Klooks

Alex Aboujamara's career path—M&A Advisory followed by CFO work at a manufacturing company—gave him a front-row seat to a persistent problem: financial data is messy. When private equity firms, banks, and credit analysts need to evaluate companies, they receive financial statements in dozens of different formats. QuickBooks exports don't match internal labeling systems. PDFs are nightmares to parse. Public financial data scattered across the web is unstructured. There was no reliable source of truth. Alex saw the gap and in 2012, he and two co-founders launched Klooks as a side project, splitting equity equally at roughly 33% each.

For five years, Klooks remained a part-time venture while all three founders worked other jobs. The real inflection came in 2017 when Alex transitioned to full-time CEO and the company started flowing revenue. They built OCR integrations, automatic data classification, and quality assurance systems to transform messy PDFs and accounting exports into clean SQL-ready tables that matched bank standards. The tech stack evolved to include web scrapers that pull public financial statements from the internet, feeding a growing database.

The first customer came through Alex's existing network—a private equity firm in his city that he knew personally from his M&A days. They had the exact pain point Alex understood intimately. But the breakthrough came in 2014 when Capital IQ, a major data aggregator, became a customer. This validation opened doors. Today, Klooks serves a mix: roughly 10 banks charging by the structured financial statement ($5–$25 per document depending on volume), 35–40 SaaS users paying ~$300–$400 monthly in Brazilian reais, and 4–5 large data aggregators plus 200–300 downstream resellers who bundle Klooks data into their own products.

The three-revenue-stream model—data-as-a-service (60%), SaaS (20%), and professional services (20%)—proved successful, though counterintuitive. When asked if he'd kill the smaller streams and focus only on the largest, Alex declined. His reasoning: structuring data will commoditize by 2030+, but extracting *intelligence* from structured data will not. He's playing a decade-long game, keeping all three revenue engines warm for when market dynamics shift.

Alex also credits his hiring strategy: of 35 employees, 26 focus on engineering and data quality assurance. Only three people carry sales quotas (including Alex himself), reflecting a capital-efficient, engineering-heavy approach to a data problem.

Klooks bootstrapped all the way—they received $50k from a Brazilian insurance company's accelerator program but it never converted to equity because the accelerator folded. Instead, Alex grew the company on revenue alone. In one year, from 2022 to 2023, Klooks doubled from $25k to $50k MRR. Alex is targeting $100k MRR for 2023, driven by expansion with international banks and data aggregators. At 37, with one child and a philosophy rooted in learning to take more risks, Alex is building a quiet, profitable machine in an unglamorous but essential vertical.