YC Alumni Brothers in Kyiv Sell at 14.5x Revenue in 3 Years: Where AXDRAFT's Multiple Came From
AXDRAFT, a contract-automation startup founded in Kyiv by an M&A lawyer and his brother from Booking.com, sold to Onit at the end of 2020 for high 7 figures — 14.5x revenue — with just 30 customers (including Walmart and Nestlé) and a team of 10. Two-thirds of the consideration was buyer stock. It comes with a lesson: ”sale mode can't be done on the side.”
This is a translation of the Japanese original. The Japanese version and cited primary sources are authoritative for all figures.
(Yen figures below are approximate conversions at ¥150/USD.)
How the Business Evolved
| Period | What Happened |
|---|---|
| October 2017 | M&A lawyer Yuriy Zaremba and his brother Oleg, a former senior engineer at Booking.com, found the company in Kyiv |
| December 2018 | Accepted into Y Combinator ($150K/7%) |
| 2019 | Raises $1.2M from Silicon Valley VCs ($1.4M total). Experiments with pricing starting at “$25 per contract” |
| End of 2020 | Settles on $750/month pricing. Sold to Onit (high 7 figures, 14.5x revenue, competitive bidding). 2/3 of the consideration in buyer stock; secured agreement from roughly 20 shareholders |
| Afterward | The brothers ran the product at Onit for about 3 years, then founded AI sales startup AiSDR |
The Numbers (at Sale)
| Item | Figure |
|---|---|
| Customers | About 30 companies (including Walmart, Nestlé and Slack) |
| Team | 10 people (Kyiv) |
| Product | A multilingual (including Chinese and Japanese) contract auto-generation algorithm |
Breaking Down “14.5x Revenue”
Thirty customers at $750/month puts annual revenue in the hundreds of thousands of dollars — and it sold for high 7 figures. What the buyer paid for wasn’t current revenue but (1) the track record of landing enterprise giants like Walmart (proof of surviving enterprise procurement), (2) the technology asset of multilingual contract generation, and (3) a team that had passed the filters of YC and Silicon Valley VCs. It is an extreme example of pricing as a strategic asset, the same pattern as Grid Finder’s £3M with zero revenue.
The fact that 2/3 of the consideration was stock also matters: in substance, this was an integration betting on Onit’s growth. Yuriy’s lesson — “Selling a company is like fundraising. You are either in ‘sale mode’ or you are not; you cannot do it well in parallel with everything else.”
Our Take
An enterprise customer’s logo can be worth tens of times your revenue. In B2B run by individuals or small teams, “who you sold to” can determine acquisition value more than how much you sold. Breaking into a single enterprise account can effectively be booked as an asset in itself.
“Lawyer × engineer brothers” is the shortest path between domain knowledge and implementation. The same shape as FeedbackPanda’s teacher × developer and Radius’s industry insider: the success condition for vertical SaaS comes down to “built by someone on the inside.”
Selling is a full-time job. The testimony that due diligence, coordinating 20 shareholders and negotiating terms “cannot be done on the side” marks the third time we’ve seen this — after Career Sidekick’s “the sale is a second business” and AppArmor’s “due diligence is hell”. Plan on growth stalling for the six months it takes to sell.
Further Reading
Sources
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