How Kadence Pivoted From Wireless Charging to 130% Net Dollar Retention

What was the highest valuation you raised at at Charify?

40,000,000 US at the time.

And was that 2021 time frame? Or

No. It was 2019.

How diluted were you at that point? Were you under 20%?

I was down to about 15% of the business at that point.

You were around 1,000,000 of revenue. Can I ask when you broke your first maybe 4 or 5,000,000 of revenue? What year that was?

Yeah. We broke that early last year.

Are you comfortable sharing where you're today in terms of run rate?

We've grown triple percentage digits since then.

Oh, wow. Okay. So, like, that would put you at, like, 15,000,000 AR today, somewhere in that range?

We don't talk too publicly about it, but...

Hey, folks. My guest today is Dan Bladen. He's the cofounder and CEO of Kadence with a k, a workplace management operations system that coordinates people, places, and projects to improve hybrid work. He previously founded Chargify, a wireless charging company. Dan, you ready to take us to the Let's go. Alright. So talk to us real quick about Kadence. When I hear that quick buy, what I think is, okay. When I go to WeWork and I need to book a room, they're powering that that transaction with your software. Is that right?

Kind of. But imagine instead of WeWork, it was a company's own offices. So we work with about 600 WeWork. 600 companies around the world. Think Boeing, Bombardier, Rolls Royce, Porsche, Revolut, helping them manage their own workplaces. You're absolutely right. Many of those companies want to have a similar WeWork experience for their own corporate real estate, but inside of their own offices.

Okay. So I'm a... I'm here on your website. I'm a I'm a sales rep at Cargar or GWI at their main office, wherever they're located. I need to get on a call. I need a quick side room quickly. I log into the app that's powered by Kadence. I find an open room. I book it it for an hour.

That's right. Yeah. So you can be a company like Willis Towel Watson that works with us. Right? They've gone from 10.1 to 4,700,000 square feet. So now that everybody's not in the office every single day, though that's obviously a varies difference across lots of different companies, how they deploy hybrid, but they've gone from 10.1, 4,700,000 square feet, roughly saving about $500,000,000 a year in annual leasing costs. And they use Kadence to coordinate the people and how they meet inside of those offices.

Makes a ton of sense. Just for clarity, again, I'm on this on this screen right now. This little orange desk right here, in the old days, it might have been like, this is Joe's desk. Joe's the only one that works at this desk. But now Joe might only come in two days a week, so it's open. That real estate's open. The other five days a week, you might put Sam or or Sylvia at the desk on Thursday and Friday, something like that.

That's correct. Yeah. So lots of companies have what we call structured hybrid work, so they might be in one, two, three days a week. Other people might be in every single day. Kadence works with all of the above.

Got it. Okay. This makes sense. Before we get your backstory here, I don't want to bury the lead in terms of how you price today. These customers that are paying you today, how do you charge? I see it looks like it's a high touch model. I don't see a checkout with credit card here on the website, so you must be higher ACV. How do you bill?

Yeah. So it's $48 a user a year is what we start at. And that goes all the way up to about $80 a user a year, depending on what modules you use from us. When we started the business, we pivoted from this wireless charging company called Chargeify. We looked at this space and like, hey, There's gonna be a ton of corporate real estate adjustments over the next few years. Nathan, it's crazy. There's $22,000,000,000,000 of corporate real

estate in The US alone. And so what we wanted to do was fix our pricing not to square foot, but to the people that use that space, which was a very new model at the time.

That's interesting. You're seeing in the age of AI today a lot people saying the seat based model is dead. You would say, no. We are literally a seat based model, literally sitting a butt in a seat. You're fine.

Yeah. To be honest, we're figuring all that stuff out right now. We're not seeing any retention problems in our in our cohorts right now. But we obviously got a lot of agentic opportunities in front of us, particularly around a product that we call SpaceOx, which is doing a lot of the work and a lot of the grudge work that our facilities leaders are having to do day in, out.

Let's talk more about your new AI tool towards the later of the episode. I'll come back to that. But just to confirm, you said on average, it's about 50 per user per year?

That's correct. Yeah.

Okay. Interesting. And are most... Like, if a startup is listening right now with 10 people and they have a very small office space in Austin, Texas, are they a good fit for you or do you require minimums?

They're not really a good fit for us. We do have a product called Kadence Flex, which does allow you to get access to about 15,000 co working locations around the world. So you mentioned the WeWork's, the Regis's, all those kind of industrious places. And so, yeah, if you're a 10 person company, you don't have an office, but you need to grab space, you can use the Kadence Flex product to get access to about 15,000 workplaces. And

one of our investors is a guy called Frederic Cores, Co Founder of Okta, and he was like, Dan, my friend, it's gonna take a long time for us to get to a 100 in ARR if we're

just What was your what was your ACV back then with the SMB? Quantify that. It's about it's about five k per year. Yeah. Okay. So 200 customers, 5 k per year. Obviously, you guys come back into revenue then. What year was

This was 2023.

Interesting. Okay. So 2023, that's when you break like a million of revenue, but it's 200 customers paying $5 a year a pop and you're going, I don't wanna slug this out for the next ten years.

Yeah. That's right. That's right.

Yeah. Don't obviously share your customer name, but can you share the largest contract you have today? Do you have any million dollar customers?

No million dollar customers yet. We've got a couple that are pretty close in our pipe, so I appreciate your prayers and best wishes for that in the coming quarter. But no, our biggest customers are banks, quite honestly, particularly neo banks. So we work with Revolut, we work with Starling out of The UK, we work with folks like Dow Jones here in The US as well. So those are our larger customers.

Interesting. Okay. We know where the company is today. Take me back to the origin story here. If we go back to your LinkedIn and look at sort of where you've been and how you got here, start off at St. Paul's it looks like, technology guide and tech stars. Walk us through this.

Yeah. So I started my career at 18 year old. I always grew up building tech. My grandfather designed the launch mechanism for fighter jets on aircraft carriers for The US and British Navy. So I was kind of really interested tinkering with things as a kid. I built my own version of dropbox.com at home in my toy cupboard as a a young teenager. And then, yeah, went and worked for church for five years straight out of school

where I did music there. And then I became head of technology. I did a theology degree as well during that time just to make it even more eclectic. And then I founded a business called ChargerFi. It was an IoT company back in the IoT boom, which more felt like pilot purgatory at the time. And ChargerFire was a wireless charging business. The idea was, hey, we could put wireless chargers, you know, there's little induction pads, we could

put those on coffee shops, tables, restaurants, hotel bedside tables, office desks and meeting rooms. The dream was to build Cisco, but to build it for wireless power. We had intellectual property, I like to say, from phones to drones. So anything that moved that had a battery, we wanted to wirelessly charge. And so we did the cloud management platform for wireless charging. We raised about $17,500,000 from Intel and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. Fast forward eight years, the pandemic

struck strikes three months after moving my wife and three kids under five to the Bay Area, and no one cares about our wireless charging business anymore.

Wow. Okay. So what happened? It just lost for everybody shut it down?

Yeah. I mean, so we didn't shut it down. We had tens of customers at the time. Still wasn't anywhere near, like, 1,000,000 in ARR. We were always the anointed winner of a market that was inevitable but never actually happened. So it felt like a vitamin, not a pain killer, if I'm honest with you, Nathan, which is very different to Kadence today. I lost a bit of hair doing it, but it was fun. We had... Our biggest

line of business was with offices. So we're fortunate. Accenture were customers, Okta were customers, Uber were piloting with us. And this was the time of agile working was a phrase. So, basically, you could pick up your laptop and work anywhere in the office. And so Kadence or Chargify rather, we have a swear jar every time I misname it. And you could wirelessly recharge all around the office. Right? And so this is March 2020 when we will

get that text message saying shelter in place. Pandemic strikes, NASDAQ come to us and NASDAQ say, hey, we're going to go from three buildings to one building. We're going to reduce in Manhattan. We're going to reduce the number of desks we have by 49%. Hey, charge ify. Your cloud management platform for all these wireless chargers that are gonna be on all of our desks, can we ditch the wireless charging part of it and just use your

software to manage our move to hybrid? And Nathan had three very quick thoughts. I was like, man, that sounds boring. I don't wanna build desk booking software was thought number one. I was like, I'm a deep tech founder. I don't wanna build desk booking software. Number two, I was fascinated by the TAM. This TAM is just absolutely colossal. There's a lot of desks and a lot of expensive offices. And then three, I was fascinated by all the moving parts of hybrid work. Who should be where, when, and and why? So, yeah, we pivoted the company and essentially reset it.

Oh, interesting. So the cap table Kadence today, you've carried that over from the the charge by cap the $17,500,000 you raised that there is to some degree still on the cap table today cadence.

Yeah. To some degree. We we went through a lot to change things up, and it's quite a journey for for probably for another longer podcast. But it's one of the main things I'm trotted out to for portfolio companies now. Hey, how do you pivot? What I think you're getting to, Nathan, is that, you know, we had a lot of hair on the deal at the time is probably the way VCs thought about it. Right? We... Kadence

was up and coming. It was growing incredibly quickly, but nobody wanted to invest in the cap table of ChargerFi. On the other hand, I was like, hey, these investors have fed my kids for eight years now. I'm not gonna just ditch them. And so we had lot of investors saying, hey, new new investors. We wanna come into Kadence, just ditch them, start this afresh on the side, but that didn't feel like winning the right way to

me. So we... I did over a 100 investors to get the round done. I had to say, no, I'm not going to go that way to a lot of people. And then we got there in the in the end in a way that I can be proud of when I'm a little bit older and look back on.

Guys, remember, I am not just a YouTuber. I'm investing in my third fund. We've deployed $250,000,000 into 550 software companies so far. Again, at founderpath.com. If you're interested in capital, I would love to cut you a check because I know you're investing in your education. You watch my show. So sign up at founderpath.com and when you get the onboarding email, I reply and I see all those just reply and say, Nathan, I found you through Youtube

and I'll make sure to prioritize you. I would love to cut you a check. Check out founderpath.com. I wanna unpack this, Dan. I'm a beg you to teach us because the majority of founders end up in the exact position you're in. We only read about the big exits, but everyone else, which is the majority, end up in companies maybe they've raised for that they realize it's just not gonna grow. They... You stuck at it longer than

most do. You stuck at it for nine years. Most quit after three or four. But the reason they stay stuck is because they've raised money. They have money in the bank. They've got investors they don't wanna let down, and they just don't know what to do. You figure out a way sort of out of this. So a couple of follow-up questions there. At Chargeify, what was the... And I'm not asking this because I care about valuations. I just wanna get the context of the switch and change. What was the highest valuation you raised at at Chargeify?

About 40 US. Yeah. 40,000,000.

And was that twenty twenty twenty one time frame?

No. It's twenty twenty twenty. Yeah. Sorry. 2019.

2019. Okay. 40,000,000 valuation. Okay. Then Nasdaq reaches out. COVID hits. You and your kids move. You're on the West Coast. You have this new product idea. Kadence comes along. There's investor interest. What do you do? Do you Yeah. Like, how much did you raise for Kadence, and how'd you treat the old cap table?

Yeah. So I went to our board in the summer of twenty twenty. I said, hey. We've got two two two decisions we can go. We can either go down from 30 to five people and sit in a cave for three years and hope that wireless charging comes back, or we can go after this new thing. It wasn't even called hybrid back then, Nathan. It was called like flex work or something. No one even come up with

a name and even the name is slightly odd now to me anyway, hybrid work. But anyway, and everyone said, let's go for it. Like, let's catch this wave. So the board were aligned behind it. One of our board members at the time was the founder of Aruba Networks, an amazing guy called Keerti Melkote, sold to HPE for 3,000,000,000. And then one of my one of my advisers, mentors, a guy called, who's the cofounder of of TechCrunch. She's

a Brit. He's been here for thirty years in the Valley too. He's like, hey. You're never gonna get your next round done for the reasons that you've mentioned. And so I went to my board at the time and said, hey. This is gonna be really difficult to get this round done because the investors that are coming in are gonna want to see me north of 30, 40% ownership again. They're gonna want it to look like a seed stage cat table.

How dare... Were you at that point? Were you under

20%? About 15% of the business at that point. And so, yeah, I went to them and proposed, hey. We're gonna have... The way to protect everybody's ownership, keep you guys all in, is to do an options increase. So that's that's what we did. In the end 02/20 DocuSigns, we did a Delaware, we did a Delaware flip from The UK to The US, we had a UK government COVID bounce back loan note as well that we pivoted...

That we flipped over to the US entity. It was a whole deal. This was now August 22 by the time we got it done. But you know what, Nathan? It served me really well in the end. We ended up having three people wanting to lead that kind of new seed round.

Okay. And so, guys, a lesson for you guys listening right now, right, in case you didn't follow what Dan did, he basically brought in the new investors, but he said, look, I'm so deluded and his employees. He's probably looking out for his employees to charge by two. They're also deluded. Anyone sticking. He needed to reset the... It's called the ESOP pool, the option pool. I don't know if I can get Dan comfortable enough to share what he reset it out, but hopefully Dan said something like, guys, look, I'll take on the 10,000,000, but I need to establish a 30% ESOP pool post close and immediately reissue 50% of that. So maybe 15 out to, you know, current go forward management. Dan, am I sort of... Is this sort of the right

tactic We for had... The most aggressive we had was... And by the way, this wasn't me pushing that. This was like the market saying, you need to look like a seed stage cap table for optics, for future investors, for making sure that it all looks like you guys are still in this.

Interesting. I wanna end on the last four or five minutes here talking about your product, AI, your go to market motion. But since we're on the cap table question, just finish up. Have you raised any more at Kadence today? Just fill out the rest of rounds.

Yeah. So we did a series a last year in the summer of $20,000,000 in August last year.

Okay. And where where are companies... There's a lot of people wondering, we're not trading at $20.21 valuation multiples anymore. You just did one last year in 2025. Without sharing your actual valuation. Can you give a general sense of ARR multiples you saw out there?

Mid teens. Okay. Yeah, where we're at the time because year over year growth is really strong. I think what's super interesting right now and what I'm focused on is quality of revenue. Obviously, everybody wants growth rate, but I think, you know, whatever the phrase is, the cows are going to come home on growth rates versus the quality of revenue later this year. I think quality revenue is going to go back into vogue, back in vogue. So

we've got absolutely stellar net dollar retentions. You talked about land and expand. Many of our customers land with Kadence in one geo or one location and then grow from there. And so not only we got the natural quote unquote seat expansion, but we also have now got the multiproduct expansion too.

We're recording this year in March 2026 to get a good sort of answer on net dollar attention. If you go back and look at the cohort you signed up in March of last year, 2025, what is their net dollar attention as of today? Are we talking, like, 120, 130%?

North of 130%. Yeah.

That's really impressive. Yeah. I'd say world class is like one forty, one fifty. So that... Wow. That's that's congratulations.

Super sticky software. I mean, you're signing a seven to 10 corporate, you know, lease for your office. This this product becomes a system of record for what's happening and who's happening in your office. And so, yeah, it's incredibly, incredibly sticky.

And you pivoted from the SMB motion back in 2023. You were around 1,000,000 of revenue. Can I ask when you broke your first maybe $45,000,000 of revenue? What year that was?

Yeah. We broke that early last year.

Okay. Early twenty twenty five. And are you comfortable sharing where you're at today in terms of run rate?

We've we've grown by triple percentage digits since then.

Oh, wow. Okay. So, like, that would put you at, like, 15,000,000 AR today, somewhere in that range?

We don't talk too publicly about it, but, yeah, we're in and around that range.

You've been super transparent, so I want you to have the option... You know, the option to talk more about your products here, go on a go forward basis. So tell us... I told you I'd come back to... I think you called it your space ops AI tool. Tell us how you're thinking about AI and growth going forward.

Yeah. So as you know, the way the world works has changed, Trevor. Nine out of 10 companies are now in some sort of hybrid modality that might mean one day in the office a month all the way through to four and a half, five days a week in the office. What we've discovered as we've gone up market, Nathan, is just how much more product we need to ship to secure repeatably 6 figure deals. Right? And so

many of our customers not... Don't just want desk booking, room bookings, Facebooking, visitor management. They want move management. I've got 40 people starting in Sydney on Monday next week. Where do they all sit? When do their desks get moved? Who are they in adjacency to? I've got to shut down an office in Lehi, Utah next month. How do I reallocate all those people in these resources? How do I scenario plan for who's going to be where

and when? What's my cost savings? So scenario planning, move management, and what the industry calls stack planning, so who's on what floor? These are all huge pieces of work. And so what we've done is we basically built agents around this work that enables our VP workplace that we typically work with to go from a three month window for getting this kind of stuff done to about quote unquote a three day period to get this stuff done.

We joined our first customer with SpaceOps was the HR company, Bamboo HR, quote, unquote, I can't believe the power of Kadence. So we've really, really enabled that team to have a ton of leverage in their workflows to look after thousands and thousands of people.

And we're seeing your product tour as you're giving the overview here, but it sounds like this scenario planning here that we're currently on is what you're referring to.

Yeah. That's right. And one of the things that we're excited about as well is looking at peer indexing as well. So we've got so we've got about 10,000 teams that use Kadence. So we can say, hey, for finance in London, this company size,

comparison? What does your hybrid cadence look like in comparison? And then yeah, here we were the first to market with what we call a concierge Kadence AI inside of the workplace in the summer of twenty three. And so basically you can use this for anything you might use an EA or assistant for inside of the workplace. Hey, who's going be in? Grab me a desk, register a visitor. What meeting rooms are available today on the 5th Floor all through AI here?

As we wrap up, there's a lot of people saying that pricing models for tools that are built on sort of agents or agent swarms, especially legacy models. So would say Kadence was a legacy model. You're now really aggressively investing in AI and these underlying agents to help your folks be more productive. People are saying we're going to shift to more of a jobs to be done pricing. So a jobs to be done example for Kadence might be number of booked desks per day instead of how many heads do you have using the platform. Is that an internal debate right now or no?

Yeah, don't I think anybody knows in our industry right now, Nathan. What I do know for sure is that, CFOs like to know what they're gonna be spending each year, and they don't like to have an uncapped limit.

Wrap us up here in the last sixty seconds. Go to market motion. How do scale from 600 customers to a thousand customers? It doesn't look like SEO is a big focus looking at your Ahrefs account. How are you finding new customers today?

Lots of events, Nathan. So, yeah, most of our customers aren't googling us anymore. Back at the start of the pandemic, it was desk booking Microsoft Teams like that was like the keyword that we defended to the hill. That's not the case so much anymore. It's much more events, dinners, social content. That's where we're seeing larger ACVs coming in.

All right. Well, hey, if people want to follow your story, where's the best place for them to follow you online, Dan? LinkedIn and Wales.

Dan Bladen. That's the best place to follow what we're doing in the future work.

Guys, he launched after working at a church for a while out of college, he founded Chargeify back in... Call it... Or before 2019, ultimately raised it a 40,000,000 valuation, 30 FTEs, but he was diluted down to a call it under 15% at that point and realized, you know what, man? We gotta pivot this business. Moved his three kids and wife to the Bay Area around 2022, still at about $1,000,000 of AR with a bunch of sort

of small customers and eventually said, know what, we got to pivot. He worked at his current cap table, raised a $10,000,000 new round, reset the ESOP pool so it really looked like a true seed round and pivoted to a brand new business model at Kadence. Kadence is what enables you to help plan your workspace in this age of hybrid work and world's number one workplace operations platform today serving over 600 customers, average new ACVs call it

in the $50,000 range, a 10X increase over five ks from 2023. Doing north of 10,000,000. What does he say north of $10,000,000 of revenue broke 4 or 5,000,000 in early twenty twenty five. And what he says, I love is quality of revenue is really high. 130% net dollar retention as he continues to invest in products to help folks like NASDAQ plan their hybrid workspaces. Dan, thanks for taking us to top.

That means I'm meeting you, Nathan.

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