Disclosure certainty 5/5 debate potential 1/5

Podjarny's new startup TESL raised a $25M Seed and $100M Series A

Guy Podjarny · He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show · Oct 27, 2025 · at 47:47

Guy Podjarny (founder of Snyk and TESL) details the early venture capital funding raised for his AI coding infrastructure startup TESL.

0:00 / 0:07exact quote · 7.4s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“We raised a hundred and twenty-five million dollars total, like a hundred million dollar A and the twenty-five million dollar seed, and we raised the last one back in September.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Guy Podjarny

Insight
To win developers in security, founders must build a devtool company
“If you want to get developers to use a security product, you have to build a developer tooling company not a security company.”
Guy Podjarny Oct 27, 2025 ▶ 13:17 He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show
Prediction Not checkable as stated
AI will shift software development from being code-centric to spec-centric
“So TESL, we believe that software in the AI world, software will move from being code-centric to being spec-centric.”
Guy Podjarny Oct 27, 2025 ▶ 40:41 He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show
Insight
A VC-backed founder's worst case is getting stuck at $2M-$3M ARR
“The kind of worst case scenario is not to get to crash and burn with your company, but to get stuck, to get to a company that it's at two million RR, three million RR, growing 30% year on year. It's kind of enough that you don't really want to just cut loose a…”
Guy Podjarny Oct 27, 2025 ▶ 49:39 He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show
Disclosure
a16z and others passed on Snyk's seed because it lacked revenue
“I got to, like, you know, ask me for the partner meeting, stay over the weekend in Andreessen Horowitz to sort of present to, and nobody converted. And everybody basically peeked behind the curtains, saw there's no revenue, says, oh, classic DevTool.”
Guy Podjarny Oct 27, 2025 ▶ 34:24 He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Snyk burned $4M to hit $100K ARR, reaching $19M 2.5 years later
“That was like two years and two months in, we were at a 100,000 ARR not awesome. And we burned four million dollars by that time. You know, four months later, we're at six 50. A year later, we're at four and a half million. A year later, we're at nineteen mill…”
Guy Podjarny Oct 27, 2025 ▶ 37:07 He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show
Assertion Supported
75% of attacks target apps, but get under 25% of security budgets
“75% of the attacks and hacks happen at the application layer, but 25% of the budget or the investment happens over there, and that's probably generous.”
Guy Podjarny Oct 27, 2025 ▶ 9:23 He burned $4M to hit $100K ARR—but with 1 big change, he grew to $4.5M ARR in just 12 months. | G... · PMF Show
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 250 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.