With regular press and an impressive funding round, Upverter co-founder and CEO Zak Homuth admitted that it looks the company is fairly well-off from an outsider’s perspective.
However, like all startups, Y-Combinator alumni Upverter has had a few “near-death experiences” from its inception — when the team thought that six weeks worth of burn was a lot — to today. At a recent #TechTO, Homuth described surviving a lawsuit from an American company suing for a feature Upverter had built for a client, rejecting a $20 million acquisition in the midst of raising a round that ended up falling through, and racking up $80,000 in credit card debt for payroll.
As recently as the fall of 2015, after running out of money from the SR&ED and IRAP programs, Upverter turned to its users in a last-ditch effort to raise money. “And for the last three months, we’ve been a real profitable company,” Homuth said. “If there’s a moral to this story, it’s ‘don’t die’.”
Watch the whole talk below:
Related: Upverter pitches GitHub for hardware on #TheDisruptors