partnerships Startups

Adam Markowitz founded Drata after spending seven years in edtech without real product-market fit, recognizing the difference when compliance became a clear painkiller. Drata achieved rapid traction with 100 customers in six weeks and 1,000 in year one, reaching $100M ARR before their fourth birthday. The company built a distribution moat through strategic partnerships, becoming a top 5 AWS ISV and sourcing two-thirds of pipeline through partner channels.

Blings is a personalized video platform that serves enterprise customers including McDonald's, Mercedes, Meta, and Rocket Mortgage. Yosef Peterseil bootstrapped the company from zero revenue, landing McDonald's as their first customer through a cold text, and the company hit $1M ARR in 2023 with a team of 19. They learned valuable lessons about charging for POCs, building follow-up systems, and using channel partners to scale enterprise sales.

Bassem Hamdy built Briq, an AI orchestration platform for construction and manufacturing, after scaling Procore from $10M to $100M. The company now generates 8 figures in revenue using an unconventional enterprise sales approach that closes deals in 9 days by selling vision before demos and targeting CFOs instead of innovation teams. They grew from a $15K first deal to 8-figure revenue through a land-and-expand strategy with consumption-based pricing.

Spresso is an enterprise ecommerce software platform spun out of failed public company Boxed in 2023. Founded by Jared Yaman, it transformed from low-margin ecommerce operations to high-margin enterprise SaaS, growing from $2.5M ARR at spinout to $5M ARR in 2025 by serving 15 enterprise customers with $2M+ contracts.

Dresma is an AI-powered platform launched in 2020 that helps global brands like Puma create and localize e-commerce content at scale. The company serves ~28 customers, generates ~$2M ARR, and has grown profitably with studio partnerships driving over 50% of revenue and enterprise customers paying up to $500K per year.

Skillveri is a VR-powered vocational training platform founded by Sabari Nair in 2012 that pivoted from hardware to SaaS during COVID and now serves 100+ schools in the U.S. The company has scaled to $1.5M ARR with $350K enterprise contracts using a hybrid SaaS + hardware model and reseller-led go-to-market strategy. Sabari bought out early investors in 2021 and rebuilt the business into a capital-efficient operation targeting $10M ARR by expanding to 2,000+ schools.

AKKO is the 'Spotify for protection plans' that bundles device protection for phones, laptops, TVs and up to 25 other items. Founded by Jared Brier and Eric Schneider, they pivoted from a smart lock product to building a B2B2C platform that now serves customers in all 50 states and Canada with 500+ repair shop partnerships. They recently raised $3M in seed funding from Fika Ventures and Pear VC and have grown to 20+ team members.