Packet Zoom

Chaitan Ahuja started Packet Zoom in 2013 after becoming frustrated with mobile data delivery while at Google. He saw a massive problem: mobile applications didn't work well in developing countries, on trains, in airports, or anywhere networks were unreliable. Rather than pitch the idea internally at Google, he left to build something new. "He was very frustrated with the state of mobile data and mobile content delivery," Shlomi recalls. "He left Google and started back into it."

Building a mobile networking stack from scratch is brutally hard. It needs to work across 800 different networks worldwide. Chaitan bootstrapped the early version with a small engineering team, slowly fine-tuning the technology over time.

By 2016, the product worked beautifully, but the company was pre-revenue. Investors at Baseline and First Round Capital saw the potential but wanted someone with commercial experience to lead the go-to-market. They hired a headhunter to find a CEO who understood mobile networks. That person was Shlomi Gian, who had just finished leading the mobile business at Akamai after its acquisition of Contendo (where he built the mobile CDN). When Chaitan and the team invited him to see a demo, Shlomi stayed for seven hours instead of the planned one. "I fell in love with the product and the technology," he says. "I decided to leave my comfort cushion at Akamai in favor of this."

At the time, they had raised $3 million but were essentially at zero MRR. The product worked, but they were approaching the wrong customers with the wrong story.

Shlomi immediately rewrote the sales playbook. Instead of chasing developers, they went enterprise-first, landing customers like Sephora, Glue Mobile, and Upwork. This pivot helped them find paying customers, though it wasn't the long-term strategy. By Q4 2016—less than 12 months into Shlomi's tenure—they had grown to approximately $83,000 MRR ("close to" the magical $88,000 mark that equals $1M ARR) with 68 customers paying between $400–$4,000 per month per application.

The biggest driver wasn't paid marketing (they spent less than $10,000 monthly on paid). Instead, it was partnerships. Shlomi had spent years building relationships at Akamai and Contendo with resellers and CDN partners who already sold performance products to the right audiences. He leveraged those relationships hard. A major partnership with China Cash, a public CDN company, became an exclusive distributor in China. European resellers in France, Spain, and the UK began selling Packet Zoom. The economics varied—China Cash took a higher cut because they handled operations and support; lighter resellers took less. But the model worked: Shlomi was confident that 60% of future revenue would flow through partnerships.

Churn was zero so far—not a single customer had left—though Shlomi acknowledged this would eventually happen through natural attrition. He wasn't worried about raising prices because the value was unique: Packet Zoom was "the only game in town" for mobile optimization at scale. Customers often cut their AWS and Akamai bills to use Packet Zoom instead.

Gross margins sat at 60–80% already, and Shlomi expected them to climb toward 95% once Packet Zoom became an AWS partner and reseller, dropping infrastructure costs.

By late 2016, Packet Zoom had raised $6 million total (Series Seed and early Series A), employed 20 people mostly in San Mateo with a growing team in Bangalore, and was on track to hit $1M+ ARR. Shlomi's goal was aggressive: double every quarter on all KPIs (churn, DAU, MRR) to reach "serious numbers" for a big Series B raise. They were opening offices in Asia and Europe, hiring sales teams regionally, and launching a new product in three months. The vision was to make mobile work everywhere—trains, airports, developing countries—and position Packet Zoom as the essential infrastructure layer for global mobile apps.