Reshma Advani Rojas, CEO of Advanced Commercial Equipment (ACEL), has turned a family legacy into the Caribbean’s most respected restaurant supply companies. Based in Trinidad & Tobago, ACEL serves 14 countries across the region and generates approximately $30 million in revenue. In this episode of ScaleApp Podcasts, Reshma shares how leadership, culture, and clarity drive scale—not just capital. Favorite Quotes · “Soft skills are not optional—they’re the foundat...

From garage to a $250 million global aerospace supplier—and then do it again and again as an investor and mentor. In this episode, Jerry Jendusa, founder of EMTEQ and now head of Breakthru, shares how a mix of listening to customers, discipline, and people-first leadership drove his growth journey. From bootstrapping to $100 million in sales and $250 million exit, Jerry reflects on lessons learned: people trump processprocess trumps productcustomers trump capitaldebt trumps...

From Ghana to Czech Republic to Harvard Business School to the frontlines of Africa’s digital economy, Raphael (“Rafi”) Afaedor's career is a masterclass in vision, immersion, and execution. Having co-founded Jumia—the first African e-commerce giant to list on the NYSE—and later Kyosk, a B2B platform connecting fast-moving consumer goods producers to informal retail shops and end customers, Rafi has learned firsthand how to scale in large, complex markets. As Rafi explains, Afric...

I believe that one of the biggest challenges in going from a few millions to a few tens of millions is building systems and processes that enable scaling. We have seen this challenge in the majority of the ScaleApp Podcast discussions, Giscad is just the most recent example. As Julie Brandle explains, one aspect of their scaling challenge was to bring on more specialized professional services - legal, accounting, HR etc. Metis is also a great story of resilience - recession, Pandemic, and now...

Background In this episode, I welcome our first Trinidad & Tobago venture to ScaleApp Podcasts: Giscad, co-founded by Desmond Dougall and Sudesh Botha. What began 22 years ago as two engineers suddenly out of work has grown into a 50-person regional powerhouse operating across nearly numerous Caribbean markets. Giscad is a ScaleratorT&T alumnus. Academics in the entrepreneurship space often make a stark dichotomy between so-called “opportunity entrepreneurship” and so-called “necessit...

Do we need to re-define "Chutzpah" = "Positron?" Mitesh Agrawal, CEO and co-founder of Positron AI, is leading one of the most audacious ventures in the tech world today: building silicon to compete directly with NVIDIA. Backed by over $70 million in funding from DFJ, Valor, Atreides, Oakseed (disclosure: I am an LP) and others, and already shipping product within 18 months of founding, Positron’s bet is that the market for inference—the part of AI that actually generates text, images, code, ...

Background / Introduction What is the biggest bottleneck keeping the stream of drugs and devices from getting to market? R&D? Capital? Maybe, but managing regulatory compliance is right up there. Safely speeding time to market for pharmaceutical and medical device makers is huge.... IF you can pull it off. 50% of time to market is in regulatory compliance. Enter Erez Kaminski and Ketryx. Managing AI for Amgen, Erez saw first‑hand how slow, costly, and error‑prone compliance work is for sa...

Background / Intro FactoredAI was incubated in 2019 by Israel Niezen out of Andrew Ng’s AI Fund with $2.5 mio “we didn’t really need,” and today has over 300 of the top 1% of talent in LATAM solving complex data problems by building world-class AI and ML/LLM solutions. Factored went from $.7mio in 2020 to $3mio to $8mio to $13mo to $18 mio in 2024, and will break $30mio in 2025. Their plan is to break $100mio in 2028. Clients include global leaders in retail, car rental, dating apps, and heal...

Introduction Rosalyn and Blair Hyslop met as teenagers Atlantic Canada in Junior Achievement and from the start dreamed of running a business together. That dream became reality when they acquired Mrs. Dunster’s, a beloved regional bakery known for its authentic donuts, garlic cheese buns, and grew it to offer hundreds of other homestyle baked goods. At the time, the business had about $7M in revenues and 50 employees; today it is 6–7x larger, with over 250 employees, multiple bakeries, and r...

Background - Eyal Feder-Levy, CEO and co-founder of Zencity, joins me on the ScaleApp Podcasts to discuss the journey from his community-building nonprofit work in Tel Aviv to building the largest provider of community engagement software for local governments. Zencity operates in six countries, serving over 400 agencies and 200 million residents with sales “deep into double digit millions.” Feder’s passion for local government, fueled by grassroots community work, shaped Zencity’s vision to ...

BackgroundLeo Bonanni is an architect-turned-entrepreneur who founded Sourcemap, a pioneering supply chain mapping platform, based on his research at the MIT Media Lab. Originally a tool for understanding the social and environmental impact of design decisions, Sourcemap evolved into a mission-critical SaaS platform used by major global brands to trace the origins of their raw materials down to the mines, farms, and factories that produce them. Bonanni bootstrapped Sourcemap for nearly a deca...

Background / Introduction Saar Safra, serial entrepreneur and CEO/co-founder of Beewise, joins Prof. Dan Isenberg to share the extraordinary mission of his sixth startup: saving the bees to secure global food supplies. With backing from Fortissimo Capital and others, and over $170 million raised, Beewise is pioneering robotic beehives to counter catastrophic bee colony collapse—a crisis affecting over 60% of colonies in the U.S. annually. Key Themes Existential Agricultural RiskTech-Driven Re...

Meet Joey Chung, Taiwanese entrepreneur, co-founder and CEO of TNL Mediagene (NASDAQ:TNMG). TNMG is a media content and technology group spanning SE Asia and Japan in Chinese, English and other languages (TNMG IS NOT IN CHINA!) as an apolitical media group, growth 50% organic, 50% M&A. Ten acquisitions, including a major merger with MediaGene in Japan which allowed TNMG to go public on NASDAQ. 30-40 % YOY GROWTH!! How to make successful acquisitions.How to build multinational teams....

I have always been skeptical of conflating entrepreneurship with innovation or technology and Sgt. Clean (YES, a rapidly expanding car wash chain in Ohio) is a great example. How many tech startups you know have more than $10 million in revenues, growing rapidly and profitably? And guess what? This is a $20 billion market in the US only. Highly fragmented, ripe for scaling if you can crack the code of (a) amazing customer experience, (b) sustainable HR which means giving people opportun...

Episode 13 taped on Friday the 13th! How lucky can you get? There is so much I find exciting about Sunbit - talking with co-founders Arad Levertov and Tal Riesenfeld is like a huge smorgasboard of interesting topics. Just a few words about their strategy here but you have GOT to listen to how they explain in their own words how they have grown beyond $300 million and achieved profitability. (Disclosure - I am an early investor) Blue ocean - when everyone (think Klarna, Affirm, PayPal) goes to...

Home Surplus, founded by Joe Schwartz who thought he was a PE guy and found himself as CEO and is building a national chain of specialist cabinet suppliers. What's the deal? Floor and Decor took an aisle out of Home Depot and turned it into a 250 store chain worth about $8 billion. Harbor Freight did the same with tools and has 1500 stores worth about $8 billion. Joe thinks the brass ring may just be the kitchen cabinet aisle of Home Depot, where required professionalism is high and so ...

Meet Thanos Papagelis and Dimitris Tsingos, co-founders of Epignosis, the global leader in online corporate training. $50 million ARR, 55% and above margins, 50% and above annual growth, profitable since 2010, bootstrapped without VC. They were so good that when they tried to raise growth capital, no VCs (except 1) believed their story and responded with standard VC bullshit - "You haven't taken enough risks." "You are under-investing." "We just don't believe you." It gets curiouser: "B...

Jonathan Corbin, Eugene Mann, and Sami Shalabi have put together decades of combined experience in senior positions at Hubspot, Google, Adobe, Stripe, IBM - need I say more - to COMPLETELY revolutionize how companies engage with customers. I will let them explain to us in this 10th!! ScaleApp Podcasts episode but the way I see it is that they have revolutionized the customer support experience as a wedge for impacting the entire sales experience. Turns out that customer support alone is a hal...

Imagine a company, about 7 years old, with 250 employees around the world, revenues in the "eight figures" (that means between $10-99 million), two thousand customers globally. With high 2-digit annual growth. The company uses AI enabled peripheral devices (think cameras that can interpret situations and make decisions) to make the workplace safer, networked and managed on a common platform to communicate and make decisions. Imagine, for example, a Coca-Cola bottling plant i...

Vikram Sharma and Deepanshu Goel founded Wify in 2020 to solve a big e-commerce and in-store pain point facing the Ikeas and Amazons of the 1 billion plus population - Not used to self-assembling and self-installing furniture and appliances at home, Indian consumers simply bought less. Building on their experience in larger companies, Vikram and Deepanshu built a tech platform to connect consumers, brands, and their army of Wify-trained professionals. Today Wify seamlessly connects all three,...