Inside Protex AI: $54M raised, 300% growth, Fortune 500s closed

0:01Founders going into a market they're unsure of, the best comment we ever got was it's a lot easier to think outside the box when you've never been in it. So don't be afraid to kind of tackle opportunities that maybe you're unsure of. It's a lot easier to kind of clean up fresh ideas to something that's already there. Welcome to the SaaS Revolution Show, a podcast by SaaS.com. Here we interview SaaS founders from around the world who've been there and done that. They share the ins and outs of how they built their businesses, their operations, their path for securing investment and more. Our mission with the podcast is to help you, the founder, learn how to scale your SaaS, maintain your well-being, and navigate the complexities of this ever-changing industry.

0:42I'm your host, Alex Thumer, and together we'll explore the good, the bad, and the ugly in the journey to SaaS success. All right, welcome back to the SaaS Revolution Show. I am your host, Alex Thumer, CEO, founder of SaaStock, also general partner at BackFuture Ventures. Delighted to be joined today by Dan Hobbs, who is the CEO, co-founder at Protex.ai. Did you just say Protex or do you say.ai as well, Dan? Yeah, we used to say Protex internally, some call us Protex AI, so a bit of a mix. My mom called us Protex A1, so still trying to get her on board with us. Well, just on that, I actually haven't had, it's seeming like my kids, they know all about AI, right?

1:27They're like eight and ten. No, sorry, nine and ten now. One of them's just had their birthday, right? But I think certainly for many years, I've been doing SaaS up for 10 years now, and probably like the first five years, my partner didn't really know what SaaS or cloud is. And I'm trying to explain to my mom what SaaS or cloud is. I haven't even bothered. But it's quite interesting to see actually how my kids know everything about AI or spot AI videos and so on. And so maybe we'll just have to do less of that with this new generation. But the old generation will be calling us A1 and wondering where the cloud is, etc.

2:04But Dan, thanks for coming on. Are you in Dublin at the moment? Yeah, currently Dublin in our Dublin office. We just open new offices actually out here, but usually based in Boston. Okay, very good. So how much time do you spend between both? Are you kind of more permanently in Boston? uh i'm actually i spent my time i was just talking to a guy earlier that uh someone asked was i jet lagged and i was like i don't even know anymore because i'm just spending my time between uh between boston uh dublin we opened up london office as well um and we have a boston office and then we're opening up in in um in in other areas in europe um but i spent about i'd say 70 percent of my time in the states maybe 60 to 70 percent and then the rest in the dublin and london office and so dan like we always kick off the show just wanted to get uh to know the guests a little bit more uh so we'd love to know uh who is dan hobbs sure yeah can my life story um not without going too much detail so i uh um i'm from ireland from placed um just west of dublin in kildare place con minyouth um so right at the end of the train line for for a lot of them coming commuting in um but i did a economics degree in college in dublin um and i'd uh i remember i went into college thinking i was going to work in the the eu and uh and learn french and i realized i'm really really shit at french so that was a quick uh quick dream down the drain um and got into startup very early so i started my first company called better examinations which is an exam software company for universities um while i was in college and built that for a couple years after and we sold that to a company called terminal four in 2019 um and then i stood around for a year to learn how companies worked and whatnot um got like the sale with the sales function and product um and then um here on my co-founder for protex uh we've known each other since we were like 11 years old so we met at a we actually met at a national science fair the young scientist in in dublin being the cool guys we were some people were some kids go out and uh and learn how to live we were too busy sticking inside doing science experiments so we met at that and always kept in touch but uh before protex but i've always kind of been had an interest in in science and technology um from from a really young age and and uh haven't had to have a resume or cv just because i've been starting companies which is a nice nice place to be in so uh yeah excited about kind of where we're at right now um just on the science side like what sort of science experiments uh uh were you doing at the science fair was there like a competition and was kieran you know a little bit did he beat you uh or was it a joint thing do you know what i was uh i did a couple projects with my brother who's definitely the brains behind i ended up like i did all those competitions ended up doing economics degree you know so i kind of spoke to itself um but kieran was was the whiz he's he's probably the the smartest person i've come across ever um but but also can have a pint although he barely drinks beer too excited poor fella um but he can still have a point and and shoot um um shoot good conversation at the same time.

5:10But he was a lot better me technically. But at the same time, I think we won more prizes than he did. So I still have that to hold over him today. And so why did you incur on Start ProTex? What was the desire to build this business? Sure. So maybe just as a quick overview, what ProTex is, is we link in with existing CCTV infrastructure in like factories and warehouses to to identify behavior patterns that lead to physical accidents so someone getting hit by a forklift or ergonomic issues or um things like that so we're able to predict injuries happening on sites and work with fortune 500 companies but for context like i before started project i didn't step into i'd never stepped into a factory uh never been on a warehouse before which was quite funny um so it was very random us random us coming across this problem.

6:04We almost had a solution before a problem, which again sounds strange. So Ciarán was doing a PhD in computer vision in Limerick. And we were trying to figure out where we could put this cool technology. So we looked at, we actually looked at drones was our first idea for a company. So we looked at creating a, I told people the story where we created a drone guard dog. So if your house got robbed, the drone would like dispatch and chase the person like a mini police helicopter for two miles quite terrifying we had no nets on it or or no sort of no sort of weapons on it at that time but it was nearly impossible and then we we heard crazy stories of people falling overboard and on cruise ships and disappearing into the sea and we thought well maybe if you could have some sort of camera system from a thermal perspective could you find them so safety started coming into the fold and i think that kind of stuck with us i remember we we were having a pint in a bar called Crows next to the RDS.

7:01And we were trying to figure out, you know, what did we want to do? And we could have built cool tech and some cool SaaS systems, but I guess we really wanted to do something that had impact. That was really, really, really core to what we wanted to do. So if we sat in another pub and we're talking to someone and told someone what we did, they would be like, oh, shit, that's really cool. So that's really what we wanted to drive. and then Ciarán Zanti was an operations manager on a factory floor in Ireland and a guy got crushed by a forklift against the wall and died. They thought it was a freak accident but when they went back through the CCTV they saw that all of those behavior patterns and trends and little micro behaviors that were leading to that accident were actually happening all the time.

7:47They just didn't know about it because if you've ever been in a factory it's wild like there's so many noises there's so much movement they're on they're on like the clock so lots of stuff going on it's really hard to spot these things so they could have stopped it and that's really where we were like okay i wonder can we help so we did yc um y carbonator um in 2021 built off the back of that and we're working with some awesome companies like dhl and and um amazon and some some huge logos across the globe and to help them to to protect their workers very cool and what data can you share about the look company so yc 2021 uh it's now 2025 where's the company at uh at the moment yeah we've grown pretty rapidly so we've raised about 54 million um uh to date um over the course of the four years uh but from a growth perspective we've grown about 300 um the 300 percent every single year um which which really stems to i think that the sentiment of the market has changed as well so probably started out like like you said at the start people were saying uh a1 instead ai or they trying to explain what what artificial intelligence was before and then the chat cheaper t piece came out a few years back and that we we kind of rode that wave and so did our clients um just bringing an ai and having ai strategies and skyrocketed really in the last probably 18 months we're seeing a huge uptake not only in the case of hey let's try out this cool tool but really getting into the grips of okay how do we roll this out across all of our network.

9:14So you're right, obviously, the market sentiment, we're in this era of everybody getting very excited about AI using AI, people, or like CFOs, companies, buyers, focusing more on AI than, let's say, some traditional software. And so obviously, if you're in that space, that the sentiment the market you know there's some nice tailwinds there uh for you uh but we can unpack maybe this 300 growth year over year uh a little bit sentiment certainly is going to be definitely helpful right um what are some of the things that that you have done that protex has done to really kind of help you you know hit these numbers um so i think a big piece of it is really understanding you know especially from a a software perspective is understanding our business model and where to play um we're very much enterprise focused we don't mess around in admin market smb i like enterprise i like the ugly sale which a lot of people i guess don't i love them lots of stakeholders um lots of kind of uh relationship building so a very relationship focused piece to it funny enough our um our market is kind of like the bible belt in america which is a lot of the you know um um factory-based areas or you know tennessee's texas kentucky's but i think where a lot of companies can fail when it comes to growth is trying to get quick wins um under the belt so they might go to like a lower down um person in the company who doesn't have much power uh but they'll be able to sign off maybe like a 10k contract or something like that which is cool and all power to you if you can do that and if you're a product-led growth motion that works really really well for for dealing with enterprise and looking at kind of sustained growth and depth within clients i think the only way to do that is top down and really focusing on building rapport and and relationships with people higher up the food chain who can make those decisions and they're a lot more fun to work with i find where you can really drive success criteria with them and understanding what makes them tick and they can make big decisions and that's where we to play so i think that motion of spending time um and being okay with pushing out deals if it means that there's much more depth in it that's where a lot of people tend to fail because they'll just look for the quick wins and doesn't last as sustainable businesses no i think that makes sense so let's say if you're one of the existing customers that uh that you've won um we imagine given an enterprise you know sort of long sales cycle how do you first um get in front of that like reach that customer like what is the the motion there are they coming inbound is it outbound referrals getting in there then starting to build the relationship mapping all of this out there's this quote that i always follow and it's helped us with investment and i've said it on another podcast before but it's uh ask for money get advice ask for advice get money twice do you know who said that can you have any guesses who do that's right you know what i feel like i've heard it but no i've heard some people say it's steve jobs some people say bill gates some people say other people it's actually pitbull mr worldwide uh it's a feel this moment it's the first line of feel this moment yeah um so what i meant by that is i think a lot of people going in just trying to sell hard um on like your your first message like your first message should just be getting meeting and i i do find that that that people higher up the food chain tend to be more receptive to startups funny enough if you tackle kind of middle managers and whatnot they will be less likely to jump on calls with you and be open to like innovation because that's not their job their job is to hit their kpis and whatnot rather than um don't do that so we tend to go in and say hey look we'd love to get your take on what we're working on because we think it's cool we think it'd cool for your company um but no sweat if you don't want to just thought it would align to your ai strategy or something like that um and we tend to be pretty good on that regard i think we're about 50 50 inbound outbound so pretty good stats in that regard but certainly at the start a lot of it was educating the market on what we did and we've got competitors in the market i think we're all doing that we're all helping each other out regards to just talking about ai in in the space and and uh i think companies trust us now that we're the right players to to lean on when it comes to learning about AI and safety and operations.

13:40What about, let's say still on the topic of, you know, go to market, what are you using internally, maybe specifically, and it doesn't have to be like AI tools to kind of help you reach the customers. But then like second part would like to know you as a CEO, like how do you use AI to kind of help you, you know, within the business and and how you're um you know i guess the culture of the business how you're pushing this uh across to for for people to you know adapt to ai yeah i think things are changing with regards to how startups are being built with with ai not the case of um just using systems for fun or making things faster but rather a case of making things a lot more efficient and there's a difference between speed and efficiency um so you see companies like mistral ai you see companies like um like perplexity and whatnot who are who are these awesome companies who are building multi multi-million multi-billion dollar companies with with with 40 50 people and it's it's a it's a world we that's never happened beforehand because scale has always been associated with growth of teams and i think and they've always been inverse function to say hey if your team's if your team's really big um it's it's uh you're gonna you're gonna need or you're sorry if you're more more revenue you have the good team you have but it's not actually that anymore it's just being efficient so um i think that's a focus of ours is how do we how do we um maintain team size and and structure but still making the company more efficient so i'll give you an example of that from a team perspective from our bd team we have a system called nooks um if you haven't come across this awesome tool we use uh which allows you to make like 10 dials instead of one um at a time um so you're increasing the efficiency of that team um similarly with um we use like clod a lot we use uh for research um to just speed up speed up learning about you know different companies different clients um and we're looking a lot more ai efficiencies to just reduce reduce that and similarly with we have a system called called devon we use which a lot of people use now from that kind of does the work of a level one software engineer.

15:52So there's those types of efficiencies where you just can make the whole team more efficient. They can work on more things they want to work on rather than kind of doing the dog work that's included. So I think the world of startups changing and I think also investment sentiment and VCs have that expectation now that that's a focus on looking at your revenue per head or your gross margin numbers because if you look at companies or where those conversations would have existed beforehand is when you're going to go for IPO or maybe a series d or series e but now uh vcs expectations is that you're looking at this further or a lot sooner rather in the in your growth journey rather than before your IPO and what about yourself uh as ceo and like how are you using ai daily weekly i'm still getting used to i think you're on my my co-founder he's he's awesome at it like he's like you should be using it for absolutely everything i feel like i'm talking like my dad whenever i talk about ai i'm like but it doesn't know what i need um so uh still getting used to that but uh i use it i use um uh clod a lot i use um uh i use chat gpt a lot for for collecting notes uh we use um systems like we don't use gong we use like a cheap version cheaper version of gong um what is that it's called the voma um does pretty much same thing not to let the crap on gong by any means think they're an awesome company but from a perspective yeah there were there were many different uh softwares out there right so uh yeah it's good to know what's out there yeah so i use our granola if you've come across that it's an awesome note-taking tool it's getting really big now the last while really love that system i use it for everything um just to collate things so i use a lot for note-taking a lot for um um like pulling little notes together throw in the chat bt or granola and start querying that data i think what i'd love to see as a next space is like creating these data lakes of all of your your customer information and then you can just query the information hubspot we use hubspot but and as hubspot copilot i'm not a huge fan of it to be honest i think it's pretty um it reminds me of like clippy from microsoft um vista uh windows vista just you can just like ask questions and it just sends you more faqs um so but i think that's probably where the commercial functions are lacking is this really cool system that you can just bring all your information to one and just ask you questions about clients is it granola uh for note-taking are you just using that uh on video meetings um or does it does it work outside or is it just for video meetings i use a video meeting so i'm going to use that and i merge it with chat gpt to pull everything into one system and then i'll have like projects in my chat gpt so if i have like um conversations with people whether it be internally or externally i'll have like a project for each of those people and i'll just pump all that in the that's on chat gpt so you can create projects i'll pump all my all the information i have about an individual or whatever maybe or what or even just voice notice um and the voice of the great that function into um the project and then if i ever have a you know did they mention that or or i can't remember something about them i'll go back into the system and and query that but i'll have like 30 different projects about different people um both internally and externally and so jumping back to um the the vc uh so you you've done series b uh so i imagine you've done pre-seed seed series a series b right um we're seeing some occasionally there's these weird kind of seed series a like joint things or like you know companies jumping straight to series A.

19:34But the VC sentiment, obviously they want growth, but they want efficiency. So I imagine that they're pushing this sentiment towards you, as you said, like asking Protex to be an efficient business. Are they also asking to be, like efficiency, are they asking for profitability as well, or probably not quite yet? Not yet. I remember I actually just spoke to a startup recently, trying to give them a bit of advice if if a c if you're in seed or suze and they're asking about profitability like soon i don't think you're thinking about the right the right way they want you to grow and you know your job should be just domination of the market doesn't one way or the other um rather than a case of of saying hey how quickly can we get to get to profitability i think efficiency matters when it comes to um just not wasting money so not being negligent rather than a case of trying to get to profitability.

20:28So do you need to make an hire? Can you look at it? What the Shopify bring out there recently, they said, you know, made something public where they said, if you're coming in looking for a hire, give me a business case first of why you're not doing that with AI. So I don't think they're looking for profitability, but I think the best VCs are looking at companies who are looking at the efficiency metrics. So your gross margins and your revenue per head against how much money you're actually bringing into the company what do you um i'm glad that you brought up the uh the shopify memo or whatever like from from toby um what are your thoughts on that and is this something that uh you also like do internally like speaking to the teams as well yeah like we have a goal internally on efficiencies which includes that of um really getting into the hood of kind of doing and and if it can't that's fine you know know if it needs that's absolutely fine because you're also dependent on what's what's in the market that you can you can shop for um to bring in um so yeah we are looking at that i think most most companies our stage would be silly not to um so we're so we're definitely looking at it but uh it's different for us than it is a huge company on how the building actually we're probably more dynamic in what we can bring in and try you're obviously doing a lot of things right if you've up 300 % year over year growth.

21:50Obviously not many are at that mark and aspire to do so. I'm sure as we're all learning on the job and everybody makes mistakes, companies make mistakes, what would be one or two that you could highlight that is a good learning to share with the audience that you've made, that you've learned from and moved on from? yes between the two businesses um i think is like not moving quick enough to especially to the u.s um with this company moved very quickly to the u.s but even i think it should just go astray especially now it's none of this whole thing of you know i have been the u.s to sell to america you can sell from anywhere um to anywhere now you know um so that was definitely one i think um i think one mistake is especially my last company is really spend the time and this company you know spend the time to hire the people the yt thing is you know hire slow fire fast um we've been really lucky in how we've hired in the past but certainly we've made hires that that weren't right and we probably left it too long to to to notice that um we tend to like you know back the underdog which you have to as a startup that's your nature but i think you need to be realistic on on um what's working and what's not um so that's probably one one mistake we made on on the first point um so you mentioned that you can sell to anywhere from anywhere now right i i agree but um but also not moving to the states fast enough was uh the mistake so what's been the benefit uh for you to you know moving from dublin to boston when you could sell from dublin but what has been the benefit yeah i think i really love american business culture um i think the way i can describe it is you you sell to a european but an american buys from you and that's that's and both work um but americans are very you know transactional in the best sense they're brought up learning business you know from from day zero um and they they ooze that which is awesome to just be around um and some of the europeans are a bit more of the see as an art uh being able to you know go and spend time and talk to lots of stakeholders and lots of stakeholder mapping whereas the us is just let's let's go and get it done um the reason of the move to the us was was because we have about 80 of our of our business is in the us um so we have uh you know some of the major uh global providers of logistics manufacturing in the us are our clients and for two companies um so we built a team out in boston uh to spend time there reason for me being there is is the culture piece as well to make sure that you know you can't just set up remotely out there we've got some fantastic fantastic people we've hired in the us um all super boston a lot of them are super boston as well i'm mad for a good accent were you first on the ground there or did you build it you were first and then built the team first in the boston office but we had people remotely there and then we built it built out there and especially with our our business we need to be on the ground in regards like we like going on to site and we because we sell the faxing warehouses it's very hard to to get that from a zoom call um in comparison to actually standing in the middle of a middle of a warehouse which 10 forklifts almost hitting you is is a lot different and we mentioned the um earlier in the podcast that you you'll be speaking at sassock europe uh this year uh october 14th 15th at the rds next to the pub where you and kieran had a you said the crow was that right crows yeah crows it's right across the road it's with an eye shot of yeah i don't know if i've been in that one i know there's a number of pubs opposite um but uh maybe i've missed that one but um but you'll be at the rds you'll be speaking um do you know yet I know it's three months out, but you know what you'll be speaking about?

25:52I think it's kind of up for grabs a little bit. You know, I'm kind of excited in the sense of what's going to be there. You know, we go to Saz Talk every year. It's always a good time. The events around it are awesome all the time as well. You know, I was in a karaoke bar at 12 a.m. with about eight VCs at one stage. Was that Chris Murphy leading that? No, it wasn't. Who was leading? There was a lot leading it anyway. I know that. um so we had a bit of an x-factor slash american idol go at it with vcs which is a weird weird world to be in um but uh it's uh it's so we're talking about ai but i think a lot about like company growth there's so many mistakes that that that startups have made and i think we're in a new era now where the covid era has kind of passed finally where you have these people raising massive rounds at stupid valuations and they're all dying those those startups and now there's this new kind of new wave of startups that are creeping out using agents and uh i want that and i think we're going to see some really exciting stuff over the next next three four years yeah 100 it's a very exciting uh very exciting time in the world of b2b um any depending on whether you're speaking on the Tuesday or Wednesday, just my advice to you, the night before speaking, don't be in the karaoke bar until 2 or 3 in the morning and let us stray by those VCs.

27:13Maybe unless you've got a term sheet for the next round, but you have to do what you've got to do. But I do know that obviously it's good crack at Sastop because Dublin is a great city and there's lots of evening events and what we'll typically see on the Wednesday morning is a little bit of a slower pace and, you know, some heavy heads with many. We are seeing also, again, I think just, you know, there is more of a trend for health and wellness. And so you see people going to the running clubs and the yogas and stuff and the gyms in the morning before Sastok. But there's still plenty of distractions for the evening and the nightlife and the pubs and the pints.

27:58So, yeah, will be a lot of fun. looking forward to being back there seeing you speak after being an attendee at Sassock and sharing more of your story so yeah very excited for that Dan if people want to reach out to you you know before then after listening to the podcast where's best to find you I'm probably sure not many potential customers are listening to this but any founders that may want to connect yeah but i mean it's always happy to chat and help out um but myself and kieran are pretty pretty uh i feel we're quite pretty generous for our time because we want to be um especially in ireland we like seeing the dublin scene taken off uh which i think it has especially in the last few years seen a lot of awesome companies coming through uh the pipeline but yeah get me on linkedin um dan hobbs as my name should be uh put dan hobbs protex and follow us on our linkedin page we always post some some cool content on it um but if any founders going in and going into a market they're unsure of the best advice we ever got our best not best advice but best kind of comment we ever got was it's a lot easier to think outside the box when you've never been in it um so don't be afraid to kind of tackle opportunities that maybe you're unsure of it's a lot easier to kind of come in with fresh ideas to something that's already there was that from another pitbull song no surprisingly not i think it's ariana i think it's ariana grande actually no um it was uh it was one of our partners in in canada she said it yeah very very cool well um if you want to catch dan at sasot europe dropping some pitbull uh uh inspired advice or just kind of learn from his scaling story then uh um get a ticket to sas stock and you know we'll have a good time and learn from some of the most exciting uh ai and sas companies that are out there uh today but dan uh thanks for being such a great guest on the show looking forward to seeing you in Dublin, maybe having a pint in the Crows if we find it, as you said, opposite the RDS.

29:54But yeah, looking forward to it. And we'll see you in October. Thanks so much, Dan Hobbs, CEO of Protex. Super. Thanks, Alex. Thanks for tuning in to this week's episode of the SaaS Revolution show. I hope you enjoyed it. And if you learned something from it, check out sasdoc.com forward slash events to find all the upcoming SaaSdoc conferences around the world. Want exclusive SaaS content and actionable insights to grow your SaaS? Join our community of over 36 ,000 SaaS founders at sasdoc.com.