How Omar Haroun Scaled Eudia from $2M to $20M ARR in 12 Months

Most AI startups chase the two percent software budget. Omar Haroun went after the other 98 percent—the massive spend on human labor and services that enterprise legal teams actually allocate most of their resources toward.

Key Facts

• ARR Growth: $2M to $20M in 12 months (Omar Haroun)
• Time to $1M ARR: 6 months from first sale (Omar Haroun)
• Customer Acquisition: 90% from customer referrals (Omar Haroun)
• Previous Exit: $105M cash acquisition by Relativity (Omar Haroun)
• Design Partners: 5 Fortune 500 CLOs via cold email (Omar Haroun)

The Future of Labor, Not Just Software Enhancement

Haroun's thesis centers on AI replacing human labor rather than just enhancing software productivity, targeting the 95-98% of enterprise budgets that go to services and people instead of the traditional 2% software spend.

Most AI startups focus on making existing software more productive. Omar Haroun took a fundamentally different approach with Eudia, recognizing that enterprise legal teams spend the vast majority of their budgets on human labor, not software tools.

His core insight emerged from studying buyer behavior across different enterprise functions. Chief legal officers, procurement heads, HR leaders, and CFOs typically allocate 95-98% of their budgets to human resources and services, with only 2% going to software purchases.

This budget reality led Haroun to a controversial conclusion about the AI revolution's true impact. Rather than viewing AI as a productivity enhancement for existing software workflows, he positioned it as a direct replacement for human labor—a shift that opens up vastly larger market opportunities for founders willing to challenge traditional SaaS models.

"AI is not the future of software, it's actually the future of labor and if you look at certain buyers in the enterprise...typically ninety five to ninety eight percent of their budget goes to humans, labor, services, not software" — Omar Haroun

"no amount of AI on top of the two percent of the budget will ever really change anything and so to really offer the 10x better alternative to that ninety eight percent of the budget" — Omar Haroun

Cold Email Strategy That Landed Fortune 500 Design Partners

Haroun secured five Fortune 500 chief legal officers as design partners through direct cold emails, leveraging his previous exit credibility and positioning himself as researching AI's impact on labor rather than selling a product.

Before writing a single line of code, Haroun conducted 80 interviews with chief legal officers to validate his thesis about AI disrupting professional services. His approach to reaching these C-suite executives offers a masterclass in enterprise cold outreach.

His cold email template focused on research rather than sales, positioning himself as a successful founder exploring AI's impact on labor. This consultative approach opened doors that traditional product pitches might have kept closed.

The strategy proved remarkably effective, with executives like Rob Beard, then CLO of Micron transitioning to MasterCard, not only taking calls but inviting Haroun to observe their teams in action. This access provided invaluable insights into actual workflows and pain points that informed Eudia's product development.

"we've gotten ninety percent of our customers from cold emails that I've sent" — Omar Haroun

"Hey, I'm a founder at an exit. I really believe AI is going to impact labor. I'm just really, really curious to see whether you'd be open to sharing kind of some feedback on a fifteen-minute call" — Omar Haroun

• Positioned as research, not sales: 'I really believe AI is going to impact labor'
• Leveraged previous exit credibility to establish trust with C-suite buyers
• Requested minimal time commitment: '15-minute call' for feedback
• Offered value upfront: genuine curiosity about their challenges and priorities

The Data Problem Behind Every AI Problem

Through deep customer research, Haroun discovered that enterprise legal teams' biggest challenge wasn't AI capability but fragmented institutional knowledge scattered across systems and trapped in employees' heads, making data consolidation the real product opportunity.

While working closely with Fortune 500 design partners, Haroun uncovered a fundamental insight that shaped Eudia's entire product strategy. The most advanced AI models in the world couldn't solve legal teams' core challenges because the necessary knowledge was scattered and inaccessible.

Enterprise legal departments store critical decision-making context across multiple SaaS applications while keeping much of their institutional knowledge locked in individual team members' experience. When key employees leave or go on extended leave, teams lose access to crucial information about risk tolerance, negotiation strategies, and historical precedents.

This discovery led Haroun to reconceptualize the opportunity. Instead of building another AI-powered legal tool, Eudia became a data and knowledge platform that happens to use AI. The focus shifted from artificial intelligence capabilities to institutional intelligence capture and deployment.

"every AI problem is actually a data problem and the data problem was really the most interesting thing that we learned from these Fortune 500 companies" — Omar Haroun

"all of the knowledge that they need...is currently distributed across a variety of SaaS applications and trapped in people's heads" — Omar Haroun

Strategic Acquisition to Accelerate Market Entry

Haroun acquired an alternative legal service provider (ALSP) to accelerate customer acquisition, expand share of wallet with existing clients, and gain deeper product insights from owning the human workflows they aimed to automate.

After raising $100 million in Series A funding, Haroun made a strategic acquisition that exemplifies his thesis about AI replacing human labor. Rather than competing with legal service providers, he bought one to accelerate Eudia's market penetration.

The acquired company operated as an alternative legal service provider (ALSP), employing former lawyers to deliver contracted services to enterprises like OpenAI, Stripe, and Citibank. This positioned Eudia between traditional law firms and fully in-house legal teams.

The acquisition served three strategic purposes: faster customer onboarding through existing relationships, expanded service offerings to current clients, and deeper product development insights from owning the actual service delivery processes.

"we were suddenly signing up their customers at sales cycles that were like fifty to eighty percent faster than if we'd gone to one of those customers on our own" — Omar Haroun

"instead of that thirty percent gross margin. We can see an eighty percent gross margin because we're not using AI to do most of the work" — Omar Haroun

• Faster sales cycles: 50-80% reduction in time to close existing ALSP customers
• Pricing model shift: From hourly billing to outcome-based contracts
• Service transformation: 30-minute contract turnaround vs. 5-hour traditional process
• Margin improvement: 80% gross margins vs. traditional 30% service margins

Scaling from Product-Market Fit to Revenue Growth

Haroun achieved product-market fit when customer referrals drove 90% of growth, allowing the sales process to consist of getting prospects in rooms with existing customers who would effectively close deals themselves.

Eudia's path to $20 million ARR reflects a disciplined approach to scaling that prioritized depth over breadth in the early stages. Rather than immediately scaling after initial traction, Haroun spent two years perfecting the product with a limited customer base.

The company maintained just 10 customers in year one, expanding to 20 in year two before scaling to 60 customers in the final months of 2025. This patient approach allowed them to achieve remarkable repeatability and customer satisfaction metrics.

The clearest signal of product-market fit emerged when customer advocacy became the primary growth driver. Existing customers became so enthusiastic about Eudia's impact that they effectively handled sales conversations with prospects, requiring minimal involvement from the company's sales team.

"anytime anyone talks to one of our customers, we get another customer. So our whole GTM engine is kind of, how do we just try to get our current customers in a room with prospects and at that point, we can walk away" — Omar Haroun

"we hit a million ARR right around six months...in the last twelve months, we've gone from $2 to $20 million ARR" — Omar Haroun

Playing to Win vs Playing Not to Lose

Having experienced a successful exit, Haroun approaches Eudia with a 'play to win' mentality, focusing on building a generational company worth billions rather than optimizing for near-term revenue or safe scaling strategies.

Haroun's previous $105 million exit fundamentally changed his approach to entrepreneurship, shifting from survival-focused strategies to aggressive growth tactics aimed at market dominance. This psychological shift influences every strategic decision at Eudia.

The difference manifests in how he approaches customer relationships and product development. Instead of targeting incremental improvements, he tells design partners upfront that Eudia aims to deliver $100 million in value over five years to justify the partnership investment.

This ambitious framing attracts enterprise buyers who think at scale while filtering out prospects looking for point solutions. It also aligns the entire organization around building platform capabilities rather than feature-driven products.

"I think most first time founders, or founders who haven't yet had a good exit. Deep down, they're often playing not to lose. They're not playing to win" — Omar Haroun

"I think a lot more about how do we get to a billion in revenue by 2030 and build a generational company. And win this market, than I do how do we optimize for sales cycles and this year's revenue" — Omar Haroun

Traditional SaaS vs AI-Enabled Services Approach