How Larry Kim Used Founderpath to Pivot Customers.ai and Hit $2M+ Revenue

Customers.ai, called MobileMonkey until March 2023, is Larry Kim’s company that identifies anonymous website visitors and automates outbound marketing for businesses. Before its $4.99 million Series A in April 2023, Kim used Founderpath revenue financing, matched with an equal amount of his own money, to buy about a year of runway for the pivot away from Messenger chatbots without pricing an equity round while growth had stalled, as he described it in a September 2023 interview.

Key Takeaways

• Kim said in Founderpath’s September 2023 interview that “initially it was about a 400K loan,” at a time when MobileMonkey had over $1 million in revenue; Founderpath’s homepage lists the deal as $572,000 of revenue financing (October 2026).
• Kim said he put in an equal amount of his own capital, which gave the company almost a full year to build and prove the new product (September 2023 interview).
• Customers.ai announced its new name, replacing MobileMonkey, on March 10, 2023, and a $4.99 million Series A led by ScOp Venture Capital on April 5, 2023 (Customers.ai’s blog and press release).
• Kim confirmed that Customers.ai passed $2 million in ARR in 2022 and said that it paid off the Founderpath financing after the Series A (September 2023 interview).
• Kim called the rate high, comparable to credit card rates, but said tens of thousands of dollars of interest bought what he estimated as tens of millions of dollars of enterprise value (September 2023 interview).

Who Larry Kim is and what Customers.ai does

Kim founded WordStream, which makes software for managing Google and Facebook ads. Gannett announced on May 10, 2018 that it would buy WordStream for $130 million in cash, net of cash acquired, plus up to $20 million in earnouts tied to revenue targets, and Customers.ai’s profile of Kim gives the price as $150 million and the close as July 2018.

He started MobileMonkey in 2018 (Kim in the interview; Customers.ai’s 2023 release gives the same year). In the post announcing the new name, dated March 10, 2023, Kim wrote that MobileMonkey began by helping B2C businesses use Facebook Messenger chat automations to find customers. He told Founderpath that Customers.ai is the same company doing business under a new name (watch at 1:16).

The product has moved since the pivot. The April 2023 release called Customers.ai an AI-powered sales outreach automation platform for business-to-consumer companies. As of October 2026, its homepage sells website visitor identification for ecommerce brands that use Klaviyo, and its profile of Kim describes a visitor identification and remarketing platform.

Why MobileMonkey stalled

Kim told Founderpath that MobileMonkey went from zero to about $1 million in ARR in under a year and was a million-dollar ARR company by 2019 (watch at 7:51). Then growth stopped. Building on Facebook meant a product manager there could switch off features MobileMonkey depended on, and policy changes made the business line hard to run. His March 2023 post says the same: Meta was calling the shots on what the company could offer and could kill popular features at any time.

Revenue got stuck at about $1 million, and when the pandemic hit the company lost its small business customers (watch at 8:51). Kim said cash in the bank fell to a couple of hundred thousand dollars at one point.

Why a founder who could self-fund used outside capital

Kim could have covered the gap himself. His reason for not doing it alone was about price, not access to money:

Keep in mind, I’m independently wealthy, so I can put in as much money into this as I want to. The challenge is, it’s like you really do want to have a neutral person putting that in to price these rounds.

Larry Kim, founder and CEO, Customers.ai, Founderpath interview, September 2023 (watch at 9:09)

He said he had not tested the equity market. He worried the company was in between, not a failure but not yet a Series A business, and the choices were a punitive down round, a convertible note or whatever his existing investors would pay (watch at 11:38). Venture debt was not on his radar either: he had taken it before, from what he recalled as “Square One bank or something like that,” and remembered warrants, months of process and lenders who wanted to meet the founder and go through the books (watch at 19:40). He met Founderpath’s Nathan Latka at a conference in Toronto, received an email about the product, and decided to try it.

The Founderpath financing, as the sources describe it

No term sheet for this deal has been published. The table lists what Kim said on camera and what Founderpath lists on its own site. They are first-party accounts by the borrower and the lender, and they differ on the amount.

Term	What the source says	Source
Amount	“Initially it was about a 400K loan”	Kim, September 2023 interview (12:40)
Amount	$572,000	Founderpath homepage deal list, October 2026
Product	Revenue financing; Kim calls it a loan	Founderpath homepage; Kim
Revenue at the time	Over $1 million	Kim (12:40)
Founder money alongside	An equal amount of Kim’s own capital	Kim (12:56)
Runway bought	Almost a full year	Kim (13:05)
Time to fund	About five business days, start to end, the first time	Kim (14:32)
Rate	Not published; Kim: high, like credit card rates, but unsecured	Kim (14:49)
Interest paid	Tens of thousands of dollars over under a year	Kim (15:44)
Repayment	Paid off after the Series A	Kim (15:57)
Date	Not published

Kim described how he sized it and what it paid for:

Initially it was about a 400K loan. We had over a million in revenue … and then I put an equal amount of capital in, just to gross that up a little bit, and that provided almost a full year of time to fully develop and show progress against this new ICP and new use case.

Larry Kim, founder and CEO, Customers.ai, Founderpath interview, September 2023 (watch at 12:40)

He liked the process. In his words, you connect Stripe or Recurly, your bank and QuickBooks, and Founderpath gives you a quick and dispassionate score of the business (watch at 13:52). Asked what he liked least, he named the rate, which he compared to credit card rates, and added that he understood why, since it was unsecured.

Founderpath’s terms today may differ from this deal’s. Its revenue financing page lists, as of October 2026, a discount rate from 7%, up to $1.5M per round, and no equity, warrants or personal guarantee. MobileMonkey’s own rate and term have not been published.

What the runway paid for: the pivot to Customers.ai

About two years into MobileMonkey, Kim said, the team decided the Facebook partnership was not working and moved to sales outreach automation for B2C companies: identifying website visitors, giving the site owner their email and contact details, and running outreach to them (watch at 9:39). The interface stayed the same drag and drop sequence of automations, but it sent email instead of Messenger and Instagram messages.

The old product left an asset. Asked where Customers.ai’s data came from, Kim said MobileMonkey’s free software had been installed on hundreds of thousands of pages and websites, which left a significant amount of data behind (watch at 2:45). His rename post gives the reason for the new name: a company selling B2C sales outreach under the name MobileMonkey just confused people.

What happened next: $2 million ARR, the Series A and the payoff

Asked when the company broke $2 million in ARR, Kim answered last year, meaning 2022 (watch at 17:06). On April 5, 2023, Customers.ai announced a $4.99 million Series A led by ScOp Venture Capital, with New York Angels and Beyond Angels, and said Kevin O’Connor, the DoubleClick founder and a ScOp managing partner, would join its board; Pulse 2.0 reported the same round on April 10, 2023.

After the round the company paid off Founderpath. Kim said it made no sense to keep millions in the bank earning about 4% while paying interest on the financing (watch at 15:57). Latka asked whether paying off early was easy; in the recording, it comes down to two emails and then a wire.

In the interview, published in September 2023, he gave these figures for the company: about 40 full-time staff, a third of them engineers (watch at 18:54); burning less than a dollar for every net new dollar of ARR added; over two years of runway; customers in the mid hundreds in its core segment plus over a thousand self-serve accounts; and more than one customer paying over $100,000 a year (watch at 23:31). His target for the end of 2023 was ARR in the mid to high single-digit millions. That was a goal, not a reported result.

Kim’s own verdict on the financing:

If you think about where we were able to get on that runway and what the alternative would have been, I think that this is a no-brainer, that this generated an incredible outcome, probably tens of millions in enterprise valuation, and significantly a better outcome than, call it, tens of thousands of dollars of interest that I paid over a period of under a year.

Larry Kim, founder and CEO, Customers.ai, Founderpath interview, September 2023 (watch at 15:18)

Customers.ai has not published a valuation, so the tens of millions is Kim’s estimate, not a reported figure.

What founders can take from Customers.ai

1. Fund the pivot without pricing the company at its low point. Kim’s concern was not cash but who would set the price of a round while growth was flat.
2. Size the money to one clear test. He paired the financing with an equal amount of his own capital to buy about a year to show progress on a new customer profile.
3. Count the cost in dollars against the dilution it avoids. Kim weighed tens of thousands of dollars of interest against selling equity in a stall. Compare offers on the same cash and the same horizon before deciding.
4. Plan how the financing ends. Customers.ai repaid it once a priced round left it with more cash than it needed to hold while paying interest.

Two other Founderpath customers used non-dilutive capital before or instead of equity: see the ContactMonkey case study and the Badger Maps case study.

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Sources and method

We checked every fact on this page on October 30, 2026. The financing facts come from Larry Kim’s own words in Founderpath’s September 2023 interview and from Founderpath’s homepage, so they are first-party accounts by the borrower and the lender rather than independent verification; each is attributed where it appears. Quotes are taken from the interview’s captions, with filler words removed and cuts marked. Company facts come from Customers.ai’s own posts and release, with Pulse 2.0 for the Series A and Gannett’s filing for the WordStream sale. An earlier version of this page put the WordStream sale at $200 million, called the Series A a 10x higher valuation, and quoted Kim in words he did not say; those claims are removed because no source supports them.

• His First Exit Was for $200m, His Next Startup Hit $1m Then Almost Failed, Now 100% Has YoY Growth, Founderpath interview with Larry Kim, September 4, 2023 (the title’s $200 million is the interviewer’s figure; Gannett’s filing gives $130 million plus up to $20 million)
• Founderpath homepage, deal list, read October 30, 2026
• MobileMonkey Is Now Customers.ai!, Larry Kim, March 10, 2023
• Customers.ai Raises $4.99M in Series A, PR Newswire, April 5, 2023, and Pulse 2.0, April 10, 2023
• Gannett to acquire WordStream, Gannett press release filed with the SEC, May 10, 2018
• Larry Kim, Customers.ai, read October 30, 2026

Customers.ai and Founderpath FAQ

What is Customers.ai?

Customers.ai is Larry Kim’s company that identifies anonymous website visitors and automates outbound marketing. As of October 2026 its homepage sells website visitor identification for ecommerce brands that use Klaviyo. It was called MobileMonkey until March 2023.

Is Customers.ai the same company as MobileMonkey?

Yes. Kim announced the new name on March 10, 2023, and told Founderpath that Customers.ai is the same company doing business under a new name after it moved from Messenger chatbots to sales outreach automation.

Who is the CEO of MobileMonkey?

Larry Kim founded MobileMonkey in 2018 and is the founder and CEO of Customers.ai, the company’s name since March 2023. He also founded WordStream, which Gannett agreed to buy in 2018.

How much funding did Customers.ai get from Founderpath?

Kim said in a September 2023 Founderpath interview that it was initially about a $400K loan, matched by an equal amount of his own money. Founderpath’s homepage lists the MobileMonkey deal as $572,000 of revenue financing. No public source explains the difference, and the date and terms have not been published.

Why did Larry Kim use Founderpath instead of his own money?

Kim said he could afford to fund the company himself but wanted a neutral party involved rather than setting the price of a round while growth was flat. Venture debt was not on his radar because of the warrants and months of process he remembered from an earlier bank loan.

How much did Customers.ai raise in its Series A?

Customers.ai announced a $4.99 million Series A on April 5, 2023, led by ScOp Venture Capital with New York Angels and Beyond Angels. Kim said the company paid off the Founderpath financing after that round.

How much was WordStream sold for?

Gannett announced on May 10, 2018 that it would buy WordStream for $130 million in cash plus up to $20 million in earnouts. Customers.ai’s profile of Kim gives the price as $150 million and the close as July 2018.