Penny.co

Mohamed Ibrahim, a distinguished engineer with a background in driving technology transformation at scale, identified a critical gap in how companies manage procurement. Rather than building yet another standalone SaaS tool, he saw an opportunity to combine software with logistics and supplier network access—creating a unique hybrid offering that could deliver real, measurable cost savings to enterprises.

Launching in late 2020, Mohamed and his four co-founders (CEO Majid Dalouj and CTO/Chief Product Officer Ahimadri Salamisti among them) took a design-partner approach. They embedded themselves in procurement departments at target companies, studying workflows and pain points. Within four months of launch, they had landed their first customer. Rather than building everything at once, they started with what they called the "happy scenario"—the most straightforward business workflow that satisfied customer needs. They worked with roughly 10 early adopter customers to shape the MVP, then gradually added customization features as they discovered that different industries and companies had vastly different procurement processes.

By late 2021, roughly a year into the business, Penny.co had only one paying bank customer, with the rest still in design partner mode. The team was running lean on revenue—around $3,000-4,000 MRR. But the foundation was solid. They pursued a sales-led approach, working offline with design partners and approaching companies directly to ensure their platform worked flawlessly before scaling.

The breakthrough came in differentiating their go-to-market by product line. For their SaaS offering, they leaned into digital distribution via Google Ads campaigns, which proved scalable. For their marketplace (a complement allowing companies to list and buy products from other vendors), they maintained the offline, design-partner approach to ensure quality and trust. The revenue model—a revenue-sharing model (taking 0.5-15% of what customers saved, averaging 7-10%) combined with subscription licensing ($1,000 per user per year)—created alignment with customers and predictable MRR. Their sweet spot emerged: corporates with 20-100 users in procurement departments, paying $20,000-40,000 annually.

By the time of this interview (early 2022, roughly 16-18 months post-launch), Penny.co had hit 60-90+ paying customers and was flirting with $100,000 MRR—a 25-30x growth from a year prior. The team had expanded to 25 people (13 in engineering: developers, data engineers, QA, and DevOps). In January 2022, they closed a $5 million seed round at a $20-25 million valuation, with equity split among founders based on risk and time commitment rather than equal division. Mohamed and team are now all full-time. Their stated target: 5x revenue growth during this funding round, pushing the company toward $400,000-500,000 MRR and a $100-150 million valuation by the next fundraise.