APSEN

Anant Kail was a VP at Fujitsu making around $200,000 annually—a comfortable, secure position. But he had a vision to build something bigger. He saw an opportunity in back office automation, specifically in enterprise finance where manual expense auditing was consuming resources and creating friction. The problem was clear: finance teams spent countless hours reviewing employee expense reports manually, looking for fraud and policy violations. APSEN was born to solve this with AI.

Anant founded APSEN in 2013 with co-founder Kunal Verma, a PhD in computer science with seven patents to his name. The two had been friends before starting and brought in engineers from day one, creating a tight core team focused on product excellence. After initial pivots to find product-market fit, by 2014 they had clarity on direction and participated in 500 Startups. The team structure remained lean: 14 people total, with 11 engineers, one salesperson, and one marketer.

Their first customers came through a combination of inbound leads and aggressive outbound cold sales efforts. A single dedicated salesperson drove most customer acquisition with cold outreach and prospecting. By April 2016, they had signed 22 paying customers, all annual prepaid contracts. Their customer acquisition cost was under $18,000 (including fully-loaded sales and marketing), which paid back almost immediately given their average $50,000 contract value—though contracts ranged from $10,000 to six figures.

The enterprise focus proved perfect for their model. Once APSEN integrated into core finance processes, it became extremely sticky—difficult for companies to remove. Zero churn from their longest customers was a strong signal. They grew 12x in 11 months leading into 2015, reaching nearly $1M in ARR by year-end. They raised $3M total, including a recent $2M priced round at nearly $10M pre-money valuation. The team deliberately avoided paid acquisition, instead building a scalable sales machine with one rep.

In 2016, APSEN is doubling down on scaling sales and marketing. Anant aims to double revenue again, targeting $150K+ MRR by December 2016. With 14 engineers building product and one sales rep proving the enterprise model works, the focus is now on replicating that selling machine. The co-founders split equity based on contribution rather than equal splits, a philosophy Anant believed created alignment around actual value creation rather than theoretical fairness.