Yasser Elsaid

Yasser Elsaid is the founder and chief executive of Chatbase, an AI customer support platform that lets businesses run one AI agent across chat, voice, email, and messaging apps. He grew up in Egypt, moved to Canada for university, and is known for building Chatbase by himself and growing it to more than 10,000 business customers without outside funding.

Off the big-tech track

He studied computer science in Canada, where, he told TechBeat Canada, everyone in his program wanted the same internship in California. “We called it ‘Cali or bust,’” he said. He interned at Tesla and then Facebook, and decided quickly that big companies were not for him. “It felt too safe, too structured.”

What he used later came from small projects he built on the side, a few of which found real users. When Meta did not give him a return offer, it felt like a setback. “In hindsight, it was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said.

A launch to 16 followers

In early 2023, while finishing his degree, he spent about two months building a tool that connected a large language model to a business’s own documents so people could question them in plain language. He announced it on Twitter to 16 followers. The post spread, and the first paying customer arrived within 30 minutes. Chatbase reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue 117 days after launch, according to EO Magazine.

Dozens of near-identical “chat with your PDF” tools followed within months. He moved Chatbase toward agents for businesses that take actions, hand conversations to people, and plug into systems such as Zendesk, Salesforce, and Shopify. “The lesson for founders is that your first product is a wedge, not a destination,” he said. In May 2026 the company launched Chatbase Voice, which puts the same agents on inbound phone calls.

Venture ambition, bootstrapped economics

Chatbase crossed $10 million in annual recurring revenue in May 2026 with a team of 26, most of them engineers. He says a bootstrapped mindset gets a company to profit and then holds it back. “If you want to build something huge, the biggest mistake is not being aggressive enough,” he said. He plans to base the team in New York, where he says 98 of the company’s top 100 target customers are.

He sees his own story as a sign that founders no longer need permission from investors. “I’m from Egypt. I moved to Canada for university. I launched a product to 16 Twitter followers. None of the traditional gatekeepers were involved at any point.”