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.