Khosla-Backed AI Startup Debuts with $80 Million in Funding

David, I would love to start with you. You're trying to tackle the concept that

you have labeled the Franken stack, even though the term is new to me.

The concept is something that's been discussed on this program a lot.

Just to explain what Riva wants to achieve it.

Sure. Well, first off, thanks for having me.

It's a big day for us. Look, I is the biggest shift in

enterprise software since the cloud. But the reality is, revenue teams are

still stuck. And like you said, what we call the

Franken stack, which is a dozen different tools that don't really talk

to each other, causing sellers way over 70% of their time wrangling software

instead of talking to their customers. And that's really painful.

Revo is looking to fix that via one unified revenue operating system built

from the ground up with air at its core. And with this 80 million raise, we're

scaling quickly to help all companies win in the age of AI.

V.A.. I was talking with my team this morning

about the structure of this round. And so it's basically a combined seed

and Series A and Reva is coming out and kind of announcing itself to the world,

which you can kind of give us the back story.

You know, you are an experienced investor in the world of technology.

When this crossed your desk, how did you know that you needed to get involved and

how did you determine at this very early stage the potential that that revo had?

Although the opportunity didn't actually cross our desk in a traditional way.

We've known David for a long time, from DoorDash to open door to open store.

Sorry. And now, even though we've been

incubating ventures with him, my partner Samir, has worked closely with him on

Rebel. And we cooked up the concept and

brainstormed it and thought it was important enough to do in the age of.

I think most applications and application stacks need to be rethought.

And this David Chester superstar wants to know.

So it was pretty easy. Then.

Is this an example of you investing in the known quantity founder then, rather

than the idea? Absolutely it will be invested.

The idea wasn't clear. That was a year and a half or two years

ago. But the founder was very clear.

David, I'm trying to track the growth that you've had.

So spring of 2024. You kind of come up with the idea, I

guess, incorporate a business and you've hired, I guess, aggressively.

You know, you're you're a sub 100 people still, but you've basically gone to

companies that are well known globally, not just here in the Valley and taken

the best people you can. What was that like?

Well, yeah, that's. That's your spot on there.

The company you build taking a page out of the notes book, but the company you

build is the team you build as a company, you build, not the plans you

make. And when we thought about tackling the

space of unifying all of go to market checking one system spanning marketing,

sales and success, we really needed to make sure that we had the talent

density, both from a technical perspective, but also from a go to

market to really bring together the combination of the depth of domain

knowledge, plus the ability to access the first party data to really pull this

vision off. So global talent is necessary for us to

make this a reality. David, what else do you need the $80

million for? Yeah, well, it's over the next few

months and quarters and years. Our vision is clear.

We need to continue accelerating our product roadmap to build out both the

breadth of the service area, to serve our customers, but also making sure that

every single capability is the best possible from a depth perspective.

But more importantly, in the age of AI, context matters.

And it's very important for us to double down on making sure that our AI

operating system is able to work seamlessly across every single one of

these modules capabilities jobs to be done.

So we're not replicating another frank and stack for the future world.

So that's what we're going to use the proceeds to to do.

Then I go back to you with the concept that the Franken stack, you know, you're

invested everywhere. One of the first checks into open air.

The world has changed a lot since then. You know, we had yesterday tweet from

Snowflake on the program talking about the problems right now in the data

layer. What do you make of the Franken stack?

Is that a real thing or this is just a marketing opportunity around this round?

No, I think it's a real thing. It enables each startup to do a lot more

than it could do. 20 engineers can do the work of 60

engineers. If you use the productivity tools

enables. But more than that, the user experience

can be dramatically different with the help of high tech.

As I like to say, in the old world of applications, users had to learn in

application and they learned to each vertical stack in the new world of the

application. Learn, stay human and responds the way

it should. It's my favorite way to think about that

transition the AI makes possible. You don't have to be trained on on an

application like SFP or PUP Start. The application gets to know you and the

other humans on your team. And so it facilitates not only the

function but also workflow across people and across applications.

It takes a very important shift in software.

To both of you. I kind of like to end the conversation

by going a little bit bigger on the world that we're in right now.

David, if you could reflect on what it was like doing this round.

There is a lot of energy behind I right now, but at the other end of the

spectrum, there is valuation concern. You know, there's no difficulty in open

air or anthropic, those kinds of frontier labs gaining capital.

But there is a lot going on right now. Would you just reflect on what the last

few weeks has been like in trying to close this?

Well, you know, the fundamental difference is

clear with our approach. We're initiative and purpose built for

revenue teams. And so, you know, when you talk about

the old players that were trying to bowl onto legacy stack, it just doesn't work.

What we're building with Reno is akin to how Tesla built its cars vertically

integrated with AI at its core. This way our eye is able to seek to see

and act across the full customer journey.

So the old players are held back by their past and the new players, to your

point, don't have the depth of domain knowledge, nor the access to the full

suite of first party data to pull this vision off.

So rivals building with both. And yes, it's hard, but that's really

what makes it defensible and worth doing.

Vino. You know, you're co-leading this round

with your friends at Kleiner Perkins. Again, the same question, like, what

does the environment look like to you right now?

This is a very sizable debut round. You had the conviction to do that.

Well, it was a while ago we did the seed round of 10 million that wasn't

announced and now we just participate in the $70 million round.

Obviously we think highly of the team, but I think it's the magnitude of the

opportunity this opens up. I native companies, I like to say most

valuations won't hold up in the air space, but the ones that are really high

quality companies will probably will return disproportionate returns In 2018.

People said to me $1,000,000,000 valuation for open the app was too high.

Then they said 26 billion was too high and then 100 billion, then 300 billion

and then 500 billion all to high. So a small percentage of the companies,

I suspect much less than 5%, will actually do extremely well and return

1050 or 100 times their money invested. Most companies will still lose money.

And I think that's why you want a back quality founders like David.

David's a superstar. I backed him in almost anything you did.