You Make $8m/yr, Would You Sell for $100m Cash? | Antoine Fort, CEO Qobra

Antoine Fort launched Qobra in 2020 with a $100K pre-seed from 7 angels, and his first investor was also his first customer. He started by cold calling with a phone list from a provider later shut down over European privacy law (GDPR), charging $10K/year. Today Qobra is at about $30K/year per customer, 250+ customers, and roughly $7–8M ARR. Along the way, one meme ad closed an $80K/year deal, and a single sales rep on the platform earned $1.5M in commissions (75x the average). So when Nathan asks if he'd sell for $100M cash today, his answer is surprisingly honest. Qobra is an AI-first sales compensation and commission software platform. Antoine covers his $5M seed and $10M Series A, the $2M in debt he raised to limit dilution, the $200K–300K/year he spends on LinkedIn, YouTube and Google ads, his G2 and SEO glossary playbook, and the three AI agents Qobra is building to replace commission consultants.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Actually, I didn't really have a proper job before launching Cobra, so created the company almost right after school. So we launched as a sales compensation software, so automating end-to-end commissions from integrations to generating statements. We serve more than 250 customers now.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Can I take 250 customers times that 30,000 ACV to sort of back into your ARR? That puts you at like 7 million of ARR.

• 0:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, slightly above that.

• 0:25Speaker 01

  Congrats, man. That's exciting.

• 0:27Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I just saw this on your LinkedIn. Top sales rep earned 1.5 million in commissions in 2025.

• 0:35Speaker 00

  He is earning like 75x what people earn on average in variable compensation.

• 0:41Speaker 01

  What on earth was that sales rep selling to make that kind of commission?

• 0:46Speaker 01

  Hey folks, my guest today is Antoine Fort. He's the co-founder and CEO of Cobra, an AI-first sales compensation platform. He graduated from college and then co-founded the business in 2020 to fix one of B2B SaaS's most broken workflows, commissions. All right, Antoine, are you ready to take us to the top?

• 1:02Speaker 00

  Yes, I am. Thanks very much, Nathan, for hosting me on this episode.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  I appreciate you joining. Do you have a horror story? Were you a former account executive that, you know, wasn't paid your quota on time or something?

• 1:13Speaker 00

  Actually, I didn't really have a proper job before launching Cobra, so created the company almost right after school. So I did not believe the horror story of commissions myself, but I could see it very clearly, so that's why I wanted to solve this.

• 1:26Speaker 01

  So here you go. These are the products you're selling today. Which of these products did you launch with and what year did you launch?

• 1:31Speaker 00

  So we launched as a sales compensation software, so automating end-to-end commissions from integrations to generating statements.

• 1:40Speaker 01

  And what year did you launch the business?

• 1:42Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah, 2020.

• 1:43Speaker 01

  2020. Okay, so you launched the business in 2020. And walk us through your first paying customer. How did you get those first couple of customers?

• 1:50Speaker 00

  There's like two first customers. One of them, so I was just with the idea of launching Cobra, but Cobra was not live. We didn't have the name yet. It was called Sales Crew, and actually, the legal name of the company still says Crew. And I saw like the co-founder and CEO of Partout, a French company, who wrote an article on sales compensation. So I reached out to him on LinkedIn. And during the full weekend, he and his CFO worked on building kind of a sales compensation app, wireframing. And so on Monday, he sends me an email saying, we need to talk. So we have this meeting on Monday. And he's saying, okay, I like the idea, so you can see what we do, what we did.

• 2:36Speaker 00

  So if you want, we could be your first investors and your first customers. So I said, yeah, let's go. And we raised a very tiny seed, pre-seed round at that time, and Partout became our first customer. And then the other one, it was almost at the same time. We just launched publicly on LinkedIn. And someone reached out to me saying, hey, it's interesting what you do. Can I get a demo? So there was almost nothing to demo at that time, just a promise. But in the end, we landed this customer very quickly.

• 3:08Speaker 01

  The pre-seed round that you did with Partout, I think I'm pronouncing that correctly. How big was that round or how small was that round?

• 3:14Speaker 00

  So it was 100K, very small round with seven business angels. That really helped a lot then.

• 3:20Speaker 01

  Was LinkedIn part of your strategy to get your first 100 customers? That was a big influence?

• 3:24Speaker 00

  I was mostly doing outbound calls. So it was just me and my phone and then a little bit of network as well.

• 3:31Speaker 01

  And what was the price point back then? How much were you charging?

• 3:34Speaker 00

  So we just looked at what was the price on the market for similar solutions, especially US ones. And we said, okay, for our first 10 customers, let's just split that in two.

• 3:44Speaker 01

  What was that price point? 10,000 a year, 1,000 a year?

• 3:47Speaker 00

  Yeah, that was, yeah, 10,000 a year.

• 3:50Speaker 01

  And what were you packaging for that? Were you pricing per seat, per feature upgrades, a usage metric?

• 3:55Speaker 00

  Per seat.

• 3:57Speaker 01

  Okay. And why was that the right metric? Why not number of reps managed, commission, you know, reps managed on your platform or some other usage metric?

• 4:05Speaker 00

  Oh, yeah. So actually, that's exactly what we do. I said per seat because it's, you know, for a number of sales rep seats. But, you know, admin licenses are free. So if you have 100 reps with your paying commissions, that's going to be 100 licenses, no matter how much, you know, finance and revhaus people you have on top of it.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  I see, I see. Okay. And then you mentioned that those early customers paying 10,000 per year on average were 50% of your pricing today. So is it fair to say customers today are, you know, averaging more like 20 grand per year?

• 4:36Speaker 00

  Actually, it's now again like 30.

• 4:38Speaker 01

  I'm on your LinkedIn and I see it looks like you guys are spending a lot of investment on sort of in-person events. Is this accurate?

• 4:45Speaker 00

  Yeah, actually, this year, we decided to put some gas on this type of events, meetings, dinners, trade shows. I think that helps creating meaningful connections.

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, so tell me about this. What are we looking at here? Walk me through this strategy here. Like, what did it cost you all in? Did you see a good ROI? Should other people be thinking about events, booth sponsorships?

• 5:06Speaker 00

  Yes, so we took this booth at Sester's. It was like the silver package, so it was the lowest one, actually.

• 5:15Speaker 01

  I think you publish this most, it's like 10 or 20 grand or something, right?

• 5:19Speaker 00

  It's more than this. It's more than this.

• 5:21Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 5:21Speaker 00

  And then the plan here is just, you know, to get as much people as possible who are walking past our booth, talk to us. So it's a very easy icebreaker, so you can speak to people. And what you see at the back on the TV is that we did multiple advertising. We like to do, you know, type of B2C marketing, but applied to B2B. And we advertised that then on LinkedIn ads, YouTube ads and so on. But we also felt that for the trade show, it was good to just have it displayed on the screen. So people, again, they're intrigued and they just come and talk.

• 5:57Speaker 01

  You mentioned paid ads as well. Are you comfortable sharing how much all-in you're paying per month on just direct paid advertising?

• 6:03Speaker 00

  So per year, it's between 200 and 3K.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  And how do you know if it's working or not? Maybe just talk about the LinkedIn ads.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so basically, you can then track, you know, traffic on your website coming from different sources, including LinkedIn. You can also see with LinkedIn, the engagement with the posts. So all this, it's very hard indeed to link revenue to a marketing source, especially LinkedIn, since it's, you know, top of funnel. So people might just, you know, come back on the website after words. But you can have, you know, very high-level signals where you can say, okay, I drove more traffic to the website because of these ads.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  Are you managing all these creatives here on LinkedIn one by one? Or using a platform to generate these?

• 6:49Speaker 00

  We got an amazing person in the company, Dylan, who's handling all of this directly. We also have, I must admit, like an agency, someone in freelance. You know, lately, we closed, not with the SpongeBob meme, but with another meme. We just closed the deal, you know, like it clicked. It took a demo, then there was the opportunity. We closed it. 80K per year, crazy.

• 7:16Speaker 01

  That's wild. Okay, with all these growth strategies, how many customers are you now serving today?

• 7:21Speaker 00

  We serve more than 250 customers now.

• 7:25Speaker 01

  Wow, okay. And can I take, Antoine, can I take 250 customers times that 30,000 ACV to sort of back into your ARR? That puts you at like 7 million of ARR.

• 7:34Speaker 00

  Yeah, slightly above that.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Congrats, man. That's exciting.

• 7:38Speaker 00

  Yeah, it's cool. You know, as a founder, you always want more.

• 7:42Speaker 01

  What's your goal for the end of 2026? Can you break 10 million of ARR this year?

• 7:46Speaker 00

  Yeah, that's the plan.

• 7:48Speaker 01

  Come on, you gotta be more American. Like, hell, yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna crush 10 million of ARR.

• 7:52Speaker 00

  The plan. We're gonna crush 10 million of ARR, yeah.

• 7:55Speaker 01

  I love that.

• 7:55Speaker 00

  Maybe 20.

• 7:57Speaker 01

  Maybe 20, there you go. Okay, and walk me through how you funded this. I know you have raised some capital. Obviously, every founder wants to manage growth with also dilution. So you told us about your 100K angel round. What happened in between there? Anything else raised?

• 8:10Speaker 00

  So yes, after that, we raised a seed round and a Series A round. So the seed round was 5 million. It was 2022, January 2022. And then we raised our Series A, 10 million, like two years later.

• 8:26Speaker 01

  Okay, so Series A in 2024?

• 8:29Speaker 00

  Actually, end of 2023.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  2023, okay. What was, I mean, the valuations were so funky back then. I mean, people were getting crazy 40, 50x multiples on their ARR. Did you sort of play that valuation game back then or no?

• 8:42Speaker 00

  No, no, we didn't want to play that valuation game because it was quite obvious that, you know, this could turn into a trap. And, you know, I think that the markets collapsed not too long after. So I think it was a good decision.

• 8:59Speaker 01

  Do you remember the year you broke your first million of revenue?

• 9:02Speaker 00

  2022. We had an amazing party. It was a crazy week because we closed one customer every day of that week, which at that time, you know, did not happen. And on Thursday nights, we have the CFO of this company, Akineo, signing the contract that gets us above 1 million. So we took all the champagne from the bar that we were in.

• 9:27Speaker 00

  And, you know, just had a good night.

• 9:30Speaker 01

  I love that. That's so cool. Okay, so you passed a million in 2022. And do you remember, like, what's growth rate today? You're at around 8 million today. Where were you exactly one year ago?

• 9:40Speaker 00

  We were, you know, between 4 and 5. We're working hard to increase that growth rate because there's, you know, there's lots of things that we do well, but there's so many that we can, that we can do even better. So this growth rate is exciting. It means that we're doing lots of things right.

• 10:01Speaker 01

  My notes say that you raised from Singular, the Revenue Syndicate and Briga. I mean, are they feeling, are they putting pressure on you? Hey, get to 200% year-over-year, get to 300% year-over-growth. What do they like as investors?

• 10:12Speaker 00

  You know, they are perfectly aware that pushing a company to just burn stupidly

• 10:21Speaker 00

  can do more harm than good. So of course, they're putting pressure. They want us to grow faster, even faster. There are investors that understand what it is to be in the shoes of the founder. They don't only look at the numbers. And I'm glad that we have them on board.

• 10:44Speaker 01

  That makes a lot of sense. And then my notes say that you also raised $2 million in debt. Is that accurate? And if so, should other founders be thinking about using debt to avoid dilution?

• 10:53Speaker 00

  Yes, I think it's really something useful to do, especially on top of fundraising. It's good moments to go and talk to bankers. So let's do it. You just need to be aware that, you know, this money needs to be paid back. So a few years later, when you look at what you're paying,

• 11:15Speaker 00

  make sure to, you know, don't take this money as if it was invested money because it isn't.

• 11:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, you did that 2 million on the back of your Series A 10 million round?

• 11:27Speaker 00

  Yes, correct.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  I see, I see. Did you do end up working with like SVB or HBC or who did you end? Are you comfortable sharing who you worked with there? Were they a good partner?

• 11:35Speaker 00

  We we've got HSBC on board and two other banks.

• 11:39Speaker 01

  I just saw this on your LinkedIn. Top sales rep earned 1.5 million in commissions in 2025. Tell me more about this data you're tracking and what on earth was that sales rep selling to make that kind of commission?

• 11:51Speaker 00

  So I'm not allowed to say what that person was selling because you know it's data of our customers. But what I can say is, you know, it's real data. So the person that earned the most money just in variable compensation across, you know, really thousands, it's not thousands, like 10,000 of sales reps earned 1.5 million dollars. Yes.

• 12:18Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 12:18Speaker 00

  And he's very ahead of the second one. And you know, as you can see, he is earning like 75x what people earn on average in variable compensation.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  There's a massive battle going on right now to basically replace the sales rep, right? Replace the the commission structured sales rep. People are saying like AI can do it. I had Amanda on from One Mind. She's basically convinced firms like HubSpot, She Can Form This With Me Live, to pay 100 to 400,000 dollars per head, per fake AI agent head to put on the website to actually take the Zoom call, close meetings. And her argument is, look, this is much cheaper than paying a quota carrying sales rep 300K if they hit the 1 million quota target. How would you sort of react to that?

• 13:01Speaker 00

  Products that have very fast sales cycles where just, you know, a one call close, AI will replace sales rep. But as long as there, you know, more complexity, I think it's still very far from being capable of doing so.

• 13:17Speaker 01

  Very cool. Okay. Anything that you are building in the AI space that we should talk about in terms of product?

• 13:22Speaker 00

  Yes. So we really believe that, I mean, what we're doing with our product is we're turning a SaaS product, which is basically a product that helps people do their job to an AI product that does the job. And we are building three agents that we're going to be releasing this quarter in June that are called, yeah, that are called the analyst, the architect, and the coach. The architect allows you to build and deploy comp plans in minutes instead of weeks. So typical implementation of COBRA or any incentive management tool

• 14:06Speaker 00

  takes, you know, weeks because you need to sync the data, then implement the complaint rules. There's usually ton of plans across the organization and they all have their, you know, specificities. All this now is just, this is my comp plan. Here's my PDF. Here's my PowerPoint, whatever. Build it and deploy it. So that's the architect and then the analyst and coach are for like similar use cases of

• 14:36Speaker 00

  reports building

• 14:39Speaker 00

  and sales rep engagement. So this is truly exciting because I really believe that this will allow us to provide so much more value to our customers.

• 14:47Speaker 01

  When you launch agents that actually do work for your customers, do you think your own agents will cannibalize your current revenue at all?

• 14:55Speaker 00

  No, I don't. What I believe in, I'm a big fan of like what Sequoia says about AI and services. They say that for every dollar spent on software, there's six dollars spent on services and that AI turns the six dollars into software. So we believe in a different world where you don't need all these people to maintain your sales compensation tool and you can do it autonomously. And we believe even further, we believe that the tool will do the work themselves. So I don't think it's going to cannibalize our revenue. On the contrary, I believe that it will increase dramatically our revenue because we'll be able to capture there is that currently are going into people and consultants.

• 15:35Speaker 01

  Antoine, as we wrap up, I want to just touch on two other growth channels I think you're crushing, but correct me if I'm wrong. It looks like you're investing pretty aggressively on making sure you get a lot of reviews. I mean, 1,000 G2 reviews is a ton of reviews. But a lot of people say, eh, but I have to pay G2 like 10 grand a month to then be featured and like, ah, maybe the leads are good, they're bad. Is G2 working for you?

• 15:55Speaker 00

  Yes, yes. G2 has very strong authority on SEO and GEO. So having lots of reviews and being highly ranked like we are is really driving lots of traffic.

• 16:07Speaker 01

  When you say drives you a lot of traffic, can you quantify it? Do you know how much you get from G2 weekly or monthly?

• 16:13Speaker 00

  It's not necessarily that we get traffic from G2, but let's say that you ask a question to Claude about what is the best sales comp software out there. Claude will rely on multiple data source and links online that can provide with the answer to that question. So that drives traffic.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  This is where you're getting most of your traffic from. So you're you built the glossary SEO playbook, which is smart programmatic SEO. Was that intentional or by accident?

• 16:41Speaker 00

  Yes, intentional. We have really been working strongly on SEO for the past, maybe like two to three years. So at first, you don't see the results so much, but then, you know, when it starts to kick in, it really does.

• 16:59Speaker 01

  This is a really smart go to market motion. The trick is you have to know which glossary terms you want to rank for. So Antoine, I imagine that was you sort of contributing what you think is important, but also a little AI enrichment as well.

• 17:09Speaker 00

  It was not my idea, but again, someone from the team that I'm really glad that he's working for for the company.

• 17:17Speaker 01

  You look like you get a lot of your traffic from France. Are you are you actively trying to sort of break into the States and, you know, get more traffic? I mean, if you've monopolized France it probably for sales commission software already, right?

• 17:26Speaker 00

  There's still a big part of the market to capture over there. I don't think we even have, you know, 1% of the market. So there's still some strong growth opportunities out there. But yes, we're really breaking strong into the US market. I'll be relocating to New York. We're everywhere because the US market is a priority for us. We already have like a significant part of our revenue coming from the US.

• 17:49Speaker 01

  If someone in the States wanted to expand to France and acquire you, would you, if someone offered you 100 million all cash today, would you take the deal?

• 17:57Speaker 00

  For 100 million? You asked me to be transparent, so I'll take it.

• 18:05Speaker 01

  I love that you're so honest. That's amazing. Are you comfortable sharing what your valuation was back in 2023 when you did that round?

• 18:12Speaker 00

  No, sadly, I cannot.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  You can't show that. Okay. Was that, can you share if it was higher or lower than 100 million?

• 18:18Speaker 00

  It was lower.

• 18:19Speaker 01

  It was lower. Okay. Very cool.

• 18:20Speaker 00

  Otherwise, I wouldn't take it.

• 18:22Speaker 01

  Yes, that's why I asked. Yeah, very cool. Well, hey, Antoine, this was really helpful. You taught us a ton. If people want to follow your story online, where can they find you?

• 18:30Speaker 00

  On LinkedIn, Antoine Forth. Feel free to hit me up.

• 18:35Speaker 01

  Antoine, thanks for taking us to the top.

• 18:37Speaker 00

  Thank you so much, Nathan. Really appreciate this session with you.

• 18:41Speaker 01

  If you enjoyed that interview, you should click here to subscribe to the channel so you don't miss new interviews every Tuesday. If you've got some free time and want to listen to the next interview right now, click right here. Lastly, subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We're on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and here on YouTube.