Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In 2018, are you still self-financed?

Sarva Srinivasan: Yes. At the end of 2018, we did a Series A. 

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise?

Sarva Srinivasan: $10 million.

Sramana Mitra: And your revenue run rate was $1.8 million?

Sarva Srinivasan: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What happens next in 2019?

Sarva Srinivasan: It was a very interesting year for us. We signed on more clients. The list of functionalities that clients demanded went through the roof. They saw the integrated capability of the platform and the flexibility that we were offering. One of our existing clients basically said, “I want to use this enterprise-wide.”

We talk about the five Rs with our prospects and clients. The first R is really data reconstruction. The second one is reconciliation. You want to make sure that the data you have is correct. We also realized that the clients are spending a lot of time figuring out what happens after a comparison is done. This is where we embed machine learning. We apply machine learning models which help us predict the reason for the breaks. That allows us to cut down about 80% of the time that the users are spending.

We also started expanding into Europe. All of us had some relationships there. In 2020, COVID happened. Q1 was a good quarter. Q2 was tough. All the banks were holding back figuring out what needs to get done. Things started looking up in Q3. Very soon, the client realized that because of the pandemic, the volume of transactions they were dealing with had gone up. Everybody was now remote. They were getting us more and more involved with their core operations.

Sramana Mitra: What did that create? Were there opportunities for adding products?

Sarva Srinivasan: The first one was it gave us the opportunity to add more capability into the product. We started to include a whole bunch of models. We started looking at patterns of data. We started expanding, which means more revenue opportunities. Our ticket sizes now are somewhere in the range of $200,000 a year to maybe $1million to $1.5 million a year.

We looked at automation very closely. Even after the clients have the ability to solve some of these errors, they spend a lot of time fixing them. So we built a process automation framework, which gives them an integrated platform. From our perspective, we are able to upsell to our existing clients and expand our footprint. 

Sramana Mitra: Very good. How many clients are you working with right now?

Sarva Srinivasan: We have seven clients. We’ll do about $16 million in recurring revenue this year.

Sramana Mitra: Is there anything else that you want to share?

Dutt Chintalapati: One of the things that we always tell ourselves is that we have to be nimble and be able to swiftly change directions or add-on new capabilities and features. The landscape changes pretty rapidly. One thing that we learned over the years is you’ve got to be nimble on your feet.

Sramana Mitra: The beauty of the way you have navigated is like it’s almost like a textbook cast study of the bootstrapping using services methodologies. It’s one of the finer ones that I have seen.

Sarva Srinivasan: Thank you.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Bootstrapping Using Services, then Raising $10M and Scaling to $16M: EZOPS Co-Founders Sarva Srinivasan and Dutt Chintalapati
1 2 3 4 5