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Larry Kim: $400K FounderPath loan and personal capital bridged pivot past $2M.

Larry Kim · His First Exit Was for $200m, His Next Startup Hit $1m Then Almost Failed, Now 100% YoY Growth at Customer.ai with unique LLM model · Sep 19, 2023 · at 10:52

Larry Kim, founder of Customers.ai, explains how he financed the company's pivot using non-dilutive debt and personal capital to avoid down-round equity dilution.

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“Initially it was about a 400 K loan. You know, we had over a million in revenue, so that's, you know, 400 K is like, you know, less than 40% of a month's of ARR. And then I put an equal amount of capital in you know, just to gross that up a little bit and that provided, you know, almost a full year of time to fully develop and show progress against this new ICP and new, new use case and, you know, growing the business to, you know, over two million in revenue and, you know, getting a lot of interest in, in, in the business from investors and eventually doing our series A.”

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