Tive Hit $100M Revenue After a Down Round and $10K in the Bank

Nathan Latka: 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 1300 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. How to get your first 100 customers the easy way. How to set your AE quota targets 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 Krinnar. You ready to take us to the top? 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.

Krinnar: Yeah, huge milestone. Last week we hit 100 million of books annual run rates, which is amazing. So we'll do very confident 100 million

Nathan Latka: in terms of growth rate year over year. What were you one year ago?

Krinnar: So one year ago we're at 67, so we'll do at least looks like 100.

Nathan Latka: Just to be clear, if we take MRR from December of 2025, you're at

Krinnar: a 67 million run rate then no December MRR. So 67 was the whole recognized revenue of the whole 2025, the December MRR. I don't know the exact number on top of my head, but I know we closed the year in Jack as we do January, its fiscal year. It was at 89 million of booked annual run rate. So we went from 89 to 100 between January 31st and guys, you want

Nathan Latka: to listen to this whole interview because, um, 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. We have IoT plus SaaS he has. We're going to get into in a second. But Ty, what are. Uh, sorry, not Ty Krinnar. Why don't you explain your business model? What are you selling?

Krinnar: So it's pretty straightforward. Customers come to us, they want to know what's happening with their Shipments all over the world, whether it's strawberries, blueberries, servers, electronics, gaming, uh, consoles. So what we do is we sell them these trackers where they want to hold it up. And, oh, 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 I also sign up, hold that up again.

Nathan Latka: So where does that get installed? Does it get installed on a truck? Like, turn around a little bit. Okay, so is there a camera on there?

Krinnar: Yes. What we do 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, uh, 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. So it tells customers where the shipment is in real time, but also it's, uh, 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? Uh, 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 saved so many shipments, especially even to these days with theft. Uh, we catch, like we have a story recently with this company. The guy literally with his wife was driving, trying to found the driver who was stealing the, like, it was just a truck full of metal. And they called the guy at the truck stop and called the police.

Nathan Latka: 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? Uh, one tracker and one truck shipment per ping.

Krinnar: I would say at least around 12 to 15. So think of XYZ of uh, accelerometer. Then you got 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 15 or so points per ping. And then people can be pinging every five minutes, every 30 minutes. So if you do the math, we're. We've collected billions and billions.

Nathan Latka: What are you run rating on that? Like if you.

Krinnar: What is that? 12th?

Nathan Latka: 2026. 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?

Krinnar: There's a few.

Nathan Latka: Go for it. Or you can show us the better where we can learn.

Krinnar: Okay, I'll do that.

Nathan Latka: This is so cool, guys. While he's bringing that up again, what we're going to sort of go with on this is we're going back to his basement in 2007 when he had this idea all the way up to, you know, now 100 million run. 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, if he's subsidizing it at the start just to get the long term subscription contracts. We'll dive into all of that.

Krinnar: Yeah. So I think some of this is maybe not great to share or not is a little confidential.

Nathan Latka: Appreciate that.

Krinnar: Let me see if I. No, I would really focus on moving.

Nathan Latka: Focus on that blue graph. You told us when you passed 100k of ARR, when did you put. Put your point on the graph where you passed a million of ARR. What year?

Krinnar: Right there. Oh, million. It was in 2020. Around, I would say 10 million this time. Here, now you make it quizzing me. 10 million. It was two and a half million in 2020 in dollars. 2020. Yeah, it was in 2021 sometime. Yeah.

Nathan Latka: Sorry, you went from 1 million in 2020 to 10 million in 2021?

Krinnar: Yeah, it was at the end of 2019. I would say early 2020. We crossed that 1 million right here. And then by end of 2021 or mid like call it Q3, Q4, 2021, we went to 10 million of both. We were growing very fast at that

Nathan Latka: time because we signed up to revenues

Krinnar: and then you happen. Revenues were pretty exciting too. Uh, I, I would share them.

Nathan Latka: 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 revenue?

Krinnar: 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. Uh, 19, almost 20 million in 2022. 10 million in 2021. So that's when we did 10 million of actual revenue. Two and a half million of revenue in 2020 and 200.

Nathan Latka: Take me back to your basement. When you launched that, you can stop screen sharing, what were you you were watching your father in law or how did you get this idea?

Krinnar: 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 that go on cell towers. Fell in love with wireless, fell in love with radio frequencies.

Nathan Latka: 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@founderpath.com if you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing. Watch my show. So sign up@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.

Krinnar: Check out founderpath.com Back in 2015 I got met my wife, I got married to my wife in 2010. So a few years, uh, hanging out. 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 why is that you

Nathan Latka: haven't done a secondary? Any kind of secondary?

Krinnar: Uh, okay, I did but small, being transparent, few hundred thousand dollars. So maybe helped a little bit with mortgage.

Nathan Latka: A lot of founders are scared to ask for that. They're like, you know, they're growing and they end up with a hundred 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.

Krinnar: I would say. One of my investors actually encouraged me quite a bit on series A1, which gave uh, 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 Sigma mentors, this guy, Billy Ilcheff. He put a term sheet and he's like, karnar, I think you should take a little bit off the table.

Nathan Latka: Okay, tell us more of the story. So yeah, I have your LinkedIn up

Krinnar: here, but in 2015, um, I'm, um, 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 10:00pm, at 8:00pm 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 Archie. 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 50 bucks a month. I'm like, okay, you can pay me M. $19.99 a month.

Nathan Latka: Your first customer was your father in law.

Krinnar: I built this thing. Bucks a month, 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 rasimi had like 10 trucks. So I started tracking his trucks. So right now I'm tracking roughly 30 trucks in Worcester, Massachusetts. They're paying me around 19. I wanted that 99 cents. So it's like $19.99 a month on um, the invoices that I would make up myself. But uh, 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. 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, uh, put a battery, make it really low power, and put it on the back of the truck. And being an engineer, I thought that if I designed the best tracker in the world, the longest tracker, longest lasting tracker on a battery, I'm just going to win. And what happened is we didn't fully win because it was expensive. And I tried to sell it for. It was 100 bucks to make, almost 150 bucks to make. And I would sell it for $150, $200, and then I would charge customers $50 a month. And I realized one thing. It's 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 to call. Yes, it does. So we're going. And it was the same guy. We went to China and um, 20, like around 18, I think. Yeah, early 2018. And we met every manufacturer out there that can make a tracker. And we built the world's first, like single use 2G tracker that we sold for 29 bucks. And I saw customers, this is 2019 customers buying thousand at a time. I'm like, okay, this is different. I could barely sell 10 before selling

Nathan Latka: battery technology that I made you that allowed you to produce this that no one else could.

Krinnar: Not particularly. What we had is, uh, we have patents, we have patent on the overall solution and the system that obviously does an amazing job at making sure that the battery power of the trackers last 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 a partner in China so we can do the cycle very quickly. But yeah, that would be, I would say the proprietary thing that, uh, 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. 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 we have many other.

Nathan Latka: What was your go to market strategy after your friends and family shipping scallops? Right. Going from 2.5 to 10 million of revenue. What was your growth tactic there?

Krinnar: I think the biggest lesson that I learned, uh, going from being a technical founder, I thought that, like I told you, that my product was the best and it would just sell itself, and it didn't. And, uh, in 2018, 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 front line, that spear is actually the heartbeat of the company. 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.

Nathan Latka: Okay, what other growth motions are you using today? Is it just sort of aesdrs or something else? Like what?

Krinnar: 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 doesn't. 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 m. Quite a bit of SEO right now.

Nathan Latka: Are you still at like 20 bucks a truck per tracker or what's your average ACV these days?

Krinnar: Call it in the. Probably call it in the 40, 50 range, maybe more, I guess if you roll that up.

Nathan Latka: Uh, 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?

Krinnar: 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 100 trackers a year. Obviously, we don't want to get as many of those customers but where, if they come in and they want to buy, where they're very welcome. So we have customers that buy 100 trackers a year and then we have

Nathan Latka: a million dollar per year customer yet. Let's go. Nice.

Krinnar: I think we have around nine or. Yeah.

Nathan Latka: That are million plus ten customers. What makes them, what allows your sales reps to upsell or give that much value to them? Is it just number of trucks? Basically a number of trackers.

Krinnar: 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 going to 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. M. Uh, it's pretty exciting on the growth side. Land and expand. So 60% of our new ARR is expansion and 45. 45.

Nathan Latka: 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 and your world? So let's start on the capital side. I know you've raised rounds. When was the first round?

Krinnar: First round was in November 2000.

Nathan Latka: Okay, wait, this goes way back when you write the first line of code

Krinnar: for this in June. So what was the first running?

Nathan Latka: Are we talking like 500k from friends and family?

Krinnar: Nothing. It was me working and taking half of the money to pay mortgage and food and so that was your own money.

Nathan Latka: You put in 50k, 100k.

Krinnar: And then I did that over. Yeah, probably around there for, for the 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 the video is I think 250k. And then we did another round of two uh, hundred k when we got into tech stars. So we got into Techstars in, 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.

Nathan Latka: Like looking back now, was that the right decision to raise that 3 million seed at that time?

Krinnar: I think so, yes. But I think maybe we could have spent it better. I think we waste money on, on spend there but I don't think we wasted it particularly, but we Were building, uh, a lot of things around software. We were, uh, we hired a lot of software engineers, which was exciting because we kind of got the architecture right in the 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 in, uh, 2018, and that's where I had to lay off. We went from like 16 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 2019. Uh, we had $10,000, 10,000 to $20,000 in the bank. And then I had to raise a convertible note of a, uh, secured convertible note and got $100,000. Ah, at a down round.

Nathan Latka: How brutal was that?

Krinnar: Like, down round?

Nathan Latka: Like it was a million. A million valuation or what?

Krinnar: No, it was from 21 down to 11. It was not interesting.

Nathan Latka: So. So who priced the 21 million? Techstars? No, the 3 million seed.

Krinnar: The 3 million. It was between next view and that's wild story.

Nathan Latka: 10k left in the bank. Did you ever seriously consider shutting the company down?

Krinnar: No. So that, uh, one thing that I realized is I believe in the darkest moments of my life. And I would say tithe, 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 want to do.

Nathan Latka: 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.

Krinnar: 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 shipments on the trucks. And a lot of shippers and customers know where they ship them 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 going to become a reality. When I started this company, you have these visions in your head, like insights are going to happen. Automated things are going to 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, m, 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, every package, every shipment, we will know what's happening with it. It's going to speak. AI agents are going to know what actions to take based on those, whether it's email, whether it's phone call, they're going to talk to other companies, agents and resolve any issues. And then finally, humans are going to just look at dashboards if there's any challenges that they need to meet and go and tackle. But otherwise agents are going to solve. And then at the end, the shipments got to make it from point 8 to point B autonomously and the shipping is going to make it on time and in full with full of coordination. And the world is going to be a better place and more efficient than it is today. And that's.

Nathan Latka: Are you actively running any tests internally to test this vision, or are we still not there in terms of hardware or software or agents or models or whatever?

Krinnar: 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 based, uh, 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 going to take other actions. It's part of the vision. But I'm very confident that in six months, 12 months, especially in 24, 36 months, we're gonna get to 20, 30. I think autonomous supply chains are there and I believe Time is going to be the company that's going to be the one that generates all this.

Nathan Latka: So what will your headline, what will your website headline be five years from now?

Krinnar: It's actually going to change in around 32 days or so. And type intelligence is going to be a big piece there, uh, which I'm sharing new info shared with anybody. So. So yeah, so Time Intelligence is going to be there and, uh, that's going to start being the headline.

Nathan Latka: You take your time with your. He's wrestling 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. Kunar folks, want to follow your story as you, as you bring this vision to life.

Krinnar: Where can they find you online, time.com and on LinkedIn.

Nathan Latka: Guys, what a story broke 100 million bucks of revenue today. Again, helping back to his father in law, who he was charging 19 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 100k by 2017, $3 million seed round at a 20 million valuation. First AE hired in 2018. By 2019, he got 30 trucks going around Massachusetts at 20 bucks, uh, a pop. 250k of ARR. Fast forward a couple years to 2023, right? They've got 29 million bucks of revenue. They end up doing a series C in 24 out of 40 million bucks. And then fast forward again to today. Series C1 in 2025, 20 million bucks. 525 million pre money at about 67 million of total revenue collected in 2025. But ending that year at an $89 million run rate. Now at $100 million run rate. 300 folks as he tries to figure out how do we finally bring autonomous supply chain to the world in mass, he's doing it with all of his live trackers. He's growing with, uh, 32, 11 SDRs, paid search, Google, LinkedIn, 1300 customers, nine of which. This is crazy. Nine of which paying more than $1 million per year. That's how you know he's building something valuable. All right, Krinnar, thank you for taking us to the top. You won't believe this. CEOs revenue. Click here to watch the next episode. Right now.