Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about events? Is that something that you’ve done in those marketplaces?

Stan Markov: Yes, we haven’t been to a Microsoft of Google event. We’ve been to the AWS ReInvent and exhibited there. We’ve also been to the KubeCon event. It’s a great audience and a great source of leads.

Sramana Mitra: So events is your big source of leads.

Stan Markov: Yes. By events, I don’t mean only the in-person.

Sramana Mitra: Virtual events took off during COVID.

Stan Markov: Yes. We got some good leads from HP Discover and other online events. We started organizing our own online events that pushed us to do that. We collect a lot of speakers. We have hundreds of attendees.

Sramana Mitra: In terms of the business build-up, you were doing just VMWare until 2019. What level of revenue did you reach doing just VMWare?

Stan Markov: We don’t announce our revenues publicly. It was in the low single-digit millions. That’s not just because we were just VMWare. We haven’t been on the market for long enough. The VMWare market is much larger. There’s still a lot of potential there.

Sramana Mitra: That VMWare business has expanded hugely now.

Stan Markov: Absolutely. It’s one product but different modules. You could subscribe to the VMWare part. This is a good platform for cross-sell and upsell.

Sramana Mitra: What about financing? Did you raise more money?

Stan Markov: We didn’t have to. The seed round was in terms of equity investment. In 2019, we won an EU grant. It’s a non-equity grant which is very difficult to win. We applied several times. You have to have very innovative projects to win it. It was for €1.9 million.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! That’s fantastic.

Stan Markov: It was an interesting process. On the last step, we had an interview in the EU headquarters. We won the funding to improve our AI-powered platform even further. With the help of natural language processing (NLP) modules, the platform creates thousands of rules that we have. It is crawling all these sources of human-readable unstructured data and then translating them into machine-readable rules using NLP.

This is something that the EU funding helped us a lot with. NLP is very popular now. I’m glad it is. We’ve been pioneering specific use cases for that.

Sramana Mitra: I was pitched your story as a company with more than $5 million in revenue. Would you like to give more color?

Stan Markov: I think that’s sufficient. We’re not at the level of the unicorns yet, but this is our direction. We are growing nicely.

Sramana Mitra: I love capital efficiency and you’re delivering very well on the revenue side. Congratulations! Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Capital Efficient Entrepreneurship from the Czech Republic: Runecast CEO Stan Markov
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