Raise $10M, 10x the company in four years.

What's behind the numbers

Read these first — they are the load-bearing inputs behind every chart below. Each row is tagged grounded when it comes from the actual 2025–H1'26 P&L or the rate card, or assumed when it's a forward input for this plan.

2025 actual → 2030 projected

2025 is the internal P&L; 2026 is part-actual — H1 is booked through ~May '26 (run-rate ~$1.1M, contracted ~$1.4M), H2 and 2027–2030 are the plan. Revenue forward is built off the rate card plus funded acquisition; cost lines carry the P&L structure forward, tilted to S&M. Shading: darker = actual, lighter = part-actual, unshaded = plan. Dollars in millions; parentheses = negative.

* 2026 is part-actual — H1 is in the book and the run-rate is ~$1.1M (contracted ~$1.4M as of May '26), roughly flat off the ~$1.2M Dec-'25 exit. 2025 column = actual trailing P&L (gross margin 63.8%, EBITDA −$0.78M); 2026 gross margin compresses to ~52% as new accounts onboard, recovering toward the 65% target thereafter. Cumulative net burn '26–'30 ≈ $9.8M after grants — close to $10M standalone, but the Q3 2028 Series B refills cash long before then (see Use of funds & runway), so the company never runs tight.

Two books, two motions

Korea is the volume engine — cheap reps, more logos, lower ACV. The US is the premium engine — expensive reps funded by the relationship premium, fewer and larger logos. US share rises from 40% to ~50% as the funded US motion matures.

Korea carries more reps but a smaller cost line; the US line is small in headcount but expensive — exactly what the US rate-card premium is there to fund. Revenue reaches a roughly even KR/US split by 2030.

The engine behind the KR & US lines

Sales headcount isn't a guess — it's sized to the new ARR the plan needs. Quota-carrying reps (a subset of total sales headcount; SDRs, marketing and RevOps sit on top) close logos at a geo-specific quota, ramp over 2–3 quarters, and carry a geo-specific CAC.

AEs are the quota-carrying subset of sales headcount in the headcount plan; SDRs, marketing, RevOps and the US relationship PSM sit on top. Booked new ARR tracks the plan's requirement from 2027 on; 2026 runs ~$0.36M short — the build year, when hiring and ramp lag (exit-2026 ARR likely lands nearer $2.0M than $2.4M if the motion starts slowly). Ramp convention: a new AE delivers ~50% (KR) / ~40% (US) of quota in the hire year, full quota thereafter.

Who we hire to get there

Headcount grows 22 → 105, but not evenly. Delivery scales sublinearly (agents do the work); sales is where the money goes. Every column reconciles to the headcount line in the P&L above.

Spend first, leverage later

Funding S&M deepens the operating loss through 2028–2029 while the sales org ramps. Then operating leverage — R&D and G&A growing far slower than revenue, and margin climbing to 65% — pulls EBITDA back toward zero, at 20× the 2025 revenue.

What the $10M buys — and how long it lasts

The raise is deployed against the plan above. ~45% builds the go-to-market org (the missing piece); the rest funds the agent platform, the scale-up, and a deliberate buffer. With ~$1M already on hand, pro-forma cash at close is ~$11M.

Net cash burned from close to the Series B is only ~$4M — the $11M nearly funds the entire plan to 2030 on its own (~$9.8M cumulative net burn). That's a ~0.8× burn multiple (after grants; ~1.1× gross): the Series B (Q3 2028, two years after the A) funds the push past $20M ARR and de-risks CAC, it isn't a rescue. Burn spread evenly within each year; excludes working-capital timing. Grants (~$0.36M/yr) assumed; debt facility excluded (undrawn backstop).

Q3 2028 — raised from strength

Timed for Q3 2028 — exactly two years after the Series A — and raised from strength, not necessity: the runway reaches it with ~$7M still in the bank (comfortably over a year of cushion). The B is the growth round that funds the push past $20M ARR, not a rescue.

What raising more buys

The plan is sized for $10M. If the round is oversubscribed, the question isn't can we deploy it — it's what each extra dollar buys against what it costs. The base plan already reaches the Series B from strength (~$7M trough, Q3 2028); more upfront capital pushes that to a later, larger, or optional B — but at today's Series A price, the most expensive equity if the plan works.

Dilution is at the Series A price — the most expensive equity if the plan works, since the B would be a step-up. So extra now = insurance you pay for in dilution. The plan absorbs ~$11–12M efficiently on the current motion; beyond that, deploying more means funding a second motion (the platform tier), not hiring GTM faster than quality allows.

Post-money — illustrative

No term sheet yet, so these are illustrative: at a typical Series A dilution of ~20–25%, post-money ≈ raise ÷ dilution.

Oversubscription gives two levers: hold the price and take more (more dilution at the same mark), or hold dilution (~21%) and let demand push the valuation up. The strong play blends both — a bit more capital at a modestly higher mark. These scale with the round; the actual number is set by the term sheet, not the raise size.

Three products, three motions

Two client-facing products — a web app and a CLI — plus one internal platform, taken to market through three motions: managed today, hybrid next, self-serve on the horizon.

A self-serve tier — a client-operated license

The funded plan is sales-led: revenue = AEs × quota × ACV, capped by how fast we hire. Alongside it, the first self-serve pilots land Q4 2026 as a hybrid license: we sell a client a license, their own team operates it, and they pay an annual license fee plus per-seat for the people who use it. That breaks the headcount cap — growth comes from the product and the client's own labor, not our reps — and because the client operates it, there's no delivery pod, so it runs at software margin. The build is mostly wrapping what we already have — onboarding, multi-seat management, license + seat billing, hardened multi-tenancy — cheap Korea R&D (~4 engineers in 2026 → ~10 by 2030).

The assumptions this rides on

Gross margin is the swing factor — at 80% (client-operated, productized onboarding) the tier reprices the company; if every license needs hands-on PulseAd implementation (~55%) the upside collapses.

Even at 55% the tier stays mildly accretive (incremental S&M is low), but it only reprices the business at the top of the range. Validate that a client's team can operate it — without a PulseAd implementation team — before banking the upside.

What’s solid — and what we need to improve

The 2025 base and the cost engine are real ground; the five-year ramp is a plan on a go-to-market motion PulseAd has not yet run. A fresh read against the live P&L tab also surfaces several headline numbers to reconcile before diligence — the table below.

The numbers to reconcile — exec-summary vs. the P&L tab

A lead will rebuild the headline metrics off the P&L tab. Here’s where they tie, and where they don’t.

Bottom line: the ✓ ground — 2025 revenue, ~+220% growth, ~12–13% take rate, the cost engine — is solid. Three of the four reds — gross-margin level & direction, the 2025 EBITDA basis, and the burn multiple — are now re-based into the projection above (the recovery slope and the OpEx line-split remain to confirm against the tab). NRR support is the one red still fully open: compute a blended figure we can defend, or lead with logo retention, before this goes in front of a lead.

Key & abbreviations

Every acronym used above, in one place.