He raised $41M in one year to replace enterprise accountants with AI. | Yogi Goel, Founder of Maxima

We were forced to open a bank account because there were customers where should we set the money.

So that was a great sign for us early on. The startup building is like a layered cake.

You have to focus on the right things at the right time. Right now, a kick-ass product with

very happy customers is what matters to me. The moment I stop worrying is the day we will die.

Think about it. All the best coaches who are in NFL. Is there a single game where they worry about

not losing. They worry about it every day, but they have the confidence that if they execute

and they play well, they will win. And that's my state.

It lets us reach more founders and it lets us get better guests. Thank you.

Yogi, welcome to the show, man. Thank you for having me.

So pretty wild on the fundraising front. I was just going through a crunch race here.

You raised an $11 million seed round early last year. And then by the end of the year,

you raised a $30 million series A. You know, for what it's worth, the median seed is about

$3 million. The median A is about 12. You're raising, you know, three four X time the median round.

So you must be doing something right on the company building front and obviously on the

fundraising side. And then you'll go through your background. You were at LinkedIn for a few

years. You were at rubric for seven years. And then you started Maxima about two years ago or so.

Maybe walk me through the tail end of rubric and kind of what led you down the startup path to

begin with. Yeah, absolutely. So the real story is that I was actually never targeting to start

around startup. I was on the CFO path. I had spent 20 years being an auditor, then setting up

financial accounting function at companies like rubric. And when I saw the problem of how painful

was it to put together the accounting books at companies which had scaled to a certain point,

I decided to solve it myself. It was a hair on fire problem. It was number one, number two,

number three priority for the rubric CFO and all the CFOs I had worked with in the past. And here,

I could see agents and LLM providing finally the way to unlock the problem. So we decided to roll

up our with the team together and build the company. Maybe tell me a bit more about how the problem

like manifests itself. What are the things that you're seeing that lead this to be like a number one

pain point? Yeah, so very quickly for your audience. So Maxima is an agentic platform for enterprise

accounting where we do the accounting work that happens inside a company on a daily weekly monthly

basis. And if you think about how pervasive this problem is, any business which is doing any

economic value exchange, which is the reason for the business to exist, they have to maintain their

books and do the accounting of things as per their local gap laws accounting laws. So every company

has to have it whether you're a single two percent grocery store or whether you are Apple computers.

The challenge that happens inside these companies is that the money movement happens across

huge amount of various streams. It could be bird cards, it could be banks, it could be payroll,

it could be procurement systems and so on. And then obviously you have revenue coming from

different ways. And a lot of the economic value also gets exchanged in form of

non-cash stuff like stock-based compensation and so on. So the problem for the accounting team

is to wrangle all that financial transaction data from different upstream systems where these

transactions are happening. Transform it as per the applicable accounting and tax laws. Validate it

because you cannot afford a 0.001 percent error in this space and then present it on as fast

as of a basis because SEC requires you, the stock exchange requires you to file your financials

within 45 days of the quarter close. And if you don't, then your stock can be at dealership. So

the speed matters. You can't just say, you know, I'll do it three months later. And then it also

stops you from doing a lot of this, taking a lot of business decisions because if you don't know

how much money you have left in the bank today, how will you greenlight the proposals for the future.

So all these accounting departments have today is these transactions systems and a dumb database called

an ERP where they store the final numbers. But the stuff that happens in the middle has to be done

manually by people. They repeatedly download data over and over again. I saw that. They repeatedly

wrangle the transaction data into accounting entries. And they do various kinds of validation

checks to ensure that there were no fat fingering. There was no miscompliance with the local tax

and accounting laws. And all of that just requires a lot of headcount at many companies which

there are clients of ours like Scalier, Ripling, Glean and many others as you scale up the problem

exponentially. And is that the main problem then? It's a matter of spend, the amount of money

they're spending on accounting or is it a problem of accuracy? Is it a problem of time? Like what is

the biggest issue for these the CFOs of enterprise? Number one problem is accuracy. So the number of

public companies in the United States which are mistreating their financials because they found

to have errors in it has peaked and that those lead to massive amount of stock correction. There's

a company in Boston, Symbatic which had like 10 million dollar restatement of their revenue and

the stock drop from I think 25 some billion by 40 percent. So for 10 million restatement your stock

drop 40 percent. And this is happening over and over again, Macy's had a 135 million restatement.

Just because it introduces like risk and other questions about how real this company is,

what else is going to get restated? Exactly. So when you are an investor sitting outside your

hedge fund or your mutual fund, now you completely lost faith in that company. Yeah, this

small thing seems off. What else is hiding in the cupboard? So they sell first and ask questions

later. The number one priority is accuracy and compliance after a certain scale. And then it is time.

I cannot explain to you how important it is to put together your books fast. It has to be done

on a monthly basis. And many companies spend three weeks every month, three weeks every month,

just to put together accurate financials from the prior month. They take two days break and they

start again and they start again. And realistically, no investment banker or auditor will sign your books

and take you public if you cannot close your books in five to six days. So you have to companies have

to go from 20 days to five days. Some of that requires change in your processes. If you have

weird processes where you are retroactively changing people's salaries or retroactively changing

pricing of a customer, then that's a process problem. That's a CEO problem. But in many places,

it's just the manual grind of grabbing data, transforming data, changing it as per the different

laws and validating it in many, many different ways. It's a very complex problem.

And you're seeing this. And what's the moment when you decide, yeah, you know what I'm going to go

and I'm going to solve this myself? I mean, it's obviously a big decision.

Yeah. So this problem that I had seen had been repeated in front of my eyes for 20 years. First,

as an auditor at all of our clients, they were shooting bricks, they were very unhappy,

saying, you know, this thing is most painful, right? Accounting processes inside companies,

it's a little bit like health systems inside countries. Nobody is happy. The people receiving

the health is not happy. People giving out the health care are not happy. The pairs are not happy

and so on. So it was a known problem that this has to change. And if you look at across the world,

there's an estimate there in US alone. I believe there are one and a half million people doing

the work manually. And they're leaving the profession in droves because they don't want to deal with

long hours. They don't want to deal with mundane repeat work because it's kind of being in

hamster wheel. If you check on Reddit, they are like moms crying in bathrooms at like a Saturday at

2 a.m. say, I want to break from this. So I knew this problem all along. I had faced it. I had

grade my hair all this. And what changed for me was a chatty beauty moment. I think when I saw

there's this tool which can understand structured and unstructured data and then follow instructions

to spit out things in a half reasonable way. Obviously, you and I, when we tried chatty beauty in

November 2022, it kind of wasn't perfect. It felt a little gimmicky, but if you squint, you could see

what was to come. And we squinted and we saw this as a real thing. I had commitment to rubric to

take it public by April 2024. I did the IPO gained a lot from that. And then after a quarter,

I left to start my company. In fact, the rubric CEO was my reference call for all the VCs.

And rubric CFO is a huge mentor of mine. So yeah, they know the problem be a solving.

Did you already have like the initial co-founding team figured out by the time you took this step?

Yes, I had the co-founding team. But I took a long time in figuring out that co-founder. I think

I took about 18 to 24 months to figure that out. I went to 12 co-founders.

This is while you're at rubric, like post-chat GVT, but before leaving.

Correct, correct. I'm sort of figuring it out who to build it with. Obviously, there's

chemistry and all that. But what was really important for me is someone who could build

accurate systems. This is not one of those spaces where you break things and build fast.

You cannot break things. You want accurate systems who can operate at a large scale. Our

product works for enterprises, complex things across 20 currencies, across millions of transactions.

And they can serve it to the people in a very elegant way, hide the complexity behind it.

And I was talked to a lot of people and Akshay and Jack were the ones who I got introduced

through my common network who had built these systems, which sort of companies already have

solved these problems. The FinTech companies. So if you think of Robin Hood, if you think about

payment tech companies, they hide a lot of the complexity behind and they make things very easy.

But yet are very accurate. If I sent you $25.31, they have to explain to me

that how much that you received $25.31. And we were looking for that. So we've hired a lot of people

from consumer FinTech, from companies who have built these systems for Netflix internally.

And such. But your co-founders were from those companies, or they were from Rubrik?

No, no. My co-founders were not from Rubrik. They were from these companies.

They were introduced to me by my Rubrik colleagues, but because they had worked at some other

companies together. So I took a lot of work. And once I saw that this, I had found these co-founders

who could build a product and who had the co-founding skills I needed, like agility,

seriousness, get shit done, ability to hire tech talent, then I felt it was time to take the plunge.

And when did you raise the seed? Was that right as you left?

Yeah, so actually it was before I left. I was officially associated with Rubrik

September, 2024. I had started talking about leaving April, 2024. And we got the seed in all this

2024. Tell me the story of how that happens. I mean, 11 million. Obviously you've got a pedigree

and so does your co-founders, but 11 million is it's a big seed. What's the story there?

Yeah, so I wish I could know how do VCs found out, but I think they have a very deep network.

I've been joking with my VC friends that there's only one network, Stronger than CIA Network,

which is the VC Network. So somehow they had found out and we were getting

inbounded. I was part of the Strong Capital's product market fit cohort, where we really wanted

to learn product market fit and go to market selling. So we were there for two months and they were

impressed with us. We were impressed with them. Word got out. We were getting a lot of inbounds.

And I felt like Plainer had a prepared mind. If you look at what Plainer Perkins has done,

they have clearly seen that in areas of professions which require highly specialized repeat work,

where there are lots and lots of labor required. They would be iconic companies built. So they

funded Harvey very early days. They funded open evidence, which is for doctors early days.

They made a similar bet on us for accounting and finance and so on. So we were talking to a lot of

VCs. I think it happened like within an eight hour time frame where we got the term sheet from Plainer.

And did you set out to raise around 10 million or how did you figure out like the amount?

It was a smaller amount. We were thinking of smaller amount, but then they felt like give

the team and the engineering horsepower you need. They felt like you need the right amount of

capitalization to go chase this thing well. This is not a product where you hire two people

in sort of outdoor software development, Eastern Europe and India. And then they kind of

picked things together. In fact, if you look at the legacy in this space, they are all checklist.

And they talk a lot about this by built by accountants for accountants. And in my mind,

an AI product which is built by accountants. And by the way, I'm an a former accountant.

Will not scale fast. People shouldn't be using the AI product that I'm coding. They should use

the AI product that I'm architecting because I can tell you what the problems are, how to build it.

But just like a formula one driver shouldn't be building the formula one car. He should be giving inputs

or she should be giving inputs on how the car should be designed. Similarly, we have taken very

sick sense that our product is architected by accountants and built by AI engineers.

He talked a bit about the problem earlier, but now that they were kind of moving towards,

starting the company, what was back then your idea of the solution and how it would work?

Yeah, I think we focus a lot on the customer value and the value also solve the customer problems

across the three dimension, increase the accuracy and compliance, reduce the time to close and do

it in a cheaper way. And there are a lot of secondary benefits of it, which is happier team,

higher retention, more agility to the business. But the first order value prop was that.

And we felt the only way to do it is by building a tool or building a software which can do the

job for the accountant. The dojoer solutions in this space has been do all the work manually and

log it into like a Asana type of a product to show to the auditor that on February 3rd,

1123 AM this work was done so that auditor says, pass, you did the work. And we felt like that was

maybe interesting 10, 15 years ago, but we have moved from the days of checklist and drawers and

shelves to someone who actually does the job. And that's what the customers were asking us to do.

Is this like replacing the existing accountants and just having a smaller team or how would this

play out? Yeah, so what you see is in companies which are highly complex and growing, they have a

very clear mandate that our revenue will grow 80 to 90% in next one or two years. But you have to

do more with less, which is you have to keep down flat. And invariably what happens is and I

saw that at rubric, I was there for seven years. So 350 Fridays where every Friday, I would go home

and I would be dissatisfied with the amount of high value stuff that I wish I had done. The high

value stuff like helping my companies launch into new geographies. I couldn't support it because

I was doing this word, which I would call is like licking the envelope every day. High value stuff

like launching new pricing and packaging because marketing can't launch a new pricing and

packaging if accounting doesn't know how to account for it. Supporting new commission plans,

doing GPU data center accounting because all I was doing was licking the envelopes. So I don't

think we should be thinking about this in the lump of work type of narrative. We feel over and

over again, there's a lot of high value work that accountants want to do and can do. That's what

the CFOs want them to do. Like one of our customers, Josh Waldron at scale AI, his big remit to his

team even before Maxima is I don't want my team just to be the beam counters. I want them to tell me

where the beans are coming from and how can we make more beats. So yes, beam counting is important

but do the other two stuff as well. And they saw our product. They had been using legacy checklist

and they're like, this thing is amazing. Now, not only I have lease capacity for people to do the

more high value stuff, which is growing more beans, but also I can make decisions faster.

But Maxima would do what exactly would tie into many different systems and pull

information and then push it into its own European effectively instead of the human having to do

that manual piece. That's a great segue. So let's understand the product a little bit. So we

mimic the action of a human and right now we do things in a very deterministic 100% accurate way.

Right now we do things for low to mid-judgment work. So the customers are using us is they connect us

to their transaction systems, their credit cards, their banks, their salary systems or revenue

systems and so on. And we don't force people to replace the ERP. We fee ERP is a system of record

like any other database where data comes to rest. But we take the step off taking that

payroll, revenue and payroll paid entry and as per the country's specific accounting laws

convert into a journal entry. And then we with evidence at 100% proof will post it into your

journal ledger. Then before we post it, we run validation checks that you are supposed to do.

So audit requires you to you check across dimensions between your payroll system and between

your journal ledger. What was really done? So we do that. And then we explain it in words as well.

So we'll explain it in words along the way that hey, the 15th of the first month for the US

employees, you are paying 15% more in salary. That's because you have had 20% more employees and

5% attrition. And that becomes a running commentary on your business, which allows you to find a

normal and we do anomaly detection as well in a variety of ways. Here this vendor to whom you

used to pay $70,000, suddenly there's an invoice for $700,000. What's going on? Take a look.

And you'll be surprised how often there is a fat thing going on. And this stuff cannot be done

until you have a transaction lineage and until you have transaction level context and ERPs

don't have transaction level context as you know, they like to smoosh everything together

into one chunky transaction. And so then going back to the narrative, I mean because you

understand the problem curious, did you go right into building or did you do the traditional

like validation, discovery, talking to a bunch of CFOs, that sort of thing? No, no, we did a lot

of discovery. We did a lot of discovery. So a lot of that discovery happened through my conversation

with my colleagues inside and outside rubric to just know that how real is this problem.

And most of the CFOs that we went to, they asked us that they do not want to swap their ERP.

They said, swapping their ERP is like doing brain surgery to reduce weight.

Yes, I want to reduce weight. I want to do stuff, but I don't want to do a brain surgery.

So they said, the my problem is the manual work. How many like CFOs or whatever would you

say you spoke with? 150. So like a solid amount. And then did you start just building or did you

right away get a design partner or a few design partners? Like how did you set up that initial,

let's say the six months right after you left? Yeah. So we took the design partner approach.

For my experience at rubric, I've seen the rubric journey very early on. The best validation of

half companies being customers. And we decided to go after enterprise very early on because I knew

from experience that the problem is a lot more complex and valuable at the enterprise level.

When you are a 30-40% company, it's not interesting. When you are a thousand person company,

it's interesting and very complex. And the dollars come after that because you just have

exponentially increases because you have real board meetings happen, real audits happen,

you have to go public and all that. Very early on we landed scale AI as a customer.

Very early on we landed rippling as a customer, part on and these are like real businesses.

Yeah, tell me about maybe one or all those. How do you land a customer like that so early on?

Yeah. So we had a point of view that this is the area we're going to go. We had

planted a flag that this is a problem. Like we'll go to the CFO orgs inside these areas and

everyone we spoke to said don't like things. This is a problem. And some of these people were willing

as we spoke to them very, very early days. This is pre-product. They said this is such a big

hair on fire problem for us. And I can explain why we touched on that early on. Both the things,

things risk, head count and time delays is that if you build this thing, it will pay you.

So we landed design partners very early on. So was it like a natural fallout of those 150 CFO

conversations? Effectly, some subset of those was like, you know what? So much so that when you

build this, let me know. Correct. Correct. And that also helped our venture around probably because

they saw signed POCs or a letter of intense. And they were working with us on a weekly basis,

giving us feedback. They were holding our feet to fire when things were not working correctly.

So we thought there was a very good thing. I'm going to ask you for a small

favorite, tiny little favorite. In fact, it's not even now that I think about it. It's not even

really a favor for me. I'm actually trying to help you do a favor for you. Just hit the fall

button. You won't miss out on the next episode. You'll see everything that we release. If you don't

want to listen to an episode, you just skip it. But at least you don't miss out. How did you structure

these? This is another big topic, which is like, there's a decision to go enterprise,

landing those design partners and instructuring them to actually get the most value.

Were they paying? Were they not paying? What was the length? What was the key result?

Say, you were trying to, I mean, how did you think about all that?

For me, I absolutely want things to be paid. I feel like three things do not get valued in the world.

So you need to get paid. There was another reason I wanted to get paid was I have been inside

companies where to pay anything after. So like usually you can spike credit card inside companies

for two to three thousand dollars. But above that, you need a purchase order. If a purchase order

has to go through, you need permission from IT, you need permission from legal, you need permission

from the bosses, the CFOs and whoever. And for me, while that was friction, but that was important

because that to tell me that A, I was following the right problem and D, there was a champion.

The person was not just saying, yeah, yeah, yeah, go build something and turns out we build it and

then you're like, I don't know, I can't help it because for whatever reason. So we wanted the

spain very early on. And we saw that customers were willing to stick their neck out saying,

you know, we, so the money started coming into a bank. In fact, we were forced to open a bank

account because there were customers with where should we send the money. So that was a great sign

for us early on. And the structuring was very simple. Early on, anybody who will take risk on you,

they want a risk-free thing. So we would tell them that, you know, you have to pay, but if it

doesn't work out, then we will refund you the money. And that was fine. No problems there.

And did you set like a specific time rate like in six months, you know, we would go to this or

or like once the product is here, we go to full contract, like what was the? Yeah, yeah, that

was set up exactly. So the token money, we stuck with the high amount, you have to pay that amount.

I think it was 5k or 10k. So it was not something that you could just sort of wash your hands off

type of thing. And then it was that, hey, we will build this for you up to three, after three months

or six months. If we succeed, then you will pay us a good chunk of change. It was like five

figures, but it was like above 50k. What was success? Was that like clearly defined? No, I disagree

with this very, at least in our space, very clear definition of success. It was around that we

will deliver this module to you x, y, z, which will do x, y, z. But in terms of success, I feel like

the customer adoption is the clearest metric because if we build something, which they're using,

why would an enterprise employee who's getting paid 1,500k a year and she's busy with so many things

that she wants to get done? Why would she skimp me on it if she's using a product which works?

So it was fine. We were just like, you know, if it works, the thing people have to understand

earlier on. By the way, I've been on that situation where I was a senior director of finance and I

had startups come to me. And the problem is when you're on the other side of the seat, there's a huge

trust, right? They don't know you from anybody else. They don't know if you'll disappear from the

earth later on. They don't know if your company will survive. So they are taking a huge bet on you.

And if you get too much into TNCs and you know, we will only provide 98% accuracy and therefore

you will pay, then you are forcing them to think too much early on and you are forcing them to

cover your ass. They cover their ass too much early on. And then they'll like, you know, it's not

worth it. I'll just go with the non-wender. So we were like, look, you have the right to

fire us if we don't produce things. And the proof is we're doing the job in whatever conditions

you need. You need accuracy. We'll deliver that. You need auditability. We'll deliver that.

And it worked out. And we should talk more about how that journey went. But some of our customers

were, you know, when they started with us, they were sort of putting a short amount of dollars.

But then afterwards, they were sort of, you know, they started with like posting

300 million worth of transactions with us in a month. And then every month, while they were giving

a sort of feedback and they were telling us, build this, build that better. We saw by like month,

seven, month, eight, they were pros. They were putting like 50 billion worth of transactions

into a product. So the proof is the usage because if they were not confident, they will not

use our product. And how do you manage the flip side? So I understand what you're saying about

kind of finding the sweet spot balance. But the flip side problem that can happen is the

enterprise knowing that they're just way bigger, way more powerful than the startup is kind of

in this mode of, hey, build this, build that. But you know, then when it comes time to, you know,

pay the big, the big enterprise fee, it's like, well, when you build this, build that, you know,

then we'll move to something like how do you kind of give enough to get them there? But not so much

that you just kind of keep pushing that away further away. It's a hard one. I think the number one

thing you need that is a champion. You need to champion inside the company. We had two champions. One

was Kenny Tran, who was at at scale, who was a head of business transformation. And we tested the

champion where we said, early on, connect us to the chief accounting officer, get us a meeting for

30 minutes, because we could see that he's willing to put his deck out. Right. So you have to test

the champion. And then you sort of tell them that this is the thing that we can do and not do. And

in good faith, after they put their credibility on the line, it will, it should happen. And then

so it has happened for us. But this is a real conundrum that a lot of founders feel that, hey,

what if I do all the work and it doesn't come through? I'm shit out of luck. And it might happen.

I think therefore you have to do, you should do four, five of these in parallel. And the gain

here is not the ACV in my mind. The gain here is that you got a product link in real life situation

versus in a lab. And we have seen that like we have through this route, we have massive customers

spot on and rippling and so on. And the way our products has progressed could not have progressed

even though I know the world really well, I could not have explained every requirements to our

engineers, even if I wanted to, because it's kind of like driving, right? You could take as much

of a manual and watch as many YouTube, but unless you go on a bumpy ride, you just don't know how to

drive. When did you know that the product was like ready for kind of a public launch? Yeah.

This was not like a moment for like it was not like we started getting full

of interaction. So I believed in a sales very, very early on, even before the product,

we were selling based on Hickmas. So just on Hickmas, we had good amount of enterprise customers

who were willing to give us some money. And I would say around summer of last year, I could feel

that we have built something special. It was monthend. So usually for accountants,

monthend is kind of like their tax filing season, except it happens not once a year, but 12

times a year. And I woke up and we have all of our engineers and customers connected on Slack.

Our Slack channel was exploding. And I saw like customers sort of, you know, 20 comments on

this. This thing is busted or this requires change or, you know, so obviously that was fired

and we have to fix the fire and we fix the fire in the next few hours. But that told me that

this is something that's relevant to the customer. They are using our product. They are like 40-50

of them on this product. They're doing this part of their workflow because the biggest problem

in my view of startups is not a product that fails because most startups can fix a product. It's

irrelevant. You have sold someone that product is sort of sitting in the side. No one gives a

no one talks about it. When you ask them over the feedback, they give you these empty platitudes.

Yeah, it's beneficial. Oh, yeah, it adds kind of value, but they can't give you specifics.

And when it comes to renewal, they can't create a case for renewal. In our case, we haven't had

a single turn. Our customers are all increasing by several multiples. And what is actually the

specific ROI? Like, how are you measuring that? We measured it the way the customer measures it.

I think you have to always keep that in mind. One of our customers, it's a 17-billion-dollar

company. I work with the champion very closely. How will you make a case in from a CFO? Because now

we are going from small dollars to big dollars. In some cases, our deals are expanding by 3x, 5x,

some cases, increasing by 10. I assume it's like six-figure deals, getting to seven-figure deals.

That's kind of the range. It's all over the place, depending on the size of the company.

It's going from five-figures to six-figures and so on. What you see is that, at that point,

the dollars are significant. We have to make a very solid business case. There's always a bill

versus bike organization. Why can't we build it ourselves? We should talk separately about

this whole lovable moment that's going on. The way our customers talk about our value prop.

Number one is, remember, in the next two years, we had discussed a head count plan where I had

to increase my team by 20 people from 60 to 80. Now, I'm going to come and ask you for only from

60 to 70. That's some massive savings for people. Remember, a CFO, you were very unhappy. A lot of

our customers have audit committees. The CFO, the chief accounting officer, has to go in from the

board and talk about deficiencies in their financial reporting process. One of our customers,

they had audit flags from their auditors saying that you have to fix the accuracy and compliance

and auditability of your work process here and here. It was number one OKR on the CFO's book

to get that fixed. We fixed it for them. Therefore, the dollars get justified in that example.

The third is, remember, CFO, you've been asking me for a full set of financials or a quick look

of the cash flows so that you can greenlight the CEOs ask and we could never give you that. We

asked you to wait for three or four days. Now, we can give you those financials a much faster,

which then allows you to greenlight more GPUs, greenlight more engineering account and so on.

So, this product does that for us. So, the OKRs, the KPIs you look at like time to close the

months, things like that, head count needed. Yeah. So, it's the same thing, risk, time, cost

efficiency, the financial reporting risk and the controls around your financial function.

A second is the time by which you put together your financials and the third is how efficiently

you're doing it. And sometimes that efficiency shows in the form of hard cost saved. Sometimes

it shows in the form of future run rate cost shape and sometimes it honestly is in the form of

our employees or team members can just be happier because I've been there. People are

crying blood inside the accounting departments where they are skipping happy hours. They are

working till like 11 p.m. 12 p.m. on Friday. They're working the weekends. And the

attrition in the accounting department is one of the highest after sales because people just

need to take health breaks and they just are done with this. You mentioned this. I want to go on

this tangent. I mean, they're actually looking at the market today like this stocks are absolutely

plummeting because basically everybody assumes that software is dead and AI is going to take over.

And one of the big questions is who's going to be the beneficiary if anybody or people just

going to companies, let's say, just going to build, especially an enterprise that has software

scales and a lot of software time. Are they just going to build all their own products and

turn out everything? What is your thinking about what spend is still going to happen and how do

you kind of fit into that? Yeah. So I think the huge benefit that I see from the AI wave that it

has lowered the floor and it has raised the ceiling. And you see that with every computing wave,

when we went from mainframe to on prem to cloud, you saw that the software adoption increased more

and more. I previously software was only at the fortune 200 who are able to write 10 million

dollar check with crazy implemented figures, but then SaaS brought it down and so on and so forth.

And now you see the lovable of the world able to help even my dad who has two person business

write something very quickly. And I think that's very valuable. So that's a raising that's

lowering the bar which is a great thing. I think raising the ceiling has been where people

might be muddling things up. So no question that the SaaS companies or the software companies have

to increase the value that they can deliver because the game has changed. I want to be very clear

that anything is solvable by anyone. So for example, if you or me, we put enough resources,

we can build a Gmail. The question is, is it our core competence? Can we build it to the

similar quality and the speed and latency that someone else Google can? Third, do we want to

maintain the headache of maintaining a long time? And as you know, once you are into the details

of things, that's when the edge cases comes in. I feel like the analysts might be getting too

swept into the narratives where the software is that people will bid it internally.

You and I know we are practitioners. You are in the business of media. The small details matter,

right? Yeah, for me, I think I know for what it's worth, like just build everything yourself

doesn't make any sense. The question is more because so many more people have built it or can

build it because the price to building it is way less, does the ability to charge decrease

10 fold, right? I do think the ROI that folks are asking from software has definitely increased,

no question on that. In my mind, the simple analogy I have for the old school versus new school,

if you look at the checklist and kind of the old school says, those are digital shelves. They

provide you the shelves and you have to fold the clothes, you have to iron the clothes and you

have to organize it in those shelves. The ask that the customer is making a few is I don't want

shelves anymore. Sure, I can use the shelves, but I want someone to fold the clothes for me

to do the laundry, do the work itself. That's what software companies have to do and now there's

technology out there which can do. Any company which is still providing shelves, checklists,

just kind of like these digital drawers and calling themselves system of record only based on

that that we are irreplaceable because system of record, I think they'll get wiped out.

And then maybe last question before we wrap it up, tell me a little bit about your series A,

30 million series A's is a massive A, how does that happen?

Yeah, I think similar concept, so we had known Red Point from a while from before we had talked

during the seed as well. They are prolific CFO investors, they have invested, CFO stack investor

with understanding, they have invested in legacy tools in the space which are more checklists oriented,

they have invested in ERP products, they have invested in credit card products so they understand

the safer part. Well, I don't know exactly what level of diligence that they did remember,

they'll take CIN network, but they had apparently spoken to a lot of our customers,

a lot of customers are their portfolio companies that are tripling in such and they met and they

gave us a trim sheet, the goal was not to raise, I didn't have a slide deck, a lot of my co-founder

asked me, can you send me a slide A, CVS slide deck, I said I don't have it man, so we got preempted.

Even the 10 million V-rays in the 11 million V-rays in the CVS seed has not been exhausted,

so the goal was to look to raise in summer of 2026, but we got preempted based on the value that

they were seeing and their thesis in the space. How many people were like on the team at that time?

Yeah, I want to say about 12. Okay, it's small, and how many are you now? We are now about 40.

Okay. I think sometimes from the outside looking in, you assume that the company's raising a lot of

the money or spending a lot of the money, but in many cases, especially when you get preempted,

you're actually running very relatively lean, I mean, 12 people with $11 million raised,

it's a very strong cash position, and 40 people with $40 million raised equally so.

Yeah, we are obviously ingesting in a lot of these cutting-edge things, but we are

closing chunky enterprise deals. But then to your point, we over-invest in providing value to

our customers. We haven't had a single turn. If you look at G2R reviews, it's 4.9515. We have

wide-loved service to our customers. I don't mind over-investing in customer support. I think

this has been a huge attitude change for me. So in the early parts of my career,

I was the MBA type Wall Street guy who was a very analyst, and I would like analyze businesses

with one brushstroke. This company is not as efficient or this startup has sales and marketing

higher. The startup building is like a layered cake. You have to focus on the right things at the

right time. Right now, a kick-ass product with very happy customers is what matters to me.

And we'll think about efficiency, which is important. I do keep an eye on my efficiency and

unit economics efficiency. I do keep an eye on. But it's not like I'm charging $2

where my build costs is $5 and service costs is $20. That's not the case. I'm unit economics

profitable in every customer. But you can't like install for efficiency. It's kind of like

growing a baby, right? I've got two kids. When my daughter was six months old, I was not saying,

you know, she's just eating every day. She doesn't burn any calories. She doesn't run. What is this?

So you have to just sort of be thoughtful in when you want to focus up a lot. Perfect.

Well, let's stop it there. I'll ask the last like three kind of rapid far questions that we

always end on. When was the moment when you felt like you'd found true product market fit?

I would say it was summer of last year, where we were landing customers even with features

which were not fully there. Customers were signing on dotted lines with chunky beads.

And the customers who had onboarded were giving a sort of feedback and the product was improving

fast. So we felt like we were solving a real problem then around summer of 2025.

Was there ever a time or has it been ever a time that you've doubted whether Maxima would work

or he thought maybe things just would like fail? I think of CEO's role as a coach of New England

Patriots, where I worry about everything from players to what will happen in the next game to

the NFL rules. I knew the core of my heart that this is a problem that the industry wants to get

hold and they want to pay for it. I know that because I had lived that problem for 20 years.

The thing that I always worry about is, are we meeting the moment, right? Can we use the best

toolkits out there and tools out there to create an incredible experience for the company

which is delivering a lot of value? And so far, I have not doubted it. I think this is why

we put together the best engineering team in the space who are very obsessed with the customers.

But the moment I stop worrying is the day we will die. So there's a difference. You know, you don't

have to be pessimist and sort of sit at home and crawl up saying that we are dead. I feel like

think about it. All the best coaches who are in NFL. Is there a single game where they worry about

not losing? They worry about it every day. But they have the confidence that if they execute and

they play well, they'll win. And that's my state. And then what would be like your top piece of

advice for an early stage founder? Yeah. I'll give two. Both came from Rubrik CEO who's my mentor.

One, he said something to the effect of answers live within trust to intuition. Right now,

we are in the world of information and wisdom overload. The reality is, we don't know your

context, your situation, your customer. So we are giving you yet another blade in a swiss army knife

and you have to build intuition when to use which blade. So trust yourself, create quiet,

don't be on forever podcast and LinkedIn loops. Give time for that information, turn into wisdom

by letting things settle, by creating some time for quiet. And the second is, if you are in sort of

this idea maze, figuring out what to do. And I don't know exactly which stage founders here are.

This is another thing. My Rubrik colleague, Pranavaduri told me when I was in the idea maze,

he said, hustle is the only indicator of success. So are you truly hustling? Are you truly

doing the hard yards of calling people, of talking to folks, working on something? And if you hustle,

you will make progress. It's almost like weight loss. If you are eating clean and you are exercising,

you will lose weight. It may happen one month later. It may happen five months later, but you will.

So those are the two pieces of advice I have. Awesome. Well, Yogi, thanks so much for jumping

on the show, man. It's been great. Appreciate it. Thank you. Wow. What an episode. You're probably

in all your absolute shock. You're like, that helped me so much. So guess what? Now it's your turn

to help someone else share the episode in the WhatsApp group you have with founders,

share it on that Slack channel, send it to your founder friends and help them out. Trust me,

they will love you for it.