Background

Leo Bonanni is an architect-turned-entrepreneur who founded Sourcemap, a pioneering supply chain mapping platform, based on his research at the MIT Media Lab. Originally a tool for understanding the social and environmental impact of design decisions, Sourcemap evolved into a mission-critical SaaS platform used by major global brands to trace the origins of their raw materials down to the mines, farms, and factor...

Background / Introduction

Saar Safra, serial entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Beewise, joins Prof. Dan Isenberg to share the extraordinary mission of his sixth startup: saving the bees to secure global food supplies. With backing from Fortissimo Capital and others, and over $170 million raised, Beewise is pioneering robotic beehives to counter catastrophic bee colony collapse—a crisis affecting over 60% of colonies in the U.S. ann...

Meet Joey Chung, Taiwanese entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of TNL  Mediagene (NASDAQ:TNMG).

TNMG is a media content and technology group spanning SE Asia and Japan in Chinese, English and other languages (TNMG IS NOT IN CHINA!) as an apolitical media group, growth 50% organic, 50% M&A. Ten acquisitions, including a major merger with MediaGene in Japan which allowed TNMG to go public on NASDAQ.

30-40 % YOY GROWTH!!

• How to make...

I have always been skeptical of conflating entrepreneurship with innovation or technology and Sgt. Clean (YES, a rapidly expanding car wash chain in Ohio)  is a great example. How many tech startups you know have more than $10 million in revenues, growing rapidly and profitably?

And guess what? This is a $20 billion market in the US only. Highly fragmented, ripe for scaling if you can crack the code of (a) amazing customer experienc...

Episode 13 taped on Friday the 13th! How lucky can you get?

There is so much I find exciting about Sunbit - talking with co-founders Arad Levertov and Tal Riesenfeld is like a huge smorgasboard of interesting topics.

Just a few words about their strategy here but you have GOT to listen to how they explain in their own words how they have grown beyond $300 million and achieved profitability. (Disclosure - I am an early investor)

• Bl...

Home Surplus, founded by Joe Schwartz who thought he was a PE guy and found himself as CEO and is building a national chain of specialist cabinet suppliers. What's the deal? Floor and Decor took an aisle out of Home Depot and turned it into a 250 store chain worth about $8 billion. Harbor Freight did the same with tools and has 1500 stores worth about $8 billion. 

Joe thinks the brass ring may just be the kitchen cabinet aisle ...

Meet Thanos Papagelis and Dimitris Tsingos, co-founders of Epignosis, the global leader in online corporate training. $50 million ARR, 55% and above margins, 50% and above annual growth, profitable since 2010, bootstrapped without VC. 

They were so good that when they tried to raise growth capital, no VCs (except 1) believed their story and responded with standard VC bullshit - "You haven't taken enough risks." "...

Jonathan Corbin, Eugene Mann, and Sami Shalabi have put together decades of combined experience in senior positions at Hubspot, Google, Adobe, Stripe, IBM - need I say more - to COMPLETELY revolutionize how companies engage with customers. I will let them explain to us in this 10th!! ScaleApp Podcasts episode but the way I see it is that they have revolutionized the customer support experience as a wedge for impacting the entire sa...

Imagine a company, about 7 years old, with 250 employees around the world, revenues in the "eight figures"  (that means between $10-99 million), two thousand customers globally.  With high 2-digit annual growth. The company uses AI enabled peripheral devices (think cameras that can interpret situations and make decisions) to make the workplace safer, networked and managed on a common platform to communicate and make decis...

Vikram Sharma and Deepanshu Goel founded Wify in 2020 to solve a big e-commerce and in-store pain point facing the Ikeas and Amazons of the 1 billion plus population - Not used to self-assembling and self-installing furniture and appliances at home, Indian consumers simply bought less. Building on their experience in larger companies, Vikram and Deepanshu built a tech platform to connect consumers, brands, and their army of Wify-tr...

Run:ai was founded in 2018 to provide the software "operating system" for development of AI and large language models (LLMs). But the real story of run:ai is not the  acquisition price (unconfirmed) of $700 million nor its raise of $130 million in VC money, but in how run:ai scaled its customer penetration so rapidly after a year of invention and re-invention of its business model. (Disclosure: I was one of the first inve...

Ridge Security is a pioneer in the new field of "penetration testing," using AI to generate offensive security for increasingly large enterprise customers. Founded in 2020 by Nick Mo and Lydia Zhang, Ridge is already generating "millions" in revenues. Originally from China, Nick and Lydia have extensive tech backgrounds at Cisco, and led Hillstone Networks from startup to NASDAQ. VC backers include TSVC (Zoom, C...

Founded in 2013 by twins Amiad and Koby Soto, Guesty graduated from Y Combinator and set out to revolutionize the emerging short term rental industry. Starting out as a service to automate management, Amiad and Koby had to pivot from service to software, and eventually came to dominate the software market for managing short term rentals around the world. Seven acquisitions later, with $400 million in equity and 750 people in 15 off...

UENI is more than a web-site builder - UENI is a strategic partner to small businesses wanting to grow bigger. Ten years after founding and $30 million raised, UENI is fast becoming a major player in helping SMEs increase their business activity through increased online presence and more effective digital-supported services. With 45,000 subscription customers UENI has amazing numbers - low acquisition costs, high margins, 40-50% co...

Born out of a search fund, Bjoern von Siemens and Dennis Kogan set out over 12 years ago to dramatically improve surgical outcomes by becoming a platform for "complex coordination" (see Peter Thiel) in operating rooms around the globe. Although Bjoern never used this term, looking back it seems audacious for a small, thinly capitalized company to grow to orchestrate a complex, life-critical network of huge surgical equipm...

Vangelis Mihalopoulas and Dimitris Tsingos, two engineers in Athens now in their 40s, founded Yodeck to do a digital signage project for a customer in Greece who wanted to easily send information to numerous digital signs (think schools, government offices, sports stadiums, train stations, corporations - any place that has multiple screens conveying information that changes frequently.)

In the midst of the Greek financial ...

Mitch Zlotnick founded Audimute to provide delightful sound experiences to famous drummers, restaurant-goers, churches, conference centers. With 35 or so employees in their Cleveland facility, Audimute makes and sells acoustics systems around the US and beyond and today sells "$5 to $6 million" after dumping Amazon as a customer. "We just couldn't make any money," laughs Mitch. Hear how that fateful decisio...

Ready to unlock the secrets of successful entrepreneurship? Tune into the first episode of the ScaleApp podcast series with Dan Isenberg, where you'll gain invaluable insights from a veteran with nearly four decades of experience in growing businesses. Dan, a former professor at Harvard Business School and Columbia, and a seasoned investor and former venture capitalist, demystifies the complexities of scaling businesses. He de...