Tive Hit $100M Revenue After a Down Round and $10K in the Bank
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Nathan Latka
4.6 • 702 Ratings
🗓️ 11 June 2026
⏱️ 23 minutes
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Summary
How do you go from $10,000 left in the bank and a down round to $100 million in annual revenue — without ever seriously considering quitting?
Krenar Komoni is the founder and CEO of Tive, a hardware-plus-SaaS company that tracks shipments in real time across trucks, ships, and planes worldwide. He started in his basement in 2015, charging his father-in-law $19.99 a month, and today has 1,300 customers — nine of which pay over $1 million per year — at a $545 million valuation.
You'll learn:
- Why Krenar almost went bankrupt twice and laid off 75% of his team — and what kept him going
- The pricing mistake that nearly killed the company: manufacturing a tracker for $150 and selling it for the same price
- How hiring two college kids to cold call strangers became the GTM playbook that took Tive from $2.5M to $10M in revenue
- Why 60% of new revenue at Tive comes from existing customers expanding, not new logos
- The patent that creates a physical switching cost competitors can't replicate: ping-rate configuration based on shipment events
- How Krenar negotiated a down round from $21M to $11M valuation with $10K in the bank — and why he doesn't regret it
- What it actually takes to land a million-dollar-per-year customer when you sell physical hardware on monthly contracts
- Why Krenar thinks AI agents will fully automate the supply chain in 24 to 36 months — and how Tive is already building toward that
- The secondary liquidity story: why his Series A1 investor had to push him to take money off the table before he had the courage to ask
- How Tive went from $250K revenue in 2019 to $100M run rate in 2026 — the full year-by-year breakdown
Connect:
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@NathanLatkawatch
- Tive: https://www.tive.com/
- Founderpath: https://founderpath.com/
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | All right, in this episode, you're going to see how a strange founder built a weird piece of hardware in his basement and turned it into a $540 million business that's totally taking over the supply chain industry. |
| 0:10.4 | He's got over 1,300 paying customers and the biggest ones pay him a fortune. |
| 0:14.7 | Today, he's adding over $10 million of new annual revenue per quarter. |
| 0:19.1 | Incredible growth. |
| 0:20.0 | And he's got a bold vision for how to use |
| 0:22.0 | AI and agents to automate the entire supply chain. But it wasn't always this easy. Watch until the |
| 0:27.2 | end and you'll see exactly how to get your first 100 customers the easy way, how to set your |
| 0:31.5 | A.E quota targets so you don't screw up your economics. And lastly, the genius way to price your |
| 0:36.2 | product so you finally get your first million dollar per year customer. Here's the CEO of tive.com. Krenar, you ready to take us to the top? I can't bury the lead. I reached out literally hours ago because you posted on LinkedIn that you hit a massive revenue milestone. What was the milestone? And then we'll jump into your story. Yeah, huge milestone last week. We hit 100 million of both annual run rates. That's awesome. |
| 0:55.0 | That's amazing. We will do very confident. What would that represent in terms of growth rate |
| 0:59.7 | year over year? What were you one year ago? So one year ago, we're at 67. So we'll do at least, |
| 1:05.0 | it looks like 100 this year. So just to be clear, if we take MRR from December of 2025, |
| 1:09.2 | you're at a 67 million run rate then. |
| 1:12.8 | No, December MRR. |
| 1:16.7 | So 67 was the whole recognized revenue of the whole 2025. |
| 1:21.1 | The December MRR, I don't know the exact number on top of my head, but I know we closed the year in check because we do January its fiscal year, it was at 89 million of booked |
| 1:26.7 | annual run rate. So we went from 89 to 100 between January 31st and 5th and 6th and guys, you want to listen to this whole interview because he's building something that's really interesting. You're seeing the world of AI. Anyone that has a data mode really wins. And one way to build an impressive data mode is to have a SaaS plus business model. We have IoT plus SaaS. He has, we're going to get into it in a second, but Tyve, or sorry, not Tyve, Kronar, why don't |
| 1:47.7 | you explain your business model? What are you selling? |
| 1:49.6 | So it's pretty straightforward. Customers come to us. They want to know what's happening |
| 1:53.0 | with our shipments all over the world, whether it's strawberries, blueberries, servers, |
| 1:56.6 | electronics, gaming consoles. So what we do is we sell them these trackers where they, I want to hold it up. I know you see the, you're opening up the website too. That's awesome. So what they do is they buy these trackers. So they sign up a contract. It's an annual contract and they say, hey, I want to buy 1,200 of these and they commit to them. And they also sign up again. So where does that get installed? |
| 2:18.0 | Does it get installed on a truck? |
... |
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