"We threw the plans in the trash": Unframe founder explains how to reach $100 million without an off-the-shelf product
Unframe CEO and co-founder Shay Levi explains how abandoning rigid planning to focus on solving specific customer problems helped the company reach $100 million in TCV within a year.
Shay Levi during the episode recording. Photo courtesy of "The Guy Katsovich Podcast"
When Shay Levi, CEO and co-founder of Unframe, founded the company, he and his partners had a completely organized work plan. At a live event of "The Guy Katsovich Podcast," which was also attended by Amit Karp (Managing Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners), Barak Schoster (Managing Partner at Battery Ventures), Yanai Oron (Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures Israel), and Guy Katsovich (Partner and founder of the Fusion fund), he shared how reality shook those plans and what the development departments of tomorrow look like.
"When we founded Unframe, we were sure we would reach the market with five good solutions, and the customers would simply choose what fits them," recalls Levi. "We thought everything would be relatively clear. In practice, the opposite happened. They didn't care what we prepared in advance. An insurance company came with an insurance problem, a real estate company with a real estate problem, and each one already knew what it needed to solve. After a few months, we threw the list away and realized that our product would not be one of the five solutions we chose. The product would be the ability to build for every customer what they really need."
"Like a Chinese restaurant menu"
This approach was not immune to concerns. "In one of the conversations I had during the seed round, they told me: you are going to be like a Chinese restaurant menu, a thousand dishes and no one knows what to order," recalls Levi. "They described the risk to me exactly. A company that does not choose one product might spread itself thin among hundreds of different requests and not build anything that can be repeated for another organization. But the customers already told us they don't want to choose from a menu, they want us to solve their problem. So the question was no longer whether to stay with the five solutions we prepared, but how to build something different for every customer without starting from scratch every time."
According to him, the key was breaking the problem down into infrastructure layers: "What we realized is that the solution can be different, but not everything underneath it needs to be built again. The insurance company and the real estate company received different things, but behind them, the same components repeated: the connection to the organization's data, the permissions, the control, and the way to bring the solution to real work. Every time we built something for one customer, the system improved for the next customer as well. That's how we tried to turn customization from something one-time into a product that can be repeated."
Unframe founders. Photo: Unframe
Behind Unframe is a team that already worked together in a software company that grew in scale. The company was founded by Levi, Larisa Schneider (COO), and Adi Azaria (R&D VP). All three previously worked at Noname Security, which Levi co-founded and which was sold to Akamai about two years ago for about $450 million. Unframe builds customized AI solutions for organizations, connected to their data, workflows, permissions, and existing systems, using technological components that can be reused. The company has already crossed a total contract value (TCV) of $100 million within about a year of the product launch.
50 thousand contracts in PDF and the difference from Noname
Levi clarifies the fundamental difference between the two companies. While at Noname Security the starting point was one product sold to many organizations, at Unframe the process starts every time from the problem the customer brings. "At Cushman & Wakefield, for example, the problem was managing about 50,000 commercial lease contracts stored in PDF files. Each contract was written differently, with clauses, dates, and conditions that had to be checked manually. We built a system for the company that reads the contracts, extracts the relevant information from them, and connects it to its workflows. It wasn't one of the five solutions we prepared at the beginning of the journey, but it relied on the same components already built for other customers."
When asked by Yanai Oron how to manage hundreds of applications without becoming a collection of projects, Levi replied: "The problem is more similar than it seems to a regular software company. There, too, different requests come from different customers, and the work is to identify which of them point to a common need that should be put into the product. The difference is that here the common denominator is underneath the solutions, and not always visible to the user themselves. When we add something to the platform, it doesn't stay with one customer. It can improve other solutions as well. As long as most of the work goes into the common layer and doesn't remain as something one-time, hundreds of applications don't necessarily create hundreds of separate products."
Closing enterprise deals in a month and a half
In response to Amit Karp's question about market readiness, Levi explained that today organizations arrive much more prepared: "At first, they expected us to tell them where to insert AI. Today it's almost the opposite. Organizations have already mapped their problems, they arrive with an organized list and know exactly what they want to achieve. Sometimes you enter a room and the feeling is that they were just waiting for someone to take it from them and start working. We reach a situation where large deals are closed in a short time. This is something I never had."
To Oron's question about the ability to close a deal and launch a solution within a few weeks in enterprise organizations, Levi clarified: "You have to separate between a deal that was closed and a situation where the whole organization is already using the system. Within a month and a half, you can reach an agreement, start working, and launch a first solution in a limited environment. Then comes the expansion stage: more departments, more users, and more processes. It's not that the whole organization changes in two weeks, but you can reach the first value much faster than before."
Barak Schoster wondered what is still the hard part of the process, and Levi clarified that the answer is trust: "A large organization can build on its own, work with a consulting firm, choose an existing supplier, or simply do nothing. When a startup arrives and says: let me enter your processes and I will solve it, it's not trivial. They need to believe that you understand the problem, that the solution will work, and that you will be there even after the implementation. Once this trust is created, everything can move much faster."
Should small SaaS products be mourned?
In response to Guy Katsovich's question about the future of regular SaaS products, Levi reassured: "I wouldn't rush to mourn Salesforce, SAP, or ServiceNow. If the best thing an organization can do with its time is to build its own Salesforce just to save the license, it has another problem. Such systems sit deep inside the organization, hold data and processes, and they are not uprooted so quickly. But in smaller products, which serve a department or a very specific need, it can already happen. A customer can say: you built these two processes for me, now replace the additional system as well and make it exactly as I need."
According to him, the large systems will not disappear, but their role will change: "At first, you don't uproot them. You build the processes you are missing around them. Over time, it may be that more and more of the work will move to another layer, and the large system will remain mainly the place where the data is stored. It turns from a product that the user works in all day into a kind of old registration system that sits in the back. Only at a much later stage might an organization ask if it needs it at all."
This turn also raises a question regarding the necessity of internal development departments in traditional organizations. "I thought about this back when we worked with one of the largest consumer companies in the world," shared Levi. "I asked myself why a company whose product is not software has a development department at all. When it needs to build an office, it brings a contractor, and when it needs transportation, it doesn't set up a bus company. So why did the assumption arise that every organization must maintain a team that builds every internal system itself? It may be that there are things that are directly related to the product and its competitive advantage and that should be kept inside. But many companies build the same dashboards, approval processes, and connections between systems over and over again. There is no reason for a thousand organizations to start all this work from scratch."
According to him, the assumption that every company must maintain a large development department is no longer taken for granted. And when asked by Oron what he would say to himself at the beginning of the journey, he concluded: "Listen earlier to what the customers bring with them. We arrived with answers, and they arrived with problems. Once we understood that our value is not to choose for them from a list, but to build around what is already important to them, the whole company changed. It took us a few months to throw away what we prepared in advance. Looking back, this was the decision that allowed us to start building the real product."
In the full episode, Levi also talks about the transition from CTO to CEO, about the pressure in the entrepreneurial journey for the second time, and about the places where previous experience actually did not prepare him for what came later.
