Kaveh Rostampor

Kaveh Rostampor is co-founder and chief executive of Planhat, a Swedish customer platform that companies use to retain, grow, and serve the customers they already have. He co-founded the company with Niklas, a technical partner, after years of fighting customer churn himself, and funded it from revenue for its first six years.

A fighter first

Before software, he competed in martial arts. “I’ve been a Swedish champion in martial arts many times. I’ve been fighting for the national team,” he told The SaaS Podcast. He started in taekwondo, has also trained in jiu jitsu and Muay Thai, and still trains.

Built from his own churn problem

In 2014 he was managing customer accounts worth hundreds of millions of dollars in annual recurring revenue and fighting churn. His co-founder, Niklas, was working on the same problem from the technical side and started building Planhat while on paternity leave. They skipped formal customer research. “We sort of felt this ourselves firsthand for many years,” he said.

He calls Planhat “a post sales CRM,” and, as “a bit more nerdier way of thinking about it,” “a time series CRM” that follows each customer’s full life cycle.

Bootstrapped habits

He says the discipline of those self-funded years stayed after Planhat raised outside money. “The good thing with being bootstrapped is that when you start out, you know, everything everybody is doing has to create real value,” he said. “If it doesn’t, then you will die.”

In September 2025 he told Dagens industri that Planhat’s 22 percent revenue growth the year before was “skitdåligt,” Swedish slang for terrible, and promised much faster growth. His advice to other founders: “don’t listen to advice, especially from people that haven’t done the things that you’re trying to do.”