DID
Gil Perry and his two co-founders—Eliran Kuta (CTO) and Sela Brondheim—all served in the Israeli Defense Forces' special forces unit before diving into the startup world. Gil studied computer science at Tel Aviv University, focusing on computer vision and image processing. Before starting DID in 2017, Gil and Eliran worked together at Mirkat (which became House Party), building the iOS and Android apps. They launched DID with a clear mission: protect privacy by preventing face recognition misuse—essentially building the 'ad blocker for deepfakes' before that category really existed.
In 2017, Gil and the team were part of the 8200 EISP accelerator in New York. BlackRock, a Fortune 100 company, was a sponsor. They met BlackRock's CTO and immediately understood the value: executives' photos could be leaked online, and with face recognition technology advancing, anyone walking the streets could be identified. BlackRock became their first customer, paying for protection against exactly this scenario.
The early motion was enterprise-focused. "We are focusing on the big companies more," Gil said, and that enterprise DNA stuck with them.
After gaining deep expertise in computer vision and face technology, DID realized something bigger was coming: a disruption in how media is created, powered by AI. Rather than only defend against synthetic media, they decided to lean in and help companies create it responsibly. "We realized that, one, we have the capabilities and expertise to lead this disruption. And two, we have the experience and the responsibility to make sure that this technology will go to the right place."
They launched their new offering: the AI face platform—a one-stop shop for synthetic video creation. The monetization is elegant: annual licenses plus per-API-call pricing.
Their breakthrough customer in the new product line was MyHeritage. DID's Deep Nostalgia feature, which animates still photos, exploded. In just two months, MyHeritage saw 80 million API calls to DID's platform. The impact was staggering: MyHeritage's app hit #1 in the free app store across 22 countries, above Facebook, TikTok, and Instagram. Suddenly, DID went from zero on this new product line to "very fast growth"—and the PR was massive. Companies started calling them unprompted.
Their current customer base includes dozens of enterprise accounts with annual contract values (ACVs) "more than" $100,000 each. They're also about to sign with a major social network, which could dramatically scale API volume.
DID has raised $24 million (last round was ~$14 million about a year ago). They have 24 full-time employees, 14 of whom are engineers—the company is built around deep learning and computer vision. Until recently, they had only one quota-carrying sales rep, but demand is forcing them to expand the sales and customer success teams. Gil says they've already hit or exceeded their revenue goals for the year on the new product line and believes they can break $1M in annual run rate this year.
Gil is confident enough to raise again—potentially "a few dozens of millions"—though he's philosophically wary of excessive capital raising and dilution. His focus is on finding tier-one VCs who can be true partners, not just money. With inbound deals flowing in and enterprise momentum building, DID looks positioned to become a major player in the synthetic media infrastructure space.
- •By solving a specific, acute pain point for a Fortune 100 company (executive photo leakage and face recognition risk), they validated enterprise willingness to pay and built credibility that enabled subsequent pivots.
- •They recognized a market inflection point (AI-generated media becoming mainstream) and leveraged their existing deep technical expertise in computer vision to become a platform provider rather than remaining a single-use security tool.
- •A viral consumer use case (Deep Nostalgia's 80M API calls in 2 months) generated massive PR that flipped their go-to-market from inside sales to inbound, dramatically reducing customer acquisition friction.
- •Their usage-based pricing model aligned incentives with customer success—as customers scaled their applications, DID's revenue scaled automatically without additional sales effort.
- 1.Identify accelerators or industry events where your target Fortune 500 customer set gathers as sponsors, and position yourself to have direct conversations with their technical decision-makers about a specific, expensive problem they face.
- 2.Build your initial product to solve one acute enterprise use case defensibly, but structure your team and technical architecture (deep expertise in a foundational domain like computer vision) so you can pivot to adjacent, larger opportunities as market conditions shift.
- 3.Create a consumer or high-volume use case of your technology that can generate earned media and viral adoption, then funnel that PR momentum into inbound enterprise leads rather than relying solely on outbound sales.
- 4.Implement usage-based pricing on top of a base contract so that as customers' own applications grow, your revenue grows passively without requiring new sales cycles or contract renegotiations.
Similar Companies
247.ai
$25.0M/mo247.ai, founded by PV Cannon in 2000, is an AI-powered customer service automation platform serving over 150 enterprise customers with $300M+ in ARR. The company raised only $20M from Sequoia (2003) and bootstrap, achieving 10% net profit margins while maintaining a 12-month CAC payback period and 100% net revenue retention. Despite a security breach setback around 2018, 247.ai has recovered and recently achieved 20% new revenue booking growth in their best quarter.
iCIMS
$13.3M/moiCIMS is a bootstrapped SaaS provider founded in 1999 that dominates the talent acquisition software market as the #2 player, serving 3,500 enterprise customers with an average monthly spend of $4,000. The company exited 2017 with $160M ARR and is targeting 25%+ annual growth while maintaining profitability, recently acquiring Text Recruit to expand into candidate messaging and recruitment advertising.
Zoom
$12.0M/moZoom is a freemium SaaS video conferencing platform founded by Eric Yuan in July 2011 after he left Cisco to build a next-generation collaboration solution. The company has grown to 850,000+ paying customers across individual, SMB, and enterprise segments, generating over $12M in monthly recurring revenue with approximately 100% year-over-year growth. Rather than focusing on customer stickiness or aggressive growth targets, Zoom emphasizes customer happiness and organic word-of-mouth acquisition, which has proven highly effective in driving viral adoption.
Madwire
$10.0M/moMadwire is a comprehensive SaaS platform for small businesses (1-100 employees) that combines CRM, payments, invoicing, billing, e-commerce, and multi-channel marketing tools in a single platform. Founded in 2009, the company has grown to $120M ARR serving 20,000 customers with an average revenue per user of $500/month, while maintaining strong unit economics ($3,000-$4,000 CAC with 3-month payback) and recently turning profitable with a focus on reaching 15-20% EBITDA margins. The company is exploring an IPO within 12-18 months without having raised substantial capital beyond an initial $7.5M.
Plunge
$10.0M/moPlunge is a hardware company that manufactures and sells at-home cold plunge devices. Founded in 2020 by Ryan Duey and Michael after their brick-and-mortar float therapy and sauna businesses were impacted by COVID, the company grew from $270k in first-year revenue to $120M+ ARR in four years. Their success is driven by influencer gifting, organic word-of-mouth, and highly efficient paid advertising (7-10x ROAS on Facebook and Google).