Marius Meiners: Co-Founder & CEO at Peec AI announcing their $21m Series A!

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Taunson. I'm here with Marius from Peak AI who has got a super exciting announcement. Tell us, what's the news?

0:11Marius Meiners:Thanks for having me. Yeah, so we just closed our Series A of$21 million last week and we're super excited. I'm ready to push the team and the topic forward even faster than we currently have. So we are hyped for the next year. Amazing. This is like phenomenal news. You announced your seed, I think$7 million in July from 20VC. So super quick turnaround, you know, from C to Series A. Why did you decide to raise now? I think you only launched in February. So, you know, you've gone from pre-C to C to Series A in record time. Yeah. Why now, I guess? Yeah. So we raised like angel pre-C to Series A now all in this year.

0:48Marius Meiners:You're right. We essentially founded the company in January and then launched the product in February. What we see today is really an insane amount of demand for the product and the space. So I think it's really a great timing to, you know, pop up the team, be very well capitalized for the next year and then really have the resources to just push super, super hard. Amazing. I actually read that you were hoping to hit 4 million ARR by the end of this year and then do your Series A early next year. so it looks like you've kind of beaten your own uh your own targets has this happened even quicker than you were expecting yeah so when we first got started in like december last we were like hey a million first year is pretty good so let's aim for like a million in the first year right um you know back in the days before this like ai wave a million first year i think you were like top 10 percent of startups worldwide always um so that was kind of the target of course that has like completely changed now in this like age of AI where companies do 5 million, 10 million, 10 million, 25 million first year.

1:48Marius Meiners:So I think the benchmarks have shifted quite a lot. And also it's possible these days to grow this fast, right? So we, you know, have, we adjusted our internal target quite a couple of times now, and now already crossed 4 million in ARR today. So we are looking more at like, you know, five or above by the end of the next year. And then hopefully, of course, like moving more towards like a 5X then across the next year. Amazing. Yeah. So like 2025 by end of next year, of course, part of this phrase, 21 million led by Singular. Part of this raising, part of what you've spoken about is expanding to the US.

2:22You're going to be in New York. Can you tell me a bit about that? Why the US? Why New York?

2:28Marius Meiners:So US is still our best market. We currently make over half of our revenue there today. We also see it as the most attractive market for growth. They're the most, you know, the biggest customers are there. The most important people are there. So I think it's great to have a local presence. The soil building in Europe and then selling in the U.S. motion is definitely something that we want to tap into. And they are the strongest customer base. And if you look at the U.S., there's two natural places to go as a European company. There's San Francisco and then there's New York City. And the way I look at it is that if you look for engineering talent, then San Francisco is probably the best place to be.

3:02Marius Meiners:Or if you look for fundraising or a VC ecosystem. But if you just want to sell, I think New York has its advantages, especially in the marketing space that we're in. All the big marketing agencies are there, all the big events are there. So in terms of selling, I think it's the best place for us to end up in. And then we'll build up local go-to-market team there, so sales and marketing. And I think we can find really good talent there locally in New York. Do you see yourself going out there at all? Yeah, I think what I've learned now from speaking to a lot of people is that you can only really do it successfully if part of the founding team also goes there for at least some time and really builds up the local presence there and hires the right people.

3:37Marius Meiners:I've also heard that European founders specifically struggle to hire the right people in the US because people are great at selling themselves. But then, you know, after you hire them, sometimes you find out that they aren't actually that great. Which is something I've heard from a lot of people now that have tried this. So I'll try my best to not fall into the same trap and be there at least for, you know, a couple of months or like a year or whatever, however long it takes. And then, you know, be between New York and Berlin like a lot. Amazing. I think you're looking to hire 40 roles. Is that primarily across go-to-market or is that a combination of, you know, product R &D and go-to-market operations?

4:10What does that look like?

4:12Marius Meiners:Yeah, we're literally hanging across, I think, every single function at the moment. So we are now 18 and, you know, on paper, like 22 have signed. So like we are already expanding quite a bit and then we are moving towards more like 55, 60 people in total. I think that's kind of like where we want to end up, I think. And then of course, you're always like, we adjust how is it going, where's the demand and the team really. And then we are now looking for the first founding finance person, first founding HR person, and then, you know, multiple product roles, looking for a ton of engineers, and then also looking to expand the sales and marketing pretty dramatically.

4:44Marius Meiners:So those are like the most important functions right now. Yeah, so really a bit of everyone everywhere. Yeah, exactly. And I read that you're onboarding an insane 300 customers a month. How are you able to do that at the moment? Is that absolute chaos? Have you got lots of amazing built-in systems and automations or is it just like scrappy, messy at the moment? So our product, you know, we sell at a decently low price point where the first plan is like 90 euros a month and then sometimes they're like 500 a month. Some customers also spend more than that. I think our biggest SUVs, however, are more like 50K.

5:16Marius Meiners:So it's not like we sell massive contracts. And, you know, if you sell contracts at this size, you have to make it decently efficient, right? Like you can't spend a month with a customer. It just doesn't scale at all. so our sales process is typically um you know a one or two touch point sales process for like the lower plans um if we even talk to people at all um ideally our onboarding in the product is so good that people just like convert by themselves and i think that there will also be the predominant motion that we sell through going forward which is like mostly mostly sales mostly product-led and not sales driven and then of course for mostly bigger agencies that we do sell to that's more like a sales driven motion um we are now at like roughly a thousand four hundred customers and they have a lot of questions so our customer support and success needs to be like very you know very good and and efficient and we do try to have automations in place and um of course currently it's also quite manual still you know i think our one customer success person maury he answers roughly like 60 70 tickets a day which is like pretty dramatic um so we're also looking for support there um is that something that you've got to balance as well this is like a really new hot topic like is there is there a lot of education that you need to do both of like potential customers real customers the market more generally to kind of teach people that this is something they need to be looking at i think we've seen like a real evolution there in january february when we started nobody was really aware of the topic at all and it was still like a lot of education where we had to tell people why this is important and why they should care about it and now we're at the point where a lot of companies have already understood that this is something to care about, but they don't really know how it works.

6:48Marius Meiners:So it's now shifted a bit from, it is important, but what do I do? So we have to do a better job on the what do I do part now that people understand the topic, but they don't know what to do. So we will also heavily invest in more content that we can push forward to them to help them understand what actions drive the most impact for their organization. And if you would pick one bit of advice to give to a company, say that they are just starting to look at this world of AI search, what would be the one thing that you would recommend? So I think you first need to understand which sources are the most important sources for your industry, meaning where does the LLM go to take information from?

7:24Marius Meiners:Is it mostly Wikipedia? Is it Reddit? Is it Quora? It might also be social platforms like YouTube, TikTok, etc. And then just making sure that you are really well represented on these platforms. So for example, if you're like a beauty or supplement brand, then TikTok is actually quite important for you and YouTube as well. So making sure that your content is on these platforms and that other content pieces that talk about you are in a positive tone, etc. So first understand, you know, where's information coming from and then how you can have how you can have an impact like on those sources. Got it.

7:52Nice. And you mentioned, you know, a bit about content earlier. Where is your growth come from? You know, you've seen this amazing growth. And there's obviously there was a huge moment, I think, you know, when when 20VC kind of led the seed round, you know, you really became came to the forefront of everybody's mind. They produced that amazing video. But how else have you managed to kind of infiltrate so many hundreds of customers in such a short space of time?

8:16Marius Meiners:A lot of it's actually word of mouth. So customers trying out the product, really liking it and then recommending it to friends. AI Search is actually also one of our biggest channels. Currently 20 % of our own conversions come through that channel. So people searching on JTBT for a generative engine optimization solution or whatever the word of the month currently is. There's so many different terms for it. And then of course social is big. So people sharing stuff, sharing screenshots of our product, sharing screenshots of their dashboards or sharing how they use the product to basically drive their own conversions for their own company so that's actually currently our biggest channel still amazing yeah it's great to hear that like yeah your own ai search is such a big channel for you right it's like what are they like dog fooding what do they call it um but yeah like you're proving your own model yeah exactly i mean if you know it's natural for people to ask jgpt how to you know because the people the person with the rank there essentially would also be good at helping them rank there right it's like a classical if your seo agency isn't on google then it's a bad seo agency yeah it's a red flag right yeah it's a red flag yeah yeah yeah it's like if your barber if your barber isn't you know doesn't have a great haircut you're like huh yeah you're like i'm gonna go somewhere else um exactly and in the in the past probably six months we've seen a bunch more companies playing in this space right it's suddenly become like a super hot area i think as kind of as you mentioned as it becomes more aware that this is an important issue but it seems like you are this is probably the biggest round raised to date for a company in this space you guys are obviously absolutely crushing it how do you look at your competitors and kind of what gives you the confidence that you guys are going to win right so i think overall at the moment in this ai era how i see companies being built is that most good ideas are fairly obvious you know like it's clear someone's going to build the next ai erp system that's with it right then you have like ai sourcing for each for for candidates you know there's like a ton of platforms like like that then um ai slides ai excel like these These are all very obviously great ideas and if you can build that and deliver a great product you will make money on them and you will have a lot of market demand.

10:21Marius Meiners:The downside of these ideas is that there's quite a lot of competition for them. You compete with 50, 60, 70 teams globally on these topics. I can't count the number of better clay or clay for eggs or lovable for eggs, yc startups. There's tons of these. If you're lovable or clay you see one new competitor every single day. And I think this is just the reality that we have to get used to at the moment, where if you work on an idea that is relatively obviously going to work, that you will just have like a ton of competition. So I think you just need to execute super, super well. And that's really where a lot of the early differentiation lies.

10:54Marius Meiners:And then, of course, at scale, you have different modes and stuff like that. But you just need to execute really, really well at the start. And are you leveraging more on the quality of the product yourself? Or do you also see kind of like brand being your mode? You know, a lot of people are talking about how product is becoming increasingly commoditized. and it's all about brand and community and content. How do you see that? Do you think, are you relying on the strength of your product? Were you thinking more about the strength of your go-to-market motion and your kind of, yeah, content brand, that kind of stuff?

11:21Marius Meiners:Yeah, I think both are super important. So at least personally, currently, I don't see product being very easy to build. It's definitely easier to build. But I can see that, you know, with a team of five people, you can build like a 100 million AR product at the moment. I'm not saying that it can be possible or something like that, but I just don't see it right now. It's still very hard to have an amazing product, right? You still need like a lot of great engineers. You need lots of great designers and great product people with great product taste. I think taste is becoming more and more important.

11:50Marius Meiners:And as you just said, I think brand is very relevant. So just being top of mind for your space, for example, Lovable, in my opinion, isn't that much better than like a VZero or like all of these other platforms are, but it's just always top of mind, right? And being top of mind, I think is super, super important like in this day and age where, you know, We do really live in the intention era. And if people think of you when they think about your category, that helps a lot. Yeah, and they've done an amazing job of being almost in every single channel imaginable, whether it's content or partnerships or events.

12:20They are there. So yeah, they've done an amazing job on that. So let's go back to the round, right? It's a 20 million series. It's a big round. Not long after the 20 BC round. When did you start this process? How quick has it been? what kind of gave them the conviction that you guys can go all the way sure um so we started i

12:41Marius Meiners:think six weeks ago and the fundraising process took roughly two weeks um and then always like four weeks to close right so from like term sheet to close um currently in germany at least we have not been able to do it in less than four weeks with all the like poa documents the negotiation the diligence and stuff like that um and i was surprised like series a diligence is for sure a lot more work than seed to diligence um which is also not not amazing um but part of the process and yeah so we're super excited and it didn't take too long but still like with preparation and stuff i think it's still like a two-month thing where you know you prepare for two weeks you race for two weeks you close for four weeks and then you know it definitely takes up like 80 90 percent of like the ceos or whoever does the fundraising person's time um for that two months so it's quite an intense period uh yeah and how did this compare to the seed everybody saw the video of Harry in 20 BC and how they turned it around in 24 hours how did the two experiences compare raising the seed in the series A and raising from 20 BC and raising from singular?

13:41Marius Meiners:I think for the seed round people were even more metric driven whereas like hey the early generation is super super strong so they didn't ask that many questions on like the long term and like market and stuff like that and this was more of a question on the series A where people would want to send like what's like the top end of the market Can you make 400 million AR or can you make 4 billion AR? I think that's more of a question for a Series A investor because they want to make sure that they're not looking at a 20x. They're looking at a 100x potentially on their investment. So that was definitely more of a key question focus for the investors that we talked to, which I also totally understand.

14:16Marius Meiners:Especially for one of these later stage or multi-fund investors, they really want to make sure that you don't hit time exhaustion very, very early in the cycle of the startup. Singular and TrendVC are actually quite similar. I think in their ways of thinking about investing, they're like, hey, these people are running in the right direction. They have built a product that customers really, really like. They have good product taste. And so in this world of fast-changing environments, we believe that they will figure out the best path forward. And I think that's something that I really understood was important for both of these investors and that we were able to convince them of.

14:52Amazing. It seems that they definitely moved really quickly, both of them. And that's something that I see as an increasing trend, especially European VCs, if they want to stay competitive, they've got to move quickly. As quick as Americans, did you talk to American VCs? Was that something that you were interested in, perhaps with the US expansion? Or were you happy just with the quality of the European VCs?

15:12Marius Meiners:We also spoke to some American investors. I also spent like half a week, a week in San Francisco to meet a couple. At the end of the day, it also came down to people, right? Like, who do you really trust going forward? I also have a view on American investors. they are culturally quite a bit different than European investors, which in one sense is really, really good. So they're much more like upside oriented and much less like downside protective, which I think is like really, really cool. However, I also vibe more now with like the people like Henry from Singular or like Harry and Kieran from TUNABC just naturally was more of a fit for us as a team.

15:47Yeah, amazing. Okay, so it's maybe like more closer cultural alignment. And I guess if you can have the speed and you can have the capital from the European VCs, I guess you don't need it. And looking forward to a potential Series B, what do you think you need to achieve in this time with the capital that you've got to get you there?

16:05Marius Meiners:That's a great question. Also, I think there's a difference in expectation between European and US investors. People in SF, I think, were heavily under the impression that anything below 10x is currently a failure, where if you don't grow from 5 to 50, then that is just not top of class at the moment. I think in Europe people are more like hey if you do 5x that's really good so I think it depends who you talk to and how the space like how does this AI wave play out right if everybody continues to make 10x year on year in the top like 5 % of startups then that will continue to be the expectation if the growth kind of like slows down a little bit I would say then the expectation will also slow down a little bit so I think it depends you know how the space plays out how we will be judged Interesting.

16:49Okay, yeah, we'll see how the market changes. And I guess, you know...

16:54Marius Meiners:And of course, we will try our absolute best, right? So we'll try to press every single percentage point of growth out of the company that we can. Of course. So far, it doesn't make a difference what the expectation is. We'll just try to deliver the absolute best we can, and then we will see where we land. I think 25 million is definitely doable. So I think in all space, given the demand level that we see, we can go 5x, maybe we can do more. It is hard to predict, I think. And when you look at the market dynamics at the moment, you know people talking about a bubble or whatever crazy valuations lots of money being invested did that come into it at all when you were fundraising were you thinking okay actually maybe let's do this sooner than next year because the market is like really hot right now or did you just try and push that stuff to the side no no it was definitely part of our like mental model on how we think about fundraising right now so i think there were two reasons so a we wanted to be in a position to not have to fundraise in january because we wanted to like be done with it earlier so that we have the capacity to already deploy faster because our space is just growing so fast but then also it was definitely a consideration of like hey what happens if the climate for fundraising in february march just like shifts a lot because we you know have like somewhat of a correction in the market or however you want to call it bubble burst correction um you know whatever um then we also don't want to position where it's going to be a lot harder to fundraise it's going to take much more time much more focus so right now is also a great time to fundraise however maybe not right now because now we're already close to christmas but like when we started i think it was a good time yeah i know it makes total sense yeah um no it's good to get it done and yeah everyone else speaks to it takes so much of the time that you can just get it done focus on executing and building again um i think like i always want to ask about the state of ai and how it's going to change and what what implications you see for your business i mean you know the models are getting better uh everything's improving things getting cheaper do you look at those sort of like frontier models and and do you like in what way do those models changing impact your business and your product suite yeah so i think we're in a very special position where we are actually more of a classical b2b SaaS business than like an AI native business we we work with AI a lot internally and we work on AI platforms right but we don't do any AI generated output so we're not like gamma we are not like you know cursor or whatever so for us it's more important how does consumer adoption of ai products change so will people continue to pivot away from like google traditional search towards like ai search and that's definitely a trend that we will continue to see i think going forward if the models get better even more right so currently we have like 800 million weekly active users on chbt i think there's a clear path where that doubles or triples over the next years and that's going to be the main growth or a fast as long as you believe in that micro trend we're good to go yeah it's amazing because i guess you get to capitalize on the growth of ai without necessarily being prone to so many of the risks which are like you know low margins or low retention uh you're building in the kind of the old school sas model but with the excitement of the ai market um super cool well look i think you know final question would be you know what is your priority what are you going to be focused on the next two months to make sure that you get into 2026 you know swinging so right now it's just team so we're just focused on team right now and hiring and um you know as you said we have like 40 open roles or 40 open positions so um you know and also for me personally it's it's quite challenging right so um scaling the culture that we have from like 18 people right now right feel super like like a very close team everybody's extremely supportive very ambitious very driven scaling that now with like 30 40 more people in a very short number of time i think is a challenge so i really want to make sure personally that we that we do this right and that we get it right and that we find the right people to join that are both extremely ambitious, hungry driven, very smart, very good at what they do, but also culturally fit the vibe and like fit the team and are nice and great to work with and chill to be around.

20:38Yeah, amazing. I mean, yeah, going from the size you are to the size you want to be, it's like, yeah, I think that's probably the hardest point to scale the culture. But look, thank you so much for joining me. Absolute congratulations. It's like super exciting. You're definitely one of the most exciting companies to come out of 2025 across Europe. And yeah, we'll look forward to like, seeing you grow even more thanks so much enjoy your day bye bye