4.8 billion keywords and 35 million pages, and now says that playbook is dead within 9–12 months as ChatGPT and AI search take over. In this episode: Why 650 employees are split into siloed 120-person product teams with no shared tech Why airSlate didn't become Harvey despite 85,000 lawyer-built legal forms as a training set Why Vadim says the "ChatGPT SEO" gurus are "b.s." and his influence on search drops from 80% to 30% His unannounced AI product (bizdraft.com) and why he won't monetize it The path from $200M to $400M: 20–30% from existing products, the rest from vertical AI His M&A filter: product-market fit, domain expertise, $5–10M+ revenue minimum His advice to founders: raise as late as you can, cash is king, preserve it now Topics: SaaS, SEO, programmatic SEO, AI search, ChatGPT, document automation, e-signature, PDF editor, legal forms, SMB software, bootstrapping, vertical SaaS, M&A, capital efficiency.

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"I Built My Own AI Video Model, Now Make $3M a Month," Akool CEO Jeff Lu

Jeff Lu quit Google Cloud in 2022 to build his own AI video models at Akool, a generative AI platform for avatars, face swap, and video translation. He skipped the giant foundation models and trained small ones for specific tasks on rented servers, then watched revenue go from $100K in 2022 to $3M in 2023, $13M in 2024, $25M in 2025, and over $3M in June 2026 alone. He breaks down why Coca-Cola picked him over the foundation models and now pays him $4m per year. He'll share how he's driven huge usage (500,000 images and videos created daily) and what he'd say if Google offered $500M cash. Akool revenue data: https://getlatka.com/companies/akool.com

You Make $8m/yr, Would You Sell for $100m Cash? | Antoine Fort, CEO Qobra

Antoine Fort launched Qobra in 2020 with a $100K pre-seed from 7 angels, and his first investor was also his first customer. He started by cold calling with a phone list from a provider later shut down over European privacy law (GDPR), charging $10K/year. Today Qobra is at about $30K/year per customer, 250+ customers, and roughly $7–8M ARR. Along the way, one meme ad closed an $80K/year deal, and a single sales rep on the platform earned $1.5M in commissions (75x the average). So when Nathan asks if he'd sell for $100M cash today, his answer is surprisingly honest. Qobra is an AI-first sales compensation and commission software platform. Antoine covers his $5M seed and $10M Series A, the $2M in debt he raised to limit dilution, the $200K–300K/year he spends on LinkedIn, YouTube and Google ads, his G2 and SEO glossary playbook, and the three AI agents Qobra is building to replace commission consultants.

How He Makes $40M/yr Renting Laptops for $50/Mo | Sevan Marian, CEO Fleet

Sevan Marian, co-founder and CEO of Fleet, bootstrapped his Paris-based laptop rental company for 7 straight years to roughly $40M in annualized revenue and close to $10M in yearly profit (EBITDA), without raising a single dollar of VC. His trick: customers pay about $50/month on 36-month contracts, and Fleet sells each contract to a bank that pays it upfront on day one. That's how he's financed 50,000+ devices across 20 countries without holding inventory. In early 2026 he sold about 25% of the company at a $100M valuation, and every dollar went out to the team: employees cashed out 100% of their shares, worth several million euros.

How Does Laundry Software Make $60M a Year? | Alex Jekowsky CEO TryCents

At 23, Alex Jekowsky started building Cents, an all-in-one software, hardware, and payments platform for laundromats, dry cleaners, and shared laundry rooms. In 2025, Cents generated $60 million in revenue, up 67%, with just 80 employees and EBITDA margins above 20%. The company now has 99% customer retention, powers laundry rooms in nearly 7,000 apartment buildings, and recently raised a $140 million Series C at an approximately $800 million valuation. In this episode, Alex reveals: • How Cents grew from $700,000 to $60 million in four years • Why its first customer was a 73-location laundry operator • How Cents combines software, payments, and custom-built hardware • Why the company generates roughly $750,000 in revenue per employee • How Cents maintains 99% customer retention • Why Alex acquired a hardware company instead of continuing to build everything internally • How the $140 million financing included a $30 million employee tender • Why founders should avoid raising at valuations that eliminate future options • How Alex plans to turn an overlooked industry into a multibillion-dollar company

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FrodaEmbedded.com hits $80m Revenue by Lending to 150k SMB's | CEO Oliver Mohseni

Froda generated $57 million in revenue in 2025 by lending to the small businesses traditional banks often overlook. In this episode, Nathan Latka sits down with Froda co-founder Oliver Mohseni to unpack the economics behind the startup bank. Froda has supported 150,000 businesses across seven markets and funded approximately $3.45 billion since launch. Oliver explains how Froda uses retail deposits, automated underwriting, and embedded partnerships with banks, fintech companies, payment providers, and software platforms to scale its lending operation. Listen to learn: • How Froda makes money on an average loan of just $23,000 • Why its banking license and retail deposits create an advantage • How it prices loans at approximately 16% APR while managing credit losses • Why embedded lending helped Froda expand across Europe • How the company built a roughly $500 million active loan book

He Sells AI Door-to-Door. $3.5M ARR, 400% Growth, $0 Ads

Carl Turner, founder of Swipe.by, built an AI marketing platform for restaurants to $3.5M ARR growing 400% year-over-year — with $0 spent on ads and every customer closed by a rep knocking on doors. He breaks down the exact rep comp plan (6 locations/month, $6K ACV, 30–40% commission), why he took $450K from Founderpath instead of Stripe, and why he gives away websites and online ordering for free. Then he turns down a $15M cash offer and explains the 2x liquidation preference math that could leave a founder with nothing. SaaS, bootstrapped, AI, restaurant tech, outside sales, SMB, Nathan Latka, Top Founders

He Makes $50m/yr on Cookie Popups, Controls 2% of all Web Traffic

Raphaël Boukris is the co-founder and Chief Revenue Officer of Didomi (didomi.io), the Paris-based consent management platform that helps enterprises comply with GDPR, CCPA, and privacy laws worldwide. Roughly 2% of all global web traffic passes through Didomi's SDK, and the company processes billions of consent decisions every month for customers including Bloomberg, Sky, and Adyen. In this interview, Raphaël breaks down the full financial history on the record: three funding rounds, two acquisitions, and a majority sale to private equity. He raised under €300k from angels, then €5m from Breega in late 2019, then a €34m ($40m) Series B led by Elephant and Breega in summer 2021 — priced, he says, at above a 10x ARR multiple. Eight months later the market collapsed. He never burned through the money. In April 2025, Marlin Equity Partners took majority control, and Didomi immediately acquired Addingwell and Sourcepoint. Today the group does $40–60m ARR across 3,500 customers with fewer than 200 employees, and has at least one customer paying over $1m per year. What we cover: (01:02) What Didomi actually sells, and why every cookie banner in Europe is a business (01:51) Why roughly 2% of global web traffic runs through their SDK (02:12) Processing billions of consents per month — and who is not the customer (03:00) Pricing on monthly unique visitors, and why AI agents and bots are breaking that model (04:32) The Addingwell acquisition: a few million in ARR, a few thousand euros ACV, profitable enough to pay dividends (05:10) Why he bought a second product instead of building one (06:56) Every round, in order: sub-€300k angel, €5m Breega, €34m Series B (07:50) Above a 10x multiple in 2021 — and how he ran Elephant through a roadshow to get it (09:44) Secondaries in the Series B, and managing a team whose options went underwater (10:06) The year he crossed $1m ARR, and the year he crossed $10m (12:18) The question he answers "absolutely not" — was he ever close to shutting it down (13:09) What growth equity actually pays in 2025, and the range he'd give (14:22) Buying Sourcepoint, a company that had raised $48m, for its ACV and its US enterprise base (15:07) 3,500 customers, one paying over $1m/year, under 200 people (16:44) The combined group revenue number: $40–60m ARR Full metrics, funding history, and revenue timeline: https://getlatka.com/companies/didomi.io

Why Does Google Pay Him $2M A Year?

Stéphane Donzé has bootstrapped AODocs and Talarian to a combined $60m in 2026 revenue without raising capital. His top three customers each pay more than $2m per year, including Google, which pays him millions annually to control the documents behind its data center builds. He funded fourteen years of R&D off a cloud consulting business, never burned more than $200k in a month, and has fielded private equity calls four times a week declining $600m offers.

How He Bootstrapped Dental Software to $16m

He bootstrapped to $16.5m ARR selling software to 2,000 dental offices. Zero dollars raised, 24% EBITDA, and $1.5m in free cash flow last year. COVID cut him back to $2m in 2021; he's added $14.5m since, charging $13k per dental office per year. When I asked what happens if Henry Schein shows up with $180m cash, he gave a surprising answer.

How David Chevalier Hit $15M ARR With a Chrome Extension and No Sales Team - Surfe

How do you go from a Chrome extension with no sales team to $15M in revenue in five years, while raising less money than most startups spend in their first year? David Chevalier is the co-founder and CEO of Surfe, the leading CRM enrichment and waterfall data platform for B2B sales teams. He bootstrapped for two years, grew to $1.5M purely through HubSpot and Pipedrive marketplace rankings, and has never taken a dollar of personal secondary despite being six years into the company. Today Surfe processes 50 million data points per year and is the third partner inside HubSpot's AI prospecting agent next to ZoomInfo and Apollo. You'll learn: How Surfe got to $1.5M in revenue with zero salespeople by becoming the number one app in HubSpot and Pipedrive marketplaces The waterfall enrichment model that aggregates 15 data providers and why building it at scale is much harder than it looks Why a third of their $15M revenue now comes from API usage and credits rather than seat licenses How David revealed his company revenue publicly for the first time ever on this show The Google partnership that started three and a half years ago and helped Surfe build the waterfall before the market even knew what it was Why their largest customer now pays over $1 million per year and how many more are approaching that threshold What happened when David tried to hire salespeople before the product was ready, and how many failed hires it took to find their CCO Eric How Surfe doubled from $9M to $15M in one year with 20 AEs each carrying $700 to $800K in quota Why 40% of their revenue comes from the US despite being founded in Paris and what it took to make that happen What David would do differently if he could go back and negotiate secondary at his pre-Series A round Connect: YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Surfe: surfe.com Founderpath: founderpath.com

Practice by Numbers: $16.5M Dental SaaS, 24% EBITDA, Zero VC - Rohit Garg

How do you build a $16.5M vertical SaaS company with 24% EBITDA margins with zero paid acquisition, zero outside funding, and your wife as co-founder? Rohit Garg is the co-founder and CEO of Practice by Numbers, an all-in-one dental practice management platform serving 1,300 customers across 2,000 locations. He started building it in 2015 because his wife is a dentist and he was the one running SQL queries to answer her business questions. Today they are bootstrapped, profitable, and sitting on $2 billion in untouched payment GMV from their existing customer base. You'll learn: Why Rohit built the entire platform by sweat equity while working a full-time job at Philips Healthcare How Practice by Numbers went from $2M in 2021 to $16.5M in 2026 without spending a dollar on paid ads Why their customers generate almost 2x the national average in dental practice revenue — and why that drives retention without any loyalty program The $2 billion in payment GMV sitting in their system right now that they have not started converting yet Why Henry Schein and Patterson, who own the biggest competitors, simply cannot move fast enough to build what Practice by Numbers has built How 100% inbound word of mouth growth leads to 22 to 24% EBITDA margins at $12.5M in revenue The AI receptionist and agentic workflow roadmap that will let dental office managers run the entire practice without touching a screen What Rohit actually said when Nathan asked if he would sell for $180M all cash to the company that owns Dentrix Why COVID cut the company at its knees in 2020 and what it took to relaunch and 8x revenue in five years The vision for $100M in revenue within 10 years and why Rohit thinks it will happen faster than expected Connect: YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Practice by Numbers: practicenumbers.com Founderpath: founderpath.com

Handwrytten Sends 6 Million Fake Handwritten Notes a Year and Makes $10M

How do you build a $10M business by teaching robots to write handwritten notes with real pens, and do it with zero outside investment for 12 straight years? David Wachs sold his text message marketing company for eight figures in 2012, started Handwrytten the next day, and has bootstrapped it to 200 custom-built robots in a Phoenix facility sending 350,000 notes per month. He owns 100% of the company, took $350K in profit last year, and is targeting $10 to $11M in revenue this year. You'll learn: Why David thinks physical CapEx is now a competitive moat in the AI era, and why he is glad he can't be vibe coded away in a weekend How Handwrytten went from $1M in 2018 to $9.4M in 2024 without raising a single dollar The veterinarian euthanasia franchise that has been sending 80,000 robot-written notes per quarter for 8 straight years Why a $5 Google ad click from a realtor generates only 20 cents in contribution margin and what that forced them to do instead How they built a paper feed system that can write on a stuffed envelope without mismatching a single card across hundreds of thousands of sends The robot leasing model: 30 units in the field at $1,000 to $1,250 per robot per month going to 3PL facilities and swag companies How integrations with HubSpot, Shopify, Claude MCP, Zapier, and Salesforce turned Handwrytten into a fully automated marketing channel Why David would sell for $100M today and what roll-up strategy Nathan pitched him live on camera The SEO playbook that drives 40,000 organic clicks per month with zero agency spend and one in-house writer What it actually costs to build a robot when you manufacture them yourself in Tempe, Arizona Connect: YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Handwrytten: handwrytten.com Founderpath: founderpath.com

Featherless: $3.6M Revenue Running 6,700 Open Source AI Models — Eugene Cheah

How do you go from a pricing experiment inside a failing product to $3.6 million in annual revenue with 10,000 customers — in under two years and with zero paid marketing? Eugene Cheah is the co-founder and CEO of Featherless.ai, the largest open source LLM inference provider on Hugging Face. He co-created RWKV, the first attention-free AI architecture under the Linux Foundation, and today runs a 27-person team serving customers that pay anywhere from $25 a month to $2 million a year. You'll learn: Why Featherless started as an accident — a pricing experiment that outperformed the original company within days How they grew to 10,000 customers with zero paid marketing using only Reddit posts to AI communities The enterprise sales motion that closes $1 to $2 million per year contracts by showing startups how to cut their OpenAI or Anthropic bills in half Why supporting 6,700 models versus competitors' 100 is the moat — and why no one else is doing it How the RWKV architecture has the potential to reduce AI inference costs by over 1,000x compared to today's transformer models Why the bottom 50% of AI model usage — the fine-tuned, niche, non-English models — is where the real money is hiding What happened when servers caught fire from user growth and the team had to add capacity faster than they could hire How a $20 million Series A in December 2025 finally gave them enough server capacity to breathe Why Eugene believes AI models today are massively over-parameterized — and what a human brain tells us about where efficiency is actually going The refund guarantee Eugene made live on camera and what it says about their confidence in the product Connect: YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Featherless: featherless.ai Founderpath: founderpath.com

Gather AI: $15M Revenue With Drones and 170% Net Retention - Sankalp Arora

How do you build a $15M revenue business by teaching autonomous drones to find missing sneakers in warehouses, and get customers to more than double their spend every single year? Sankalp Arora is the founder and CEO of Gather AI, a physical AI company that uses autonomous drones and computer vision to track inventory in real time across warehouses. He holds a PhD in robotics from Carnegie Mellon, built the world's first safe autonomous helicopter for DARPA, and today has 30 to 40 customers paying an average of $500K per year with net revenue retention of 170%. You'll learn: Why Sankalp spent three years writing code with zero revenue before getting his first customer in 2021 How a $2 warehouse pick turns into a $15 pick because of one inventory location error, and how Gather cut that by 70% for Barrett The land and expand math: customers start with 5 facilities and expand to 100 within three years at $500K per facility network Why 170% net revenue retention is possible when your product is embedded in daily warehouse operations How Gather AI built neural nets that can read barcodes a standard grocery store scanner cannot, with no human annotation required Why Sankalp passed on big-name VCs and chose Smith Point Capital, founded by Keith Block, former CEO of Salesforce The forklift vision product that turns any warehouse into an Amazon Go store using off-the-shelf hardware from Best Buy How Sankalp was carrying suicidal thoughts since his teenage years and only discovered life without them a year and a half ago, while building a company past $9M in revenue The Series B math: $40M raised at roughly $270M to $400M valuation selling 10 to 15% of the business at $15M in revenue Why Gather AI is touching just 0.1% of its addressable market today, and what 1% would actually mean in dollar terms Connect: YouTube: Nathan Latka Gather.ai: gather.ai Founderpath: founderpath.com

Tive Hit $100M Revenue After a Down Round and $10K in the Bank

How do you go from $10,000 left in the bank and a down round to $100 million in annual revenue — without ever seriously considering quitting? Krenar Komoni is the founder and CEO of Tive, a hardware-plus-SaaS company that tracks shipments in real time across trucks, ships, and planes worldwide. He started in his basement in 2015, charging his father-in-law $19.99 a month, and today has 1,300 customers — nine of which pay over $1 million per year — at a $545 million valuation. You'll learn: Why Krenar almost went bankrupt twice and laid off 75% of his team — and what kept him going The pricing mistake that nearly killed the company: manufacturing a tracker for $150 and selling it for the same price How hiring two college kids to cold call strangers became the GTM playbook that took Tive from $2.5M to $10M in revenue Why 60% of new revenue at Tive comes from existing customers expanding, not new logos The patent that creates a physical switching cost competitors can't replicate: ping-rate configuration based on shipment events How Krenar negotiated a down round from $21M to $11M valuation with $10K in the bank — and why he doesn't regret it What it actually takes to land a million-dollar-per-year customer when you sell physical hardware on monthly contracts Why Krenar thinks AI agents will fully automate the supply chain in 24 to 36 months — and how Tive is already building toward that The secondary liquidity story: why his Series A1 investor had to push him to take money off the table before he had the courage to ask How Tive went from $250K revenue in 2019 to $100M run rate in 2026 — the full year-by-year breakdown Connect: YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Tive: https://www.tive.com/ Founderpath: https://founderpath.com/

Golf Genius: $53M ARR, $10M Self-Funded, Zero VC — Mike Zisman

How do you build a $53M ARR software company, stay profitable for eight straight years, and give 60% of the cap table to your employees — without ever taking a venture check? Mike Zisman is the founder and CEO of Golf Genius, the dominant tournament management and handicapping platform for golf clubs worldwide. He self-funded $10M of his own money as interest-free debt, did 10 acquisitions before hitting $60M in revenue, and today sits on $14M cash while printing 20% EBITDA margins with 300 employees across the US and Cluj, Romania. You'll learn: Why Mike structured his entire $10M founder investment as debt instead of equity — and how it created a tax shield that paid him back on the way out How the USGA handicapping contract in 2019 transformed Golf Genius from a niche club tool into the infrastructure layer of global golf How Golf Genius went from $0 to $1M ARR in 8 years, then from $1M to $53M in the next 8 — and what the USGA relationship had to do with the inflection point Why 50% of his 300-person team are engineers based in Cluj, Romania — and how that structural cost advantage funds 20% EBITDA while competitors burn cash The exact three-phase acquisition strategy: legacy desktop customer rollups, league expansion, then B2C mobile apps with 8M+ users How Mike negotiated the GolfShot acquisition — and why he forced their entire cap table behind a single LLC before closing Why employees own 60% of the cap table at $53M ARR and how that drives 6-7% annual attrition across the entire company including Romania What Mike would say if a PE firm offered $400M all cash today — and why he says he's more excited about what's next than he's been in years Why he thinks AI will make SaaS companies radically more productive, not obsolete — from a founder whose doctoral thesis in 1977 was already on artificial intelligence The rule of 40 reality at $53M ARR: why growth slows as companies scale and what Mike does to stay above the 10% industry average Connect: YouTube: youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Golf Genius: golfgenius.com Founderpath: founderpath.com