Jonathan Corbin, Eugene Mann, and Sami Shalabi have put together decades of combined experience in senior positions at Hubspot, Google, Adobe, Stripe, IBM - need I say more - to COMPLETELY revolutionize how companies engage with customers. I will let them explain to us in this 10th!! ScaleApp Podcasts episode but the way I see it is that they have revolutionized the customer support experience as a wedge for impacting the entire sales experience. Turns out that customer support alone is a half TRILLION $ business.

They have raised $28 million from VCs including the MIT affiliate fund, E14 (I am an LP), and already have impressive metrics including:

• 93% of inquiries resolved autonomously
•  81% reduction in support costs
•  2x increase in team productivity
•  60% faster resolution time

Just listen!!! and if you like it, LIKE it!!

Imagine a company, about 7 years old, with 250 employees around the world, revenues in the "eight figures"  (that means between $10-99 million), two thousand customers globally.  With high 2-digit annual growth. The company uses AI enabled peripheral devices (think cameras that can interpret situations and make decisions) to make the workplace safer, networked and managed on a common platform to communicate and make decisions.  Imagine, for example, a Coca-Cola bottling plant in which conveyor belts are filling and whizzing bottles around, boxing and putting them on palettes, and forklifts and other equipment are moving those palettes around, stacking them ceiling-high on racks. Dozens of workers are operating the heavy equipment, and inspectors and managers are moving fast around. One of the forklifts stalls creating a traffic jam, or there is a power outage. Maybe there is noise, or darkness at times. A worker doesn't know about it and is walking and answering his phone and turns the corner right into the... But instead of an accident, his vest had just started vibrating a warning to stop walking immediately.

A workplace accident, the likes of which happen 400 million times a year globally (1000 deaths every day), has just been avoided.

Our company, Trio Mobil, has installed millions of such devices in thousands of facilities around the globe.

Oh, and where did this rapidly scaling venture originate???

Meet the two co-founders, engineers by training, parents, and good friends.

Great thanks to 212VC for the introduction to this portfolio company!

Vikram Sharma and Deepanshu Goel founded Wify in 2020 to solve a big e-commerce and in-store pain point facing the Ikeas and Amazons of the 1 billion plus population - Not used to self-assembling and self-installing furniture and appliances at home, Indian consumers simply bought less. Building on their experience in larger companies, Vikram and Deepanshu built a tech platform to connect consumers, brands, and their army of Wify-trained professionals. Today Wify seamlessly connects all three, increasing brand sales, customer satisfaction, and creating skill-development and career paths (and income) for previously low-skilled people.

WIth just $6 million in angel and VC financing, Wify will be scaling 10x in the coming 3-5 years, growing from 3000 to 30000 professionals and from $6 million to - well you can do the math.

Notables:

• "Do it faster, sooner. Don't wait to get it so perfect."
• Most of the world is NOT a DIY world, and although the Indian market is huge, they anticipate expaning to Africa, Latin America and other markets.
• India, once conservative and venture-leary, is changing, and it is easier to recruit top talent, raise capital, and generate shareholder liquidity.

Run:ai was founded in 2018 to provide the software "operating system" for development of AI and large language models (LLMs). But the real story of run:ai is not the  acquisition price (unconfirmed) of $700 million nor its raise of $130 million in VC money, but in how run:ai scaled its customer penetration so rapidly after a year of invention and re-invention of its business model. (Disclosure: I was one of the first investors, happily so). The benefits for customers include significantly better use of scarce computing resources, since the development of AI requires such extensive computing resources, which also consume a lot of electricity.

It wasn't easy at first, because, hard to believe in 2025, AI was not yet a "thing" in 2018, and LLMs were at first developed mostly in academic and research institutions, not enterprises. Lucky or prescient? And run:ai was not born with a full set of teeth: early on they learned that enterprises wanted a completely different product than did research institutes... Corporations (think auto manufacturers or pharmas) conduct AI or LLM projects as teams, often cross-functional, with different members playing different roles and having different requirements for their part of the project. Run:ai's first product was NOT the product that customers needed!

Highlights:

• Learning to sell - Omri, as a young CEO-founder-engineer (30 at the time), had a steep learning curve as a leader, including learning how to sell. "I need to be out their selling" at least in phase 1.
• Participating in all sales calls - after a while, Omri actually began to like it!
• Each of the initial founders was able to reinvent himself as the needs of the market changed so rapidly.
• It is very hard to know who the right people are - and "I tend to wait to long" before making a tough decision. On the other hand, "sometimes waiting works and the person learns to grow new skills."
• After the first few $ million, the problem changes to "enabling others to sell the product."
• Process is essential to scale, but there are right processes and wrong processes! "You have to nail it!"

Ridge Security is a pioneer in the new field of "penetration testing," using AI to generate offensive security for increasingly large enterprise customers. Founded in 2020 by Nick Mo and Lydia Zhang, Ridge is already generating "millions" in revenues. Originally from China, Nick and Lydia have extensive tech backgrounds at Cisco, and led Hillstone Networks from startup to NASDAQ. VC backers include TSVC (Zoom, Carta), and Oakseed.

Highlights:

• Learn how this hard core data engineer learned how to be a great salesman.
• "You need to really listen to customers' feedback, especially what they don't like. Keep doing that..."
• "Customers don't buy what you think is the best product. They buy what they need, and what they need is sometimes surprising."
• Sales cycles with enterprise customers in Mexico and other similar markets are much shorter because they are used to using products from outside their own markets.

Founded in 2013 by twins Amiad and Koby Soto, Guesty graduated from Y Combinator and set out to revolutionize the emerging short term rental industry. Starting out as a service to automate management, Amiad and Koby had to pivot from service to software, and eventually came to dominate the software market for managing short term rentals around the world. Seven acquisitions later, with $400 million in equity and 750 people in 15 offices - Guesty is by far the market leader, proudly helping rental managers increase their own revenues and profits.

COVID wasn't the only challenge - as Koby transitioned out of an active role in Guesty after four years, Amiad learned that he had to relentlessly challenge himself and continually adapt his own role.

"If you don't make those transitions in your role, you get penalized with bad numbers and either you wake up and change, or the board will wake you up and change you."

Favorite quotes

• "I surround myself with really amazing talent and I learn from them."
• "The best way to know if you are on track is by the level of success in achieving your goals each year. If you are not, then you need to think if you have the right skill set... I constantly question what I am doing."
• "I would have told my younger self in 2013, to surround himself with the best talent and focus on that alone. But I would definitely support creating Guesty."
• "You need to continually 'take out the garbage,' meaning, over the years you collect a lot of esoteric features for this client or the other, and it grows."

UENI is more than a web-site builder - UENI is a strategic partner to small businesses wanting to grow bigger. Ten years after founding and $30 million raised, UENI is fast becoming a major player in helping SMEs increase their business activity through increased online presence and more effective digital-supported services. With 45,000 subscription customers UENI has amazing numbers - low acquisition costs, high margins, 40-50% conversion rates (WTF!?!?) from single pay to long term subscription. 

Listen in on how Christine and Anh (a married couple who had two children while growing UENI) have finally found a sweet spot with small businesses in the US and UK. Looking forward, UENI's new partnerships with Walmart and other major players will be driving them from $10 million to $100 million ARR and beyond.

Favorite quotes:

• "Never go to a fremium model."
• "Cost, cost, cost - you need to drive down and manage your costs."
• "Choose an easier market than small business owners! I would never have entered it knowing what I know today." (And aspiring competitors - stay out!)

Born out of a search fund, Bjoern von Siemens and Dennis Kogan set out over 12 years ago to dramatically improve surgical outcomes by becoming a platform for "complex coordination" (see Peter Thiel) in operating rooms around the globe. Although Bjoern never used this term, looking back it seems audacious for a small, thinly capitalized company to grow to orchestrate a complex, life-critical network of huge surgical equipment and surgical robot makers, massive hospital groups, large insurance companies and software developers to save lives.

Over a decade later, having raised "100s of millions" of dollars, Caresyntax coordinates surgery in well over a thousand operating rooms and with "tens of millions" in revenues is doubling its size every couple of years.

Favorite quotes:

• "Don't compromise on core values or core beliefs. The biggest mistakes we have made have been when we compromised alignment in favor of competence."
• "Put clarity over harmony - this is very important for leadership."

In producing ScaleApp podcasts, I do my best to bring you unique real life journeys of scaling up, told in a way that will give you food for thought - even better, food for growth! 

Vangelis Mihalopoulas and Dimitris Tsingos, two engineers in Athens now in their 40s, founded Yodeck to do a digital signage project for a customer in Greece who wanted to easily send information to numerous digital signs (think schools, government offices, sports stadiums, train stations, corporations - any place that has multiple screens conveying information that changes frequently.)

In the midst of the Greek financial meltdown, they wanted just to provide jobs for a handful of engineers. Today, Yodeck is a $20 million ARR global market leader, growing very profitably at 60% year over year with no end in sight. They were bootstrapped with customer financing (think: profitable sales are the best source of growth capital), a tiny seed investment, and only recently raised growth capital, which is mostly still in the bank. Learn how they pulled this off, and what they learned along the way.

My favorite quotes:

• "We had a venture right next to us in the same group, Epignosis, scaling up, and that gave us confidence."
• "My advice to my younger self - start having kids earlier, before starting your venture."
• "The most important thing - pick your founding team from people you trust." 

Mitch Zlotnick founded Audimute to provide delightful sound experiences to famous drummers, restaurant-goers, churches, conference centers. With 35 or so employees in their Cleveland facility, Audimute makes and sells acoustics systems around the US and beyond and today sells "$5 to $6 million" after dumping Amazon as a customer. "We just couldn't make any money," laughs Mitch. Hear how that fateful decision has impacted their top line, bottom line, and people line.

My favorite line:
Dan Q: What are you most proud of?
Mitch A:  That I am not in the day-today operations of my company.

What is your favorite line?