Pod Insights SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders Tive Hit $100M Revenue After a Down Round and $10K in the Bank About this episode How do you go from $10,000 left in the bank and a down round to $100 million in annual revenue — without ever seriously considering quitting?
Krenar Komoni is the founder and CEO of Tive, a hardware-plus-SaaS company that tracks shipments in real time across trucks, ships, and planes worldwide. He started in his basement in 2015, charging his father-in-law $19.99 a month, and today has 1,300 customers — nine of which pay over $1 million per year — at a $545 million valuation.
You'll learn:
Why Krenar almost went bankrupt twice and laid off 75% of his team — and what kept him going The pricing mistake that nearly killed the company: manufacturing a tracker for $150 and selling it for the same price How hiring two college kids to cold call strangers became the GTM playbook that took Tive from $2.5M to $10M in revenue Why 60% of new revenue at Tive comes from existing customers expanding, not new logos The patent that creates a physical switching cost competitors can't replicate: ping-rate configuration based on shipment events How Krenar negotiated a down round from $21M to $11M valuation with $10K in the bank — and why he doesn't regret it What it actually takes to land a million-dollar-per-year customer when you sell physical hardware on monthly contracts Why Krenar thinks AI agents will fully automate the supply chain in 24 to 36 months — and how Tive is already building toward that The secondary liquidity story: why his Series A1 investor had to push him to take money off the table before he had the courage to ask How Tive went from $250K revenue in 2019 to $100M run rate in 2026 — the full year-by-year breakdown Connect:
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch Tive: https://www.tive.com/ Founderpath: https://founderpath.com/
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 All right. In this episode, you're going to see how a strange founder built a weird piece of hardware in his basement and turned it into a $540 million business that's totally taking over the supply chain industry. He's got over 1,300 paying customers and the biggest ones pay him a fortune. Today, he's adding over $10 million of new annual revenue per quarter. Incredible growth and he's got a bold vision for how to use AI and agents to automate the entire supply chain. But it wasn't always this easy. Watch until the end and you'll see exactly how to get your first 100 customers the easy way. How to set your AE quota target so you don't screw up your economics. And lastly, the genius way to price your product so you finally get your first million dollar per year customer. Here's the CEO of Tive.com. Kranar, you ready to take us to the top?
0:42 Speaker 00 I can't bury the lead. I reached out literally hours ago because you posted on LinkedIn that you hit a massive revenue milestone. What was the milestone? And then we'll jump into your story.
0:50 Speaker 01 Yeah, huge milestone last week. We hit 100 million of booked annual run rate. So it's amazing. We will do very confident.
0:58 Speaker 00 What would that represent in terms of growth rate at your year? What were you one year ago?
1:01 Speaker 01 So one year ago, we're at 67. So we'll do at least, it looks like 100 this year.
1:06 Speaker 00 Just to be clear, if we take MRR from December of 2025, you were at a 67 million run rate then?
1:11 Speaker 01 No, December MRR. So 67 was the whole recognized revenue of the whole 2025. The December MRR, I don't know the exact number off the top of my head, but I know we closed the year in check because we do January, it's fiscal year. It was at 89 million of booked annual run rate. So we went from 89 to 100 between January 31st and
1:32 Speaker 00 Growth and guys, you want to listen to this whole interview because he's building something that's really interesting. You're seeing the world of AI. Anyone that has a data mode really wins. And one way to build an impressive data mode is to have a SaaS plus business model where you have IoT plus SaaS. He has, we're going to get into it in a second, but Tive, or sorry, not Tive. Kranar, why don't you explain your business model? What are you selling?
1:49 Speaker 01 So it's pretty straightforward. Customers come to us. They want to know what's happening with our shipments all over the world, whether it's strawberries, blueberries, servers, electronics, gaming consoles. So what we do is we sell them these trackers where they want to hold it up. I know you see the, you're opening up the website too. That's awesome. So what they do is they buy these trackers. So They sign up a contract, it's an annual contract and they say, hey, I want to buy 1200 of these. And they commit to them and they also sign up for our platform.
2:16 Speaker 00 Hold that up again, so where does that get installed? Does it get installed on a truck? Like turn it around a little bit? Okay, so is there a camera on there?
2:21 Speaker 01 Yeah, what we do, what we do, what customers do is they take this, they press the button right there. This turns on, they peel the sticker on the back, most of the time they peel the sticker and they open the trailer. Or the container when it's open already, it's at the dock, they load it up the trailer and the container with, let's say, pallets of servers, pallets of electronics, pallets of gaming console, pallets of vacuum cleaners, whatever it is. They take this tracker and they place it usually on the last pallet. Sometimes they hide it because they don't want anybody to see it. Then they close the trailer, this thing is on. It's transmitting in real time using cellular connectivity. So 2G, 4G, 5G connectivity all over the world.
3:02 Speaker 01 So it tells customers where the shipment is in real time, but also it's telling its condition. Is it hot? Is it wet? Is it cold? Did somebody open the trailer? There's a little light sensor right there. Uh, did this get dropped? There's a shock sensor. There's also an orientation sensor to see if something's tilted. So all of that data on top of location is being fed into our platform and then customers log in and see and monitor their shipments. So now they know. Are those berries above 40 degrees Fahrenheit for more than an hour? Are those vaccines on a tarmac somewhere sitting at 90 degrees Fahrenheit? And they were able to immediately call the logistics company, call the carrier, call the trucking company and act on it. And we save so many shipments, especially we even to these days with theft, we catch,
3:48 Speaker 01 like we have a story recently with this company, the guy literally with his wife, was driving trying to find the driver who was stealing the, like it was just, truck full of metal and they called the guy at the truck stop and called the police and they were able to save the shipment.
4:03 Speaker 00 How much data exhaust are you generating from one of those devices? If I took all the unstructured data and structured in a JSON file, how many rows of data points would I get just from that one tracker and one truck shipment?
4:13 Speaker 01 Per ping, I would say at least around twelve to fifteen. So think of X, Y, Z of accelerometer, then you get temperature, then you get humidity, you get shock if it happens, light, and then location, you have GPS, you have Wi-Fi positioning, you have also cellular towers that we get. So there's around fifteen or so points per ping. And then people can be pinging every five minutes, every thirty minutes. So if you do the math, we've collected billions and billions of data.
4:42 Speaker 00 What are you run rating on that? Like if you did this on May twelfth, twenty twenty six, if you just look at last month, how many individual, I don't know what the right usage metric is. Is it number, how many total pings you captured across all customers? Is it number of installed devices, number of truck trips? What's the critical metric for you?
4:56 Speaker 01 There's a few.
4:58 Speaker 00 Go for it. The more you can show us, the better, the more we can learn.
5:01 Speaker 01 Okay, I'll try to do that.
5:03 Speaker 00 This is so cool, guys. While he's bringing that up again, what we're gonna sort of go with on this is we're going back to his basement in two thousand and seven when he had this idea, all the way up to, you know, now a hundred million run rate. You know, this is not just software, obviously, there's production involved, IOT. I'll ask him if he's manufacturing these himself, if he's making money on the hardware or if he's subsidizing at the start just to get the long-term subscription contracts. We'll dive into all of that.
5:22 Speaker 01 Yeah, so I think some of this is maybe not great to share or not, it's a little confidential.
5:28 Speaker 00 I appreciate that.
5:28 Speaker 01 Let me see if I am going. No, I would really focus on moving.
5:33 Speaker 00 And real quick, focus on that blue graph. You told us when you passed a hundred K of ARR. When did you put, put your point on the graph where you passed a million of ARR? What year?
5:39 Speaker 01 Right there, oh, million, it was in twenty twenty around, I would say.
5:45 Speaker 00 Ten million?
5:46 Speaker 01 This time here. Now you're making, you're quizzing me. Ten million, it was two and a half million in twenty twenty dollars, twenty twenty. Yeah, it was in twenty twenty one sometime. Yeah.
5:58 Speaker 00 So sorry, you went from one million in twenty twenty to ten million in twenty twenty one?
6:03 Speaker 01 Yeah, it was at the end of twenty nineteen, I would say, early twenty twenty, we crossed that one million right here. And then by end of twenty twenty one or mid, like call it Q three, Q four, twenty twenty one, we went to ten, ten million of books. We were growing very fast at that time because we signed up some really large customers. And then if you, if you happen, revenue. Were pretty exciting too. I would share them.
6:27 Speaker 00 When did you just finish the revenue story real quick and then I want to get your backstory in your basement? When did you break 50 million?
6:32 Speaker 01 Revenue. So revenue in 2020. So let's go this way. We'll do 100 this year. 67 million last year. 45 in 2024, 29 million in 2023 revenue. 19, almost 20 million in 2022, 10 million in 2021. So that's when we did 10 million of actual revenue. 2 and 1/2 million of revenue in 2020 and 250k of revenue in 2019.
7:01 Speaker 00 When you launched, you can stop screen sharing. What were you, you were watching your father-in-law or how did you get this idea?
7:07 Speaker 01 So my background's in tech. I used to work for startups, but primarily doing chip design, RF chip design, 2G, 3G, 4G radios. And then I worked for an MIT startup where we build the world's most efficient base stations, like on cell towers. Fell in love with wireless, fell in love with radio frequencies.
7:24 Speaker 00 Guys, remember I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250 million into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those. Just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through YouTube and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com.
7:52 Speaker 01 Back in 2015, I got, met my wife. I got married to my wife in 2010. So it didn't click.
7:58 Speaker 00 She married you before you were rich?
7:59 Speaker 01 Few years, hanging on. Oh, that's for sure. I'm not rich yet. Still a founder, still a pretty poor founder. Living on salary, which is great, but I think our equity is going to be valuable by the way.
8:10 Speaker 00 Any kind of secondary? Okay.
8:12 Speaker 01 I did, but small. Being transplant, a few hundred thousand dollars. So maybe helped a little bit with the mortgage.
8:19 Speaker 00 A lot of founders are scared to ask for that. They're like, you know, they're growing and they end up with 100 million of revenue, but they're broke because they didn't, never did a secondary. What gave you the courage to ask for that? Just coach other founders.
8:28 Speaker 01 I would say one of my investors actually encouraged me quite a bit on series A1, which gave me that courage. Otherwise I wouldn't have the courage. And then from there I built that courage to ask a little bit more. But yeah. He was from two single ventures, he's got Billy Ilchev. He put a term sheet, he's like, Kurnar, I think you should take a little bit off the table. It'll help you. So.
8:47 Speaker 00 Okay. Tell us more of the story. So yeah, I have your LinkedIn up here, but.
8:50 Speaker 01 In twenty fifteen, I'm I'm uh with my father-in-law and obviously known him for a few years now, but after this wireless experience and knowing where the technology was going, he was always on the phone trying to figure out where his truck drivers are. I'm trying to have dinner and he would get up off the table at ten P M, at eight P M. And I'm like, why can this guy just sit and what he's doing is trying to figure out where the truck drivers are. Did they load? Did they offload? Did they unload the shipment? I'm like, you know what? His name is Oddi. I'm like, I'll build a GPS tracker for fun and put it in your trucks. And he's like, go ahead. And he's like, there's a lot of companies asking me. I don't want to pay fifty bucks a month. I'm like, okay, you can pay me nineteen ninety-nine a month.
9:28 Speaker 00 Your first customer was your father-in-law paying you nineteen bucks a month?
9:32 Speaker 01 Correct, on a truck. But I pivoted pretty fast from there. So that's the story. And then his friend wanted to track his trucks too. So uh this guy, Rassimi, had like ten trucks. So I started tracking his trucks. So right now I'm tracking roughly thirty trucks in Worcester, Massachusetts. They're paying me around nineteen dot nine. I wanted that ninety-nine cents. So it's like nineteen ninety-nine a month on the invoices that I would make up myself. Uh but what I realized is on the back of the shipment, on the back of the truck, one truck driver, Tony, showed me that there was this temperature sensor. And he would be hauling fish and scallops and lobsters from New Bedford, Mass. And he's like, I said, hey, bring me this sensor that's on the back of the truck.
10:12 Speaker 01 He brought it to me and I said, how do they get the data out of it? He said, well, at the end of the shipment, somebody takes this temperature logger, plugs into a computer, sometimes into a printer, and then sees what the temperature was and then decides whether they take this load or not. I'm like, wow, I got it. So I said, you know what I want to do? I want to take this tracker that I built, put a battery, make it really low power, and put it on the back of a truck. And being an engineer, I thought that if I designed the best tracker in the world, that the longest tracker, longest lasting tracker on a battery, I'm just gonna win. And what happened is we didn't fully win because it was expensive. And I tried to sell it for hu- it was a hundred bucks to make, almost a hundred fifty bucks to make.
10:53 Speaker 01 And I would sell it for a hundred fifty dollars, two hundred dollars, and then I would charge customers fifty dollars a month. And I realized one thing, it's not. Not all about product market fit. It's product market price fit. And I learned a big lesson there and then took my myself and my VP of Technology Martin. We went to China, which actually we're going.
11:13 Speaker 00 Just like right after this call?
11:14 Speaker 01 Yes, it does. So we're going and the same guy, we went to China in um twenty like around eighteen, I think, yeah. Early twenty eighteen and we've met every manufacturer out there that can make a tracker. And we built the world's first like single use two G tracker that we sold for twenty nine bucks. And I saw customers, this is twenty nineteen, customers buying thousand at a time. I'm like, okay, this is different. I could barely sell ten before now I'm selling a thousand.
11:44 Speaker 00 Battery technology that made you that allowed you to produce this that no one else could?
11:47 Speaker 01 Not particularly. What we had is a, we have patents. We have patents on the overall solution and the system that obviously does an amazing job at making sure that the battery power of the trackers lasts as long as possible. And then when we went to China, what we wanted to do is find a partner there that actually would listen and work with us. So we could teach them a little bit of these things because we wanted to move very fast. We didn't have the time to engineer and design everything on our own. We wanted to China, a partner in China, so we can do the cycle very quick. But yeah, that would be, I would say, the proprietary thing that we had in the beginning is power consumption. And a system way making battery life long, last longer. Think of it, if something stuck in customs, then change the ping rate.
12:32 Speaker 01 If you're going from ocean to road, change the ping rate. So having that configuration change based on the events that are happening is a patent that we have.
12:41 Speaker 00 Tell me how you grew, what was your go to market strategy after your friends and family shipping scallops, right? Going from two point five to ten million of revenue, what was your growth tactic there?
12:50 Speaker 01 I think the biggest lesson that I learned uh going from being a technical founder, I thought that like I told you that my, my product was the best and it would just sell itself and it didn't. And in twenty eighteen, when we're struggling quite a bit, I hired two out of college kids. And what we started to do is just cold calling and we started cold calling, cold calling. Cold calling and what I realized it was cold email, cold call, cold email, cold call. And I learned so much about products. I learned so much about what customers want. I learned that's where I learned that our trackers cost a lot of money. We need to build something new. And I learned that SDRs or BDRs, whatever you want to call, that that front line, that sphere is actually the heartbeat of the company.
13:35 Speaker 01 And I think many founders forget that, many entrepreneurs forget that. I respect that job more than any other job since 2018. Because that's where the pulse of everything is. And then what I learned is I want to learn as much from that feedback and then build it. And then hire great AEs that listen to that same feedback to the customer. And then just grow and grow and grow and grow. That's, that's how we grew.
14:01 Speaker 00 What other growth motions are you using today? Is it just sort of AEs, SDRs or something else? Like what?
14:06 Speaker 01 The marketing too, quite a bit. I mean, I personally do a lot, I try and do a lot on social media. But the marketing team does, they've done a really good job on paid search. So Google, LinkedIn, we're dabbling quite a bit on Facebook right now. And then quite a bit of SEO.
14:24 Speaker 00 I didn't ask you this, but are you still at like 20 bucks a truck per tracker or what's your average ACV these days?
14:31 Speaker 01 Call it in the, probably call it in the forty, fifty dollar range, maybe more.
14:36 Speaker 00 I guess if you roll that up, I imagine you're selling to huge companies that are like, what would one logo pay you per year on average? Because they're buying for hundreds of thousands of trucks, right?
14:45 Speaker 01 So we have 1300 logos. So it depends on the customer. There's customers who buy, that's one thing we do really well is we can accommodate to customers who are gonna buy two trackers a week, let's say a hundred trackers a year. Obviously, we don't want to get as many of those customers, but we're, if they come in and they want to buy, they're very welcome. So we have customers who buy a hundred trackers a year and then we have customers.
15:10 Speaker 00 Million dollar per year customer yet? Let's go. Nice.
15:15 Speaker 01 I think we have around nine or, yeah.
15:18 Speaker 00 Better million plus a year. What makes them, what allows your sales reps to upsell or give that much value to them? Is it just number of trucks, basically, and number of trackers?
15:27 Speaker 01 That's the easy one, yeah. I would say just expansion that way because they keep growing and growing. Think of a logistics company and then they just getting more customers into this and more customers and more customers. Or if you're a customer that you're shipping products, you say, okay, I'm gonna start in this region and you open up another region, another region. You go global. Or you start tracking just one product of yours and then you expand into all the products. It's pretty exciting on the growth side. Land and expand. So 60% of our new AR is expansion. And 45, 45.
16:00 Speaker 00 We've got about six minutes left. I want to spend three minutes on how you've capitalized the business and then three minutes on your future products. Like, how are you thinking about AI in your world? So let's start on the capital side. I know you've raised rounds. When was the first round?
16:11 Speaker 01 First round was in November 2016.
16:18 Speaker 00 Wait, this goes way back. When did you write the first line of code for this?
16:20 Speaker 01 In June of 2015.
16:22 Speaker 00 So what was the first round contract? Are we talking like 500K from friends and family?
16:25 Speaker 01 Nothing. It was me working and taking half of the money to pay mortgage and food.
16:31 Speaker 00 So that was around money. You put in 50K, 100K.
16:34 Speaker 01 And then I did that over, yeah, probably around there for 18 months. And then I raised from Hyperplane Ventures and Bolt, which was a hardware incubator in Boston. And Hyperplane Ventures is in Boston. And we raised, I think, 250K. And then we did another round of 200K when we got into Techstars. And so we got into Techstars in 2017. So this was end of 2016 and then early 2017. And then in May of 2017, raised our first seed round. I think it was 3 million dollars.
17:06 Speaker 00 Like, looking back now, was that the right decision to raise that 3 million seed at that time?
17:10 Speaker 01 I think so, yes. But I think maybe we could have spent it better. I think we rushed a little bit on spend there. But I don't think we wasted it particularly, but we were building a lot of things around software. We were, we hired a lot of software engineers, which was exciting because we kind of got the architecture right and. Back end and all of that, but we had no customers, no customers. I think getting, that's where I learned that lesson and then we almost ran out of money. And twenty eighteen and that's where I had to lay off. We went from like sixteen people down to six or yeah, six or seven people. And that was a tough time and then we almost ran out of money in July of twenty nineteen. Uh, we had ten thousand dollars, ten to twenty thousand dollars in the bank.
17:55 Speaker 01 And then I had to raise a convertible note of a secured convertible note and got hundred thousand dollars at a down round.
18:03 Speaker 00 How brutal was that? Like down round like it was a million, a million valuation or what?
18:08 Speaker 01 No, it was from twenty one down to eleven. It was not great.
18:11 Speaker 00 Interesting. So, so who priced the twenty one million? Techstars? Oh no, the three million seed.
18:17 Speaker 01 The three million, it was between next to you and accomplice.
18:19 Speaker 00 That's a wild story. Ten K left in the bank. Did you ever seriously consider shutting the company down?
18:24 Speaker 01 No. So that one thing that I realized is I believe in the, in the, in the darkest moment of my life and I would say time. The thing that kept me going is what I realized is I would start time again, even if it went bankrupt. And that mindset came to me like I was walking and running and all over Massachusetts. Trying to like, um, just figure out what I'm gonna do.
18:51 Speaker 00 Where do you see the future of your space going? I mean, can you build a brain for these trucks to tell them where to turn and how to drive and how to avoid weather? And shouldn't you just be running these transportation companies yourself? You have all the data.
19:01 Speaker 01 So this is where the world's going and I think it's very exciting. We're really tracking what we're doing as you know, we're tracking the, the shipments on the trucks. And a lot of shippers and customers know where these shipments are now. But the beauty is with artificial intelligence and finally with agents, I believe that autonomous supply chain is finally becoming something that's gonna become a reality. When I started this company, you have these visions in your head, like insights are gonna happen, automated things are gonna be calling and people don't have to be on the phone calls and emails and spreadsheets. But now with agents, uh, if you asked me seven months ago, I'd be like, mm, I don't know. But after Opus came out in February. It's real. There is no doubt about that anymore. And where the world's going is, think of it this way.
19:46 Speaker 01 Every package, every shipment, we will know what's happening with it. It's gonna speak. AI agents are gonna know what actions to take based on those, whether it's email, whether it's phone call. They're gonna talk to other companies' agents and resolve any issues. And then finally, humans are gonna just look at dashboards if there's any challenges that they need to meet and go and tackle. But otherwise, agents are gonna solve. And then at the end, the shipment's gonna make it from point A to point B autonomously. And the shipment's gonna make it on time and in full with full of coordination. And the world's gonna be a better place and more efficient than it is today. And that's what really, really excited about that.
20:24 Speaker 00 Are you actively running any tests internally? Do you like to test this vision? Or are we still not there in terms of hardware or software or agents or models or what?
20:31 Speaker 01 Well, right now, we're actively, we've actively built workflows. So that we can automatically do things so that, actually, think of it as a shipment speaking. And then based on where it is and what's happening, there's workflows and my, uh, based on milestones, those workflows trigger things. And the next step right now that we're doing is AI agents that make phone calls. And then based on that, then we're gonna take other actions. It's, it's part of the vision. But I'm very confident that in six months, twelve months, especially in twenty-four, thirty-six months, we're gonna get to twenty thirty, I think, autonomous supply chains out there. And I believe Time's gonna be the company that's gonna be the one that generates all this.
21:10 Speaker 00 So what will your headline, what will your website headline be if five years from now?
21:14 Speaker 01 It's actually gonna change in around thirty to days or so. Uh, and Time Intelligence is gonna be a big piece there, uh, which I'm sharing.
21:23 Speaker 00 We love new info.
21:24 Speaker 01 I haven't shared with anybody. So, yeah, so Time Intelligence is gonna be there and, uh, that, that's gonna start being the headline.
21:32 Speaker 00 Well, hey, you take your time with your, he's wrestling with cameras because he took this call last minute. He's in his brother's, I think, apartment, uh, or something, or garage or something in New York. So, uh, we appreciate it, Kadar. Folks wanna follow your story as you, as you bring this vision to life, where can they find you online?
21:48 Speaker 01 Time.com and on LinkedIn.
21:49 Speaker 00 Guys, what a story. Broke a hundred million bucks of revenue today again, helping back to his father-in-law, who he was charging nineteen bucks a month with a little thing in his back of his truck to track his truck back in 2015. First line of code, 2016, he put in a hundred K. By 2017, three million seed round at a twenty million valuation. First AE hired in 2018. By 2019, he got thirty trucks going around Massachusetts at twenty bucks a pop, two hundred and fifty K of ARR. Fast forward a couple of years to 2023, right? They've got twenty-nine million bucks of revenue. They end up doing a Series C in '24 at forty million bucks. And then fast forward again to today, Series C won in 2025, twenty million bucks, five hundred and twenty-five million pre-money, at about sixty-seven million of total revenue collected in 2025, but ending that year at an eighty-nine million dollar
22:32 Speaker 00 run rate. Now at a hundred million dollar run rate, three hundred folks, as he tries to figure out, how do we finally bring autonomous supply chain to the world en masse? He's doing it with all of his live trackers. He's growing with thirty-two AEs, eleven SDRs, paid search, Google, LinkedIn, thirteen hundred customers, nine of which, this is crazy, nine of which paying more than a million dollars per year. That's how you know he's building something valuable. All right, Kranar, thank you for taking us to the top. You won't believe this CEO's revenue. Click here to watch the next episode right now.
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