Gustav Bang, Co-founder & CEO of Complir: BREAKING: Complir raised $11m Seed

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Skating Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. Today we've got an amazing guest with some amazing news, Gustav from the co-founders of Compleyer. What's going on? What are you announcing? We're announcing our seed round led by General Catalyst with participation from both existing and new investors. Amazing news. $11 million, not a small seed round and only what, nine months after your pre-seed round? Yeah, something like that. Eight, nine months. Yeah. Amazing. For those who don't know, can you give us the super quick pitch? What have you built and who is it for?

0:28Gustav Bang:Exactly. So we basically started two years ago with this grand vision of enabling retailers and brands to sell physical products anywhere in the world with ease. And when I say retails and brands, it's because you can be either the one that produces a product or import it, or you can be one that's just reselling that product. But that still comes with a responsibility role, which means that you virtually have to go through all these regulatory maces, get documentation from your suppliers, look out for any materials. I can keep on going, but like basically have a huge amount of work ahead of you just for simply trying to sell a physical product.

1:02Gustav Bang:And those rules change all the time and they're different depending on what type of product it is. So when we heard that, we thought like great AI use case, let's go, let's do it. And that's super interesting. Is that how it came about? Did you hear about this sort of like archaic problem? And then you were like, OK, we could build a business in that place. Because I can't imagine this was like a problem that you had yourself. No, none of us were compliance managers before starting compliance. I mean, my CPO teenager had worked in packaging for Jabra, so she actually had some ideas about the amount of work.

1:31Gustav Bang:But what happened was, I mean, I just came out of Legora, and we had sat in the offices of a Swedish law firm, basically, like, just forward-deploying ourselves, being, like, uncomfortably close to the end users. And we did the same, so we actually just went out to some of the biggest retailers in Denmark, asked them, like, hey, guys, we want to dive into this problem. Is that something you recognize? And Flying Tiger responded only after a week, So we got this deal, you know, we don't charge anything. We just get some free lunch, get some free office. And we sat there for a whole year, basically just diving into the complex domain.

2:04Gustav Bang:Deleted a ton of code, again, because we just built stuff in so many directions. We almost kind of see this as one big board of problems, right? And we wanted to find the problems that was the most valuable to solve. And there are a lot of problems in this space. So that was for me a really good signal that this was a good business to build up on. What was that experience like sitting in those offices for a year? I mean, at the very end, we were like seven people sitting in the hallways. So at some point we kind of had to go out, but it was just so nice. Like even today, we have 20 customers now in different sizes.

2:40Gustav Bang:And I think Flying Tiger for us are like our best friends, right? Like we have really close relationships with most of our customers, but we can basically ask them anything. Like even if new customers come with new requirements, we can use FlyingTagger as specialists that knows about any type of product. So it's like kind of having an extended regulatory arm that we can always use and kind of cross-check our findings with. And was there a moment in time where you realized, okay, we've built something meaningful here. We've built a product that actually solves this problem somewhat? For sure. Like I think we built point solutions first.

3:14Gustav Bang:Like we didn't want to build the whole stuff. So the first thing we built was a translation tool. Sounds simple, but in our world, like doing translations, if you do it wrong, you might have a whole container having to be destroyed or product recalled. So it can be quite ugly. We did that and we saved FlyingTek at 300 ,000 euros a year on just that. And that was where I think both us and FlyingTek, we were like, oh shit, like we can name at least 20 features that will do this. And then that was where we like turned around and said like, okay, what's the full life cycle like? what is the very early phase of a product during development or sourcing all the way to that it's live on the shelves all over the world but like yeah and you went you went through you went through yc what point was that in your journey yeah that was so we raised the pre-seed we were 10 people working full-time and then we went to yc like a bit more mature than the average startup i would say um which was actually a good thing for us because we had already like an operation around sales we already have had a product that was quite mature and then nyc of course it was like super short same three months everyone moved to san francisco locked in in a big house uh i did customer calls from 3 a.m because most of the customers are european so uh that's quite tough um but like we we quadrupled our revenue in those three months so it was a really really nice and fast way to go from pre-seed to seed um and also like kind of bringing that energy into a european team where it's like the ambition level now for the company is just 10x uh what it used to be and how is the actual yc process itself i mean it sounds like a lot of companies are trying to go there to sell to other companies or in their batch it's probably not so relevant for you but it sounds like they're paid a role in maybe lifting the ambition up getting you to move faster what were some of the other benefits of being there yeah exactly like i think for most companies like they can sell to the batch right we didn't have that benefit um and you don't see that many retails in the San Francisco area.

5:11Gustav Bang:So we didn't, like, it wasn't for geographical reasons. We would still do it again in a heartbeat. Like, I just think the, like, the speed of iteration. I also had the experience during Legora. And I saw how that impacted the company. Like, the ambition level in Legora, back then it was called Leia, was also high. But, like, something changes when you're going through YC. I'm sure there are some mentoring and you get some inspirational talks from Branceski. but it's also just like the kind of like the community around just doing things is really uh it's a really strong energy that you cannot avoid when you're there yeah that's so interesting it's just like the the ambition of everybody there must be so crazy high that yeah it's crazy it's crazy everyone has this ambition like a grandiose idea and like one thing i really like which i noticed this like some of my friends who also found companies and so on like we start scaling almost too early like they insist many of the founders they're like they they kind of iterate on the problem for a long time before scaling up and they're thinking about oh what was what would this look like if we had 10 million in revenue right already when they have no revenue they think about that which i think is a really good move because it's just so much easier to to solve for those scalability issues when you're still small um yeah that's really interesting so it fix the issues of the future today and like build the framework the infrastructure the architecture that enables you when you get to those moment you've already got those systems and processes in place.

6:35Gustav Bang:Exactly yeah super simple and scalable system that you know is just going to be able to grow. How are you finding the journey personally I mean it sounds like you've had a bit of a crazy ride already spending a year in those offices then being in YC and doing customer calls at 3am what's been the customer experience been like? I mean I love being a founder like I've been in startups for 10 years personally and it's been in really good startups really bad startups as I think just like having been both on the engineering side and the sales side is really a useful kind of, it's really nice to be a generalist as a founder, right?

7:06Gustav Bang:Like I can both do tech, user interviews, whatever is needed for me. And now that we're a team of 18 people, I find that my best thing that I can do is just unlock people wherever it is. Like if it's in sales, then I'll jump into sales if it's something in engineering. So for me personally, being able to do everything in the company is a really nice thing to do. And you mentioned you've been through some good startups and bad startups. What have been some of the learnings from your time working and operating now you're applying as a founder?

7:39Gustav Bang:Yeah, that's a good question. I mean, like the biggest learnings to do what we do now also is like from straight out of like the Lagora playbook and Max, who's like a brilliant founder, really one of the best in the EU. about simplifying things, right? Like every time we have a decision, pick the most ambitious, most risky of those two decisions. Makes every single decision very easy. You know, if you're building into a complex area, don't address it as complex, right? Just simplify it and make sure that what you're building is simple. But then on the contrary, like I would say just in general, not being too like aware of the market size that you're building into.

8:16Gustav Bang:I think in my experience building startups it's easier the harder it is it seems very but if you're building into something very large like a huge mission big mission then it becomes easier to raise funds it becomes easier to attract great people like all these things become actually easier right so if you're thinking oh I'm just going to do an easy startup I'm going to pick this like easy area then you're going to have more competitors you're not going to be able to raise so yeah that's really interesting is like actually, yeah, what did you say? The easier it is, the harder it is. The harder it is, the easier it is.

8:51Yeah, exactly. Talk to me about the round then, right? So you just raised 11 million. General Catalyst, a phenomenal investor, very excited, doing a lot of really interesting things in AI. What did they see? How did that relationship come about? What was that process like raising from them?

9:07Gustav Bang:Yeah, so I think for us, General Catalyst was the number one of all the investors we could have dreamed of to lead this round because they, first of all, they have a European side to them now since I think a few years ago. Great network in the retail space that we're operating in. A big understanding of the opportunities also in the EU. Like I'm sitting in the European Commission right now because there's a 2 trillion euro budget every year that we're going to tap into. So I guess like, I like that the US investors, they move quickly and don't do as much due diligence, but they also are very US focused, right?

9:40Gustav Bang:The US is the biggest market. You want to tap into that. But for us, it's the country. Like we are actually going to the US, maybe that's the last market, right? Like we've got the EU, Canada, China, like all these places are way more regulated than the US. So we would like, like General Catalyst was just so aware of this opportunity outside of the US. And then obviously, like, I also knew like Max, for example, in Lagora, they also raced from General Catalyst. And, you know, the guy we talked to at first, Yuri, he has maybe the best reputation in the Valley. They like, no matter who you ask, they know him, they talk good about him, which I think having an investor like in a seed round, you know you're going to be working with them for so many years, right?

10:23Gustav Bang:So it has to be a good relationship. I think it's really interesting your point about the highly regulated markets. Often when you look at the most successful companies that have been built out of Europe, they're often companies that could only have been built in Europe because of some structural reasons, right? Like whether it's Revolue and it was currency exchange and because there's so many countries in Europe, even like 11 Labs with their dubbing. And it often feels like the generational companies and even like Deal, which is sort of American, but very European roots, remote working is much bigger across Europe where you have so many countries.

10:55It's really interesting that there's this thing where the structural things occurring in Europe actually often pay advantage to the companies that are building from there.

11:04Gustav Bang:True. Yes. I mean, I remember how we framed Complier Tours and Vistos. like we call us the vanta for physical products right yeah and we always were like why did vanta show up in the us or not in the eu um right because you have some compliance that you want to live up to um but i think what's shaping our field right now is like we also want to become the compliance layer for global commerce basically right and global commerce like we started with european customers but they sold globally so we had to think globally from very early on and that means like no matter whether you're a vanter or complete or anyone doing compliance fintech compliance whatever it is like it's kind of a global problem by definition uh when you're doing compliance that's so interesting yeah that's like yeah interesting you have to from day one it has to be you have to you have to have something that works everywhere yeah exactly for us it was not only everywhere in terms of geography was also you know now we just say consumer goods but it's like there's a huge difference between a cosmetic product and a toy and a food product like so when we initially started people were like shouldn't you just be doing cosmetics like that's a huge market in itself we were like no way like for us like a retailer selling a product they should be able to sell any product and compliance is uh so this is a very wide play you could say horizontal play that is only also realistic now to do because of the speed of Federation, all that stuff.

12:34And tell me now, you raised this money. I think you said your team was at 18 people. What are you going to be spending that money on? What are you going to be doing over the next 6, 8, 12 months to get you to that next stage of your journey?

12:45Gustav Bang:Yeah, so we got seven engineers and two specialists right now. And that's like, I mean, it feels like we're 50 engineers, right? Because it's going really quickly. So we don't feel the urge to kind of expand on the engineering capacity in the short term. but then we're like now opening up in the UK and Germany so we're hiring head off roles for those countries and paying enough to kind of like commit to those markets as well like I think that's a common mistake the Danish founders especially made but like in general just like not committing enough to expansion and so that's going to be like the short term 6 to 12 months players just like really grab the best of the best logos in all of Europe and get a solid foundation to build up on um but yeah i mean who knows like we kind of in yc also there was a lot of talk about like how do you shape a company in the era of ai right like you don't necessarily need to hire 40 people uh just because you can uh so we have we're going to be very strategic about like which people we choose um to bring in but uh yeah if there's anyone out there listening and thinking this is a a crazy cool company to join then uh feel free to reach out yeah i love it and uh is it something in your mind that you want to achieve right is there a certain milestone is there a customer number that you want to get to that you think okay this is where we need to be in 6-12 months to get to where i want us to be i mean we're pretty aggressive about the growth like we would like to raise a series a maybe in only 6-12 months time um we've been growing 40 percent month of a month in the last six months um and and have actually pivoted so right out of yc we basically just like went into revenue no matter what kind of customer it was and now we just only do enterprise so we basically threw out two billion euros of pipeline increase the pipeline again times two and now we only got like 100k plus contracts coming on um so that's been one of the goals for us is like you can build a really great business with like 10 20 30k b2b contracts but if you do like pure enterprise play in the beginning like within a lagora like it's just so much more scalable and it almost takes the same amount of effort when there is a 10x change in the revenue so we have an acv now it's grown from 27k to 55k and then we would like to be at around like 100k by the time we raise the 3s a that's amazing did you it hasn't been any noticeable difference you know in in the way that you sell the products enterprises versus snbs are there longer timelines are you having to be more involved answering different types of questions are they slightly more risk averse yeah yeah for sure like we're really diving into the nitty-gritty parts of enterprise sales right now we just heard a podcast lenny's podcast recent episode where they dive into enterprise sales uh and there are so many things that we uh we thought was true like the type of person that you're hiring for these enterprise sales roles they have to be really good project managers basically they need to involve people like you can we do an average contract on like two to three months but the only reason we do that is not because our product is uniquely easy to go into it's just that you involve all the right people very proactively um yeah that's just project management on steroids yeah i mean yeah and there's so many uh always like hoops to jump through right well yeah thank you so much for joining me this is really exciting.

16:14I think you guys are absolutely crushing it and I look very much forward to hearing about your Series A announcement in the next 69 months. You'll be the first.

16:22Gustav Bang:Yeah, let's do it. Best of luck with it all and thank you for taking the time. You too, man. Bye for now.