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AI startup Revo is emerging from stealth with the aim of unifying the steps and data necessary for businesses to develop and execute go to market strategies. The company has eighty million dollars from a combination seed and Series A funding round co led by Coaslaventures and Kleine Perkins. Revo CEO David Zoo and investor Vinokosler are with us now. David, I would love to start with you. You're trying to tackle the concept that you have labeled the Franken stack.
Even though the term is new to me, the concept is something that's been discussed on this program a lot. Just to explain what Revo wants to achieve here.
Sure, well, first off, thanks for having me. It's a big day for us. Look, AI is the biggest shift in enterprise software since the cloud, but the reality is, revenue teams are still stuck in like you said, what we call the Franken stack, which is a dozen different tools that don't really talk to each other, causing sellers to waste over seventy percent of their time wrangling software instead of talking to their customers.
And that's really painful.
Revo is looking to fix that via one unified revenue operating system built from the ground up with AI at its core, and with this eighty million raise, we're scaling quickly to help all companies win in the age of AI.
Vinod I was talking with my team this morning about the structure of this round and so it's basically a combined seed in Series A and Revo is coming out and kind of announcing itself to the world.
Would you kind of give us the backstory?
You know you are an experienced investor in the world of technology. When this crossed your desk, How did you know that you needed to get involved and how did you determine at this very early stage the potential that Revo had.
The opportunity didn't actually cross our desk in a traditional way. It'd be've known for a long time from door dash to open door to open store. Sorry, and now Revo.
We've been incubating ventures with him. My partner Samar has worked closely with him on Revo, and we cooked up the concept, rainstormed it and thought it was important enough to do in the age of Hey, I think most applications and application stacks need to be re taught and this is David just a superstar armed to know, so it was pretty easy.
That is this an example of you investing in the known quantity founder then rather than the idea?
Absolutely, he wan we invested.
The idea wasn't clear that was a year and a half or two years ago, but the founder was very clear.
David, I'm trying to track the growth that you've had. So spring of twenty twenty four you kind of come up with the idea, I guess, incorporate a business, and you've hired I guess aggressively. You know you're sub one hundred people still, but you've basically gone to companies that are well known globally, not just here in the valley, and taken the best people you can.
What was that like, Well, yeah, you're spot on there.
The company you build taking a page out of Vano's book, but the company you built as the team you build, as a company you build, not the plans you make.
And when we thought about tackling the space of unifying all go to market tech in one system, spanning marketing, sales, and success, we really needed to make sure that we had the talent density both from a technical perspective, but also from a go to market to really bring together the combination of the depth of domain knowledge plus the ability to access the first party data to really pull this vision off. So global talent is necessary for us to make this a reality.
David, what else do you need the eighty million dollars for?
Yeah, well it's over the next few months and quarters
and years. Our vision is clear. We need a continue accelerating our product role map to build out both the breadth of the surface area to serve our customers, but also making sure that every single capability is the best possible from a death perspective, but more importantly, in the age of AI, context matters, and it's very important for us to double down on making sure that our AI operating system is able to work seamlessly across every single
one of these modules capabilities. Job to be done, so we're not replicating another Franken stack for the future world.
So that's what we're going to use.
The proceeds to to do.
Vinod, I go back to you with the concept of the Franken stack. You know you're invested everywhere. One of the first checks into open AI the world is changed a law since then you know, we had yesterday Shrida from Snowflake on the program talking about the problems right now and in the data layer. What do you make of the frankenstack? Is that a real thing or this is just a marketing opportunity around this round.
No, I think it's a real thing. Of course, AI enables each startup to do a lot more than it could do. Twenty engineers can do the work of sixty engineers if you use the productivity tools AI enables. But more than that, the user experience can be dramatically different with the help of AI. As I like to say, in the old world of applications, users had to learn an application and they learned each vertical stack. In the new world of AI, the application learns the human and
responds the way each ship. It's my favorite way to think about the transition AI makes possible. You don't have to be trained on an application, get SAP or pubs Jack.
The application gets to.
Know you and are the humans on your team, and so facilitates not only the function, but also work for across people and across applications.
I think it's a pretty important shift in software to both you.
I kind of like to end the conversation by going a little bit bigger on the world that we're in right now. You know, David, if you could reflect on what it was like doing this round. There is a lot of energy behind AI right now, but at the other end of the spectrum there is valuation concern. You know, there's no difficulty in open AI or anthropic those kinds of frontier labs gaining capital, but there is a lot
going on right now. Would you just reflect on what the last few weeks has been like in trying to close.
This well, you know, the fundamental difference is clear with our approach. We're AI native and purpose built for remy teams, and so you know when you talk about the old players that are trying to bowl AI onto legacy stack, it just doesn't work. What we're building with Revo is akin to how Tesla build its cars vertically integrated with AI at its core. This way, our AI is able to see, to see, and act across the full customer journey.
So the old players are held back by their past, and the new players, to your point, you know, don't have the depth of domain knowledge nor the access to the full suite of first party data to pull this vision off. So Revo's building with both and yes it's hard, but that's really what makes it defensible and worth doing.
You know, you're co leading this round with your friends at Kleiner Perkins. Again the same question, like what does the environment look like to you right now? This is a very sizable debut round. You had the conviction to do that.
Well.
It was a while ago we did the seed round of ten million, there wasn't the nuts, and now we just participated in the seventy million dollars around. Obviously we think highly of the team, but I think it's the magnitude of the opportunity this opens up for AI native companies. I like to say most valuations won't hold up in the AI space, but the ones that are really high
quality companies will return disproportionate returns. In twenty eighteen, people said to me a billion dollar valuation for open air.
Hours too high.
Then they said twenty six billion was too high, and then one hundred billion, then three hundred billion, and then five hundred billion were all too high. So a small percentage of the companies I suspect, much less than five percent, will actually do extremely well and return ten fifty or one hundred times their money invested.
Most companies will still lose.
Money, and I think that's why you want to back quality founders like David. David's a superstar, right back almost anything you did.
David Zo, CEO of Revo Ai Vino Cosla, co founder Coasadventures, and as we just discussed, co led that around. Great to have you both on the program. Frank, you