RevComm Turned Profitable After Only a Series A: Takeshi Aida on Management That Keeps Strategy Fixed but Changes Tactics

Aida describes RevComm as a company that aims to revolutionize communication. They founded it as a solo founder in 2017 after leaving their previous job, recruiting engineers first and then people on the business side. The company now has about 300 people and operates from three locations: Japan, Indonesia and the United States.

The product line began in October 2018 with "MiiTel Phone," built for phone calls. According to Aida, the company focuses in particular on "spoken communication," which happens not only over the phone but also in web meetings and face to face. From the very beginning, therefore, the phone was only an entry point, and the goal was to optimize voice communication as a whole, including web meetings and in-person conversations. Later came "MiiTel Meeting," which integrates with web meetings, and "MiiTel RecPod," which analyzes in-person conversations, creating a multi-product lineup covering three areas.

From the outside, people tend to assume the company has repeatedly raised large rounds, but Aida revealed that it has so far done only a Series A in equity financing. The roughly 5 billion yen raised was a combination of 2.5 billion yen in equity and 2.5 billion yen in debt. The last equity financing took place in February and March 2020, about five and a half years before the recording.

Aida says the company has been mindful of its cost of capital (WACC) and has raised funds by using the right-hand side of the balance sheet prudently. Its most recent funding was through debt, and the company is currently profitable. That said, Aida believes the company needs a thicker capital base to accelerate its next phase, and it has begun considering a new equity financing.

Aida stresses that profitability was never the target. What capital markets value most in startups is top-line growth, and that is what the company has tried to maximize. In pursuit of that, it also raised operational productivity, and as a result, "we inevitably ended up becoming profitable."

So, by way of apology, Aida tells shareholders: "Sorry, we've become profitable. We really should be investing more." Aida's view is that the company did not aim to be profitable; it should be investing a bit more, but productivity ended up being so high that it turned a profit.

Aida listed four uses for newly raised funds. The first is M&A, and the second is R&D, whose importance Aida sees as growing ever greater. The third is hiring. High productivity means a small team is delivering big results, but a lean setup like that can develop strains and lose the slack needed to start new things right away. Aida wants to accelerate hiring to give the organization some breathing room. The fourth is overseas expansion; the plan is to invest to raise global revenue, still small today, to 40–50% of the total.

Because these uses are strongly in the nature of risk capital, Aida explains, equity is more suitable than debt. Beyond simply wanting money, it is important to gain more supporters, and in that sense too, Aida wants to bring in more shareholders through equity.

Iijima asked whether customer acquisition has become harder as sales-enablement SaaS products and the like keep appearing one after another. Aida replied that the market is still very small, so they would be glad to see two or three more powerful competitors emerge.

As grounds, Aida cited the observation that large markets always have three to ten strong players. Telecommunications, automobiles and financial institutions (such as the three megabanks) are examples. It is precisely markets with several strong players that grow large. One reason is that competitors push one another to improve, but Aida explained another reason using an analogy to growing vegetables.

A new market has dry soil with no nutrients. You might plant a seed there and get one cherry tomato, but it will not become a huge farm. To make a farm, you have to enrich the soil. For example, if three companies each spent tens or hundreds of billions of yen on raising awareness of voice AI, the world's mindshare would shift toward "voice is coming," and only then would companies start considering voice tools and sales-tech tools. Aida says Japan has about 8.5 million salespeople, accounting for just over 10% of the workforce. The idea is that if companies each plant seeds in this huge market, nurture it and push one another, it will become a large market.

When Iijima asked whether the players now springing up like bamboo shoots after the rain would eventually consolidate, with M&A happening along the way, Aida answered, "I think so."

On the company's own approach to M&A, Aida first raised the question of "whether it's even SaaS in the first place." Aida noted that the head of Microsoft has said "SaaS is dead," and some U.S. investors say the same. Against that backdrop, the question is whether to acquire similar SaaS companies, or to go into seemingly distant areas, in the spirit of the Japanese proverb about unexpected chains of cause and effect.

Citing Arm and Intel as examples, Aida explained that moves made by reading two or three steps ahead are not understood at the time — people ask "why there?" — whereas moves only one step ahead are readily accepted. Aida said they believe what the current market environment demands of the company is moves that look two or three steps ahead, the kind that make people ask, "Why did they go there?"

Asked where new competitors might come from, Aida pointed to how rapidly the AI field is advancing. It is now possible to use LLMs to make things run, build applications themselves and replace existing ones, and Aida believes the area that sales tech has covered will be disrupted all at once.

Whether you end up disrupting or being disrupted depends on strategy, Aida says. What is an LLM, and what impact will it have on each industry and use case? Going further, which values of Homo sapiens will decline, and which will rise relatively? Aida said a strategy built from those questions is extremely important.

On management during periods of transformation, Aida says they often bring up the cases of Kodak and Fujifilm, and DNP (Dai Nippon Printing) and Toppan. DNP grew its business by applying technologies developed in printing to other fields. Kodak, on the other hand, clung to film. BlackBerry, too, asked who would use something operated through an on-screen GUI and insisted that physical buttons were what mattered, and then declined, Aida recalls.

In such periods, you have to assume that what you have called your strengths can come crashing down in an instant. The right answer may well lie in what you have rejected or in directions you thought were impossible. Aida considers it extremely important to build strategy with that mindset.

Aida says this change has intensified especially over the past year. When they started the company in 2017, the paper "Attention Is All You Need" had come out, and it was clear that a wave of voice, agents and AI was coming. That is why the company has operated not only at the application layer but also at the data layer, positioning itself so as not to be disrupted.

Recently, however, the algorithm layer has been advancing so fast that it is encroaching on the application layer. Above that, the operations layer — in other words, the relative value of humans — is also declining. Aida feels that things they expected to happen over about five years are now happening in about five months, at an exponential pace, and that the company has to shift into a higher gear.

As a concrete example, Aida pointed to how vertical (industry-specific) value is delivered. A year ago, fine-tuning existing models on a company's own data to specialize them for a particular domain was discussed as a strategy. But with major gains in reasoning ability in models such as GPT-5 Pro, that kind of specialization has lost its meaning in some cases, or has had to be redone by fine-tuning a different model. Even if you think, over a one- to two-year span, "given this trend, here is the strategy and tactics," the situation soon changes. Aida described this movement as very interesting, while noting that what is happening right now is that if you act haphazardly, you die.

So how does the company reconcile short-term responses with long-term direction, and how is that communicated internally? Aida first explains that the company's North Star is "to create a society where people care about one another," and that this will not change no matter how much technology advances. They set it in 2016, and their position is that even if humanity were to move into a virtual world by 2116, 100 years later, there is no point in planning on that assumption, though it could happen.

Once you set the North Star, you can work backward from it to devise business strategy. Aida understands strategy (senryaku, written with characters meaning "abbreviating the battle") as thinking through how to avoid having to fight at all, and says a strategy built that way should basically not waver. If it does waver, either it was logically wrong or something previously unseen has come to the surface; in that case, you accept that "I was wrong" and change the strategy. If you cannot change it, death awaits, Aida says.

Tactics (senjutsu, "the art of fighting"), on the other hand, determine how to fight over a one- to two-year span — including short-term profit and loss — in order to realize the strategy faster and more accurately. Since the situation changes moment by moment, tactics should, if anything, change. If strategy wavers, people may end up saying, "What that person is saying makes no sense," but tactics are branches and leaves — like changing the route you take up a mountain — so members should understand and follow, Aida believes. What matters is to sort out what is allowed to waver and what is not.

The current strategy consists of four pillars: vertical, horizontal, parallel and geographical. According to Aida, they talked about the same four pillars in the video at launch, and the content has not changed at all.

Vertical refers to the vertical direction — how to add features to existing products. The product direction they described back then is proceeding as planned; for example, an AI that automatically sets appointments already exists in beta, and the question now is when to launch it.

Horizontal means expanding into new areas. What was once phone-only has expanded to web meetings and face-to-face conversations, so the company can now cover all voice communication. Beyond that, the aim is to build AI that supports management decision-making.

Parallel is the platform strategy. Aida says that, looking back at history, platforms have won, and positions the company's platform as its voice analysis engine. The engine is used not only for sales and internal meetings but also for interviews and meetings in the HR field. Rather than developing its own interview tool, however, the idea is to provide the voice analysis engine to existing ATS (applicant tracking system) providers and others, creating a world with "MiiTel Inside" behind the scenes.

Geographical refers to rolling out the three pillars above not just in Japan but globally.

When tactics change, the organization changes too, Aida says. The speed of change over the past year has definitely affected team building. You think through what kind of people are needed to realize the strategy and tactics, and then you search for them, find them and win them over with "grit and determination." But getting them to join is not enough; what matters is working together from there.

So at an all-hands meeting around the end of last year, Aida shared the "Four Cs" with employees: first, Connect; not just connect but Collaborate; not just collaborate but Create; and finally, Commit (to results). Aida came up with them personally.

Behind this is how RevComm works. Aida comes into the office every day, and on the day of the recording, members of the PR and HR teams were in the office too, but the company's stance is to provide an environment where people can come in while leaving it up to them whether they do. With a base in Indonesia as well, it can be hard to feel connected, so Aida explained that they put out this message to get people to consciously focus on connection again.

Finally, Iijima asked for tips on expanding globally from Japan. Aida, who worked on global business during their trading-company days, first says that "population is power." Of the world's roughly 7 billion people, about 4.5 billion live in Asia, centered on India, China and Indonesia. India and China each have about 1.4 billion people.

The other key indicator is GDP per capita; Aida says they do not invest in the B2B space in countries where it does not exceed $4,000. GDP per capita correlates strongly with average annual income, and if average income is below $4,000, it is faster, cheaper and more accurate to hire people to do data entry. In a country where people work for $4,000 a year, would a company pay 10,000 yen a month for a sales tool? It would not, Aida explains.

This criterion comes from experience in the automotive business. According to Aida, motorization takes off at a GDP per capita of roughly $4,000 because that is when the middle-income class grows. As the middle-income class grows, employers need to raise productivity and start investing in DX and IT.

By this criterion, China's GDP per capita exceeds $4,000, but there are political and data risks. It is a market where an industry can suddenly be banned and an entire business wiped out, so even though the conditions are in place, Aida currently considers it difficult because of political risk.

India's GDP per capita is about $1,400, and since investing in people is more rational, Aida sees a B2B SaaS market as unlikely to grow there. On top of that, the tax system is complex, and even large Japanese companies that have done business there for many years sometimes get sued, so the hurdles are high.

Indonesia has a population of about 270 million, a total fertility rate of 2.1, population growth of 1.3% and a median age of around 26 — a well-shaped population pyramid — and Aida expects it to grow significantly. GDP per capita is about $4,400 and has doubled over the past 10 years. Because it consists of 17,508 islands, travel is costly, while mobile penetration exceeds 100%, with 300 million devices for 270 million people. About 56% of GDP is domestic demand, which grows along with GDP. As domestic demand grows, sales activity increases in both B2B and B2C, yet travel costs are high. If the internet is widespread, inside sales and remote sales should be coming — that was the hypothesis Aida formed before going there, and after verifying it on the ground, they concluded "this can work." That is how Indonesia was chosen.

Aida suggests deciding based on population, GDP per capita and geopolitical/political risk, plus a couple of industry-specific indicators. For commerce-related businesses, for example, that might be the share of commerce or the average spend per transaction.

Aida cautioned, however, that what this kind of analysis yields is merely the "conditions for not losing." Whether you can win depends on the grit and determination that follow, and on whether you can build the right team. If you stop at a logically correct thought process, that is the end of it; what actually matters more is going all-out to dig into the local market and break new ground.

At the end of the interview, Iijima joked that competitors might take notes from today's conversation, to which Aida replied that if everyone could enrich the soil together and grow the market that way, it would be the best outcome, and that they would welcome it.