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SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Selling Check for $400M, Now Building a $1.5M ARR AI Startup

SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders

Nathan Latka

Entrepreneurship, Business

4.6701 Ratings

🗓️ 6 May 2026

⏱️ 24 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

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/

Transcript

Click on a timestamp to play from that location

0:00.0

I think that was a $360 million acquisition by Intuit in 2019.

0:04.4

Is my timeline right?

0:05.4

Actually, it was close to $400 million. How many millionaires did you make? At least 10. Are you comfortable sharing? What's the largest company pay you? Do you have any million dollar per year accounts? I would say our largest engagement is around $300,000 right now. In Q2 of 2014, when we sold the company to intuit it, we were like

0:22.8

the largest Semenadee, according to the Wall Street, German, by coincidence. Are you comfortable

0:27.2

sharing what you personally took home when you exited into it? Very large audience. I would prefer

0:31.7

not to share that if that's okay. That's totally okay. How many paying customers are you working with

0:36.0

now today at SafeBooks? So we have about 15 paying customers. You have to understand we are selling powerful data and automation platform for the office of the CFO.

0:45.3

You got three million bucks of extra roaming around. I want to invest.

0:49.8

Hey folks, my guest today is Ahikam Kaufman. He is a veteran fintech executive who previously co-founded

0:55.8

check which was acquired by intuit and served an executive at hp and mercury interactive today he's

1:01.0

building safe books AI which uses agentic revenue integrity to autonomously ensure financial data

1:06.5

accuracy for enterprises icombe you ready to take us to the top? Yeah, go for it. All right. That is a

1:11.4

mouthful, but it's important work. Give it to me like a kindergarter. What are you selling today?

1:15.8

What we are basically selling is the ability to understand your financial data cross-system,

1:21.4

validate it, check it, and replace significant manual work, which today is being done by accountants.

1:27.0

One of the challenges in the

1:28.4

office of the CFO is there's a gap between what an accountant is trained to do and what he

1:32.6

needs to do, which is basically check his data across multiple systems in real time, across

1:38.3

structured and unstructured data. And we now using the benefits and power of AI, we can fully automate that work. Let me give, let's play a game here. I'm going to do old and you're going to tell me the new way to do it using your technology. Okay, old way. I do invoices via bill.com. I have a fractional CFO. I pay $3,000 a month. They go into my quick books at the end of each month. They close everything out. They integrate Bill. They integrate my bank accounts, you know, be a plat or salt edger teller. They close the books. That's the old way. The new way is what? Sorry. So that's like a great example, but doesn't fit our ICP. We'll catering to large enterprises, companies, public companies, who need to execute governance across their data.

2:18.2

For the most part, they're not using the platform you mentioned, and they're using a flow of

2:23.4

other systems. And the way they do business and conduct the business, where we currently focus,

2:28.8

which is order to cash and revenue and billing integrity, is very, very cumbersome, manual, and process through multiple

...

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