How TitanX Hit $9.7M ARR After Buying IP for $200K
Top Founders
Nathan Latka
4.6 • 702 Ratings
🗓️ 25 March 2026
⏱️ 16 minutes
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Summary
How do you turn $200K into a $9.7M ARR SaaS company with a $100M valuation by buying IP instead of building from scratch?
Joey Gilkey is the founder of TitanX, a sales intelligence platform generating $9.7M ARR after launching in 2024. The company serves enterprise sales teams with contracts ranging from $24K to $250K annually, with its largest deals exceeding seven figures.
What makes TitanX interesting is its approach to building a moat. Instead of competing as another data provider, the company sits between data sources and execution layers, using proprietary signals and AI to improve outbound performance. The business scales through high ACV sales, expansion revenue, and strategic acquisitions.
You'll learn:
- How Joey turned a $200K IP purchase into a $100M company
- Why buying IP can be faster than building SaaS products
- How TitanX structures pricing from $24K to $250K ACV
- The role of proprietary data in building defensibility
- How inbound, outbound, and referrals drive pipeline
- Why expansion revenue is core to growth strategy
- How acquisitions accelerate ARR growth
- The credit-based pricing model and consumption dynamics
- How TitanX uses AI to improve outbound performance
- The logic behind raising $27M and taking secondary cash
Joey started in enterprise sales before launching multiple businesses and eventually betting his entire net worth on TitanX. After acquiring the IP in 2023, he shut down a profitable services business to focus fully on SaaS, scaling from zero to $9.7M ARR in under two years.
This episode is for SaaS founders thinking about capital allocation, high-ACV sales, and building defensible data products. It's a practical breakdown of how to scale quickly using acquisition, pricing, and distribution strategy.
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/mxiCodnXo6U?si=zebVllHlOY7UlVqO
Connect with Joey: https://titanx.io/
Connect with Nathan: https://founderpath.com/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | What did you spend on the IP? |
| 0:01.1 | 1,200 grand up front, 800 grand seller note. |
| 0:03.9 | What's revenue today at Titan X? Today, we're sitting at the time of recording this. We're at 9.7 million error. What's your largest customer pay you per year today? One just expanded to 406, ARR, three-year contracting. Oh, wow. Okay, so it's a $1.2 million contract. Did you get creative on this acquisition? was a $10 million acquisition, a million up front? |
| 0:21.7 | How did you structure it? |
| 0:22.6 | Yeah, it was a $13 million acquisition. |
| 0:24.6 | We put $7 million. Okay, so it's a $1.2 million contract. Did you get creative on this acquisition? What is it? 10 million acquisition, a million up front? |
| 0:21.7 | How did you structure it? |
| 0:22.6 | Yeah, it was a $13 million acquisition. |
| 0:24.5 | We put $7 million up front. |
| 0:25.9 | We went to growth equity. |
| 0:26.9 | So we raised $27 million and then $10 million in our pocket as secondary cash. Zoom, if Henry Shuckett's infam info came and offered you $200 million all cash today to sell the company, do you take it? |
| 0:36.9 | Hey, folks, my guest today is Joey Gilke. |
| 0:39.4 | He's a serial entrepreneur and the founder of Titan X, a sales intelligence platform that created the phone intent category. He famously bet his entire net worth on the company, shutting down three other cash flowing businesses to focus on a proprietary model that predicts who will actually answer your cold call. Under his leadership, it's growing to millions of revenue and they just recently raised a series a joey you ready to take to the top |
| 0:58.0 | let's do it brother all right so tell me first how did you get into this space are you an ex sales guy or |
| 1:03.0 | when did you launch yeah man i've been in the enterprise sales world my whole career so started off in |
| 1:07.7 | the fortune world okay so tell me about that when did you acquire that piece of IP? What year? That was August of 2023, and I acquired it for a different reason that it turned |
| 1:17.8 | into. So I seemed like a brilliant, more just like a brilliant idiot. Thought how I was going to use it was |
| 1:24.1 | I was going to build it for my fractional business. It was going to be the moat around that services company we started using it in like a licensing model at the fractional company |
| 1:32.3 | and then I realized pretty quickly that it was it was like dark magic that was heavily expensive |
| 1:38.0 | and very slow and if I can get my hands on and I can throw money at R&D and optimize it plus I |
| 1:43.3 | knew where a lot of the bodies lived when it comes to where does unique |
| 1:46.4 | telco data live and fraud detection data and all that kind of stuff. |
... |
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