SaaS investors often tell me that you can’t build a big company or make a big technology bet without significant outside VC funding.
But now there are more second-time founders putting up millions of their own dollars, and years investment with growing revenues, to invest big in new technologies.
These big-thinking founders tell me VCs don’t understand their space.
And those VCs don’t understand the new business models that are created when things change.
Gopal Krishnamurthy is the founder and CEO of Lumel, which has a suite of products focused on enterprise performance management (EPM).
Their apps allow users to plan, report, and analyze data using modern native app frameworks on top of modern cloud data platforms such as Microsoft Fabric, Snowflake, Databricks, and others.
Lumel’s products provide a full stack of integrated planning, BI, and data apps on the customers’ data platforms.
He grew his enterprise services company, Visual BI, to over 300 employees and sold that company to Atos in 2021.
Gopal then self-funded Lumel with a personal VC-sized investment and has grown it to over 300 employees in four years. Lumel has a revenue run rate of over $12M ARR and is growing fast.
Lumel is building its apps using modern cloud data platforms, not siloed SaaS databases, allowing its products to manage real-time data across applications.
This bold new vision and architecture for enterprise software apps align with modern data approaches supporting AI, creating a billion-dollar opportunity for Lumel in the future.
Gopal describes his bit bootstrapped bet on my podcast this week:
“The main thing is it’s a big market. It’s not like we are just trying to get to our first $10 million revenue. We did that before with Visual BI and we have done that with Lumel already.
”We are looking at how we can get to a billion-dollar ARR business. That’s the big, bold vision. We have invested tens of millions already, and we are almost profitable.
“We think we can absolutely create a billion-dollar business based on our customer feedback and traction from 3,000 customers. So, it’s not a question of product market fit. We worked with hundreds of our enterprise customers and perfected our data apps products.
“The other thing is our products can work for smaller businesses and medium-sized businesses, because of our architecture and approach. It’s completely horizontal: it works for all industries and all customers of all sizes.”
Gopal’s technology is paving the way for a billion-dollar industry. We’ll see how his technology and his company get there.
In this episode, Gopal also discusses the common challenge of transitioning from custom services to a no-touch product-led approach selling to enterprises.
Check out this big-thinking interview with Gopal Krishnamurthy on the Practical Founders Podcast.
