{"podcast":{"title":"SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders","slug":"saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902","podcast_index_feed_id":46902,"rss_url":"https://nathanlatkathetop.libsyn.com/rss","website_url":"http://getlatka.com","image_url":"https://static.libsyn.com/p/assets/a/9/2/c/a92c13a488d25883e5bbc093207a2619/Master_Template.png","author":"Nathan Latka","episode_count":3086,"summary":"What if you knew data behind the fastest growing SaaS companies today? Each morning join Nathan Latka as he spends 15 minutes interviewing SaaS founders. You'll learn how SaaS CEO's launched their startup and grew it into a real SaaS business. SaaS Founders range from bootstrapped to funded, MVP to 10,000 customers, pre revenue to pre IPO.","last_synced_at":"2026-06-04T04:19:10.512238+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902"},"episode":{"title":"Selling Check for $400M, Now Building a $1.5M ARR AI Startup","slug":"selling-check-for-400m-now-building-a-1-5m-arr-ai-startup","published_at":"2026-05-06T13:00:00+00:00","page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902/selling-check-for-400m-now-building-a-1-5m-arr-ai-startup","show_page_url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902","url":"https://nathanlatkathetop.libsyn.com/selling-check-for-400m-now-building-a-15m-arr-ai-startup","audio_url":"https://podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.libsyn.com/secure/nathanlatkathetop/Ep26_-_SafeBooks.mp3?dest-id=284781","summary":"How do you build a $1.5 million ARR enterprise AI platform after previously selling a fintech startup for nearly $400 million? Ahikam Kaufman is the CEO of SafeBooks AI, an agentic data automation platform for the office of the CFO. You'll learn: - How to charge $125,000 ACVs by pricing against the cost of an accounting headcount. - Why the company raised a $15 million seed round just to build their initial data architecture. - How they landed a $300,000 engagement in their first year of going to market. - The exact strategy Ahikam used to distribute $25 million in retention bonuses during a past acquisition. - Why building a proprietary graph database is the only way to prevent AI hallucinations in finance. - How SafeBooks scaled to 15 paying enterprise customers. - The economics of automating the quote-to-cash process across disparate CRMs and ERPs. - How to manage founder dilution while building a venture-backed tech company. Ahikam is a veteran fintech executive who previously co-founded Check, which he scaled and sold to Intuit in 2014 for nearly $400 million, creating over 10 millionaires in the process. Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/JQA3RX9PsHw Connect with Ahikam: https://safebooks.ai/ Connect with Nathan: https://founderpath.com/","meta_description":"How do you build a $1.5 million ARR enterprise AI platform after previously selling a fintech startup for nearly $400 million? Ahikam Kaufman is the CEO o…","key_points":[],"chapters":[],"topics":[],"duration_seconds":1458,"processing_state":"not_requested","actions":[{"name":"request_transcript","method":"POST","url":"https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902/episodes/selling-check-for-400m-now-building-a-1-5m-arr-ai-startup/transcription-requests","description":"Idempotently request low-priority transcript generation for this episode."},{"name":"read_markdown","method":"GET","url":"https://stenobird.com/podcast/saas-interviews-with-ceos-startups-founders-46902/selling-check-for-400m-now-building-a-1-5m-arr-ai-startup.md","description":"Read the agent-friendly Markdown representation of this episode resource."}]}}