Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel (Part 3)

Marc Vontobel: Without having very good positioning, we already created traction and signed some big deals with some Fortune 500 companies. That helped us find out the real use cases where we can have a real impact on the business. If you buy Starmind without having a clear use case in mind, you always depend on the vision of the buyer. We have found a few of those, but it’s not repeatable.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a very rare buyer who can take a technology and find an application for it. That’s not the way to build a company at all.

Marc Vontobel: And the buyers came in all forms and shapes – from a very modern progressive CIO to a digital transformation manager. You have to spread the word broadly that you cannot do that efficiently. In the beginning, the AI hook helped us create traction without knowing what the actual use case is.

Afterward, we found out that we have three main use cases where Starmind makes a lot of sense. One is in R&D. One of our big customers is Novartis. They use Starmind to develop new medicine. Every single day, they release a new medicine and that’s millions more in profit. There is a clear link to the business outcome. It makes sense to have a huge internal expert network where you can just find the right answer from outside of your department. That’s not just for pharma. CPG also has big R&D departments. That’s probably the most related to our origin.

The second one is in sales. If you work in a professional services company, you have to answer to all of those RFPs. Normally, what we see is these large organizations like Cognizant and Deloitte have large country entities.

Everything that you have already done in the country, you might find that knowledge internally. Everything that happens outside of your geography is very hard to tap into. To be a part of an RFP process where the response team is able to quickly tap into the experience of people outside of their direct team is something that increases the win rate of RFPs. Increasing the win rate is one of the most important KPIs for companies like these.

The third use case is not one that we found out ourselves. Our customer had outsourced their internal service center and just paid a flat fee for every single ticket. Normally, it takes three to five days for an agent to solve a ticket. We put Starmind in front of it and said, “Do you want to create a ticket? It takes three to five days. Or you could get an answer from a colleague. It just takes an hour.”

Sramana Mitra: Each of these use cases has its own TAM. In our world, we look at more bottom-up TAM than top-down. We look at how many such deals you can get around this use case. Have you done that?

Marc Vontobel: We have done that and they are way too big for a startup of our size. We further focused on certain industries. One thing that we learned is the narrower the use case, the easier it is to create traction. It looks great to have a huge TAM, but in the end, it doesn’t really help you decide where to start.

Sramana Mitra: You just underscored one of the things we say all the time.

Please don’t tell me you have a hundred-billion-dollar use case. You don’t. You have a small segment of that that you can fulfill.

How big is the R&D knowledge management use case in the pharma industry?

Marc Vontobel: We have one further way to narrow it down. At the moment, we only focus on four markets – the US, UK, Switzerland, and Germany. I couldn’t tell you how big the R&D market for those is.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Starmind CEO Marc Vontobel
1 2 3 4 5