Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later and Build a World-Class AI Startup from India: Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of Yellow.ai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What are the numbers on Series B and Series C?

Raghu Ravinutala: In series B, we raised about $20 million. In Series C, we raised about $79 million.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a lot of money that you’ve raised. You’d have to build a huge company to return that investment. One of the things I’m hearing from a lot of enterprise startups that sell to the enterprises is that it has become easier to sell to the international market because buyers have become used to evaluating and buying online. Are you experiencing that as well?

Raghu Ravinutala: What we have seen in Asian markets is that with the COVID-related changes, a lot of our large enterprise deals are happening online. A lot of deals in North America also happen online, but they happen online with local field sales. We didn’t have as much success with remote teams selling into the North American markets for the enterprise.

At this time, SMB and commercial is not a market we’re able to find a sweet spot in. That is the nuance. We still went ahead and invested in local marketing in the North American market. That shifted the need significantly on how fast we were able to generate traction.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about positioning. You didn’t come into a virgin market. There are quite a few of automated self-service customer support companies. Talk about the space and how you differentiate. What scenarios and use cases are you winning? Where do you have an unfair advantage?

Raghu Ravinutala: This space, from the outside, looks competitive. It is competitive, but it looks even more cluttered from the outside. Having a nice positioning on why you’re relevant to a customer is super important. We defined that along three axes.

One is around the channels. A lot of our competition is either on chat or voice just because of the history around the specific channels they support. Right from the beginning, we have seen voice and chat as constants.

The second is the ability to drive autonomous transactions. Somebody calls an airline to reschedule their ticket. You could still automate that conversation by saying that you will take your data and somebody else reschedules at the backend. The conversation is still automated, but the process is not.

Coming from the Asia-Pacific messaging-first markets, here the messaging is not seen as a supplementary channel. Here, it’s a core channel. You need to get banking transactions done. You need to reschedule them entirely on chat. There’s a nice workflow agent that works along with the conversation automation. End-to-end autonomous completion and automation have been a significant capability. Maybe we are the company that processes the most number of transactions on conversations than any other company in the world.

The third part is born in a multi-lingual environment. We have the most multi-lingual conversations happening in real-time. For companies that have a multi-geography presence and users with multiple languages, our solution is differentiating. When we put all this together, what we are delivering is not a single-channel CX automation, but it’s a total experience.

Companies are out looking at that total experience. If they are looking for a virtual assistant that can handle hundred-plus tasks in a single front-end interface, we come out as a differentiated platform for that.

Sramana Mitra: Good description. Multilingual is one, and voice and text are another. Then the chat platforms. Given that positioning, whom do you see in deals? Do you see Aisera?

Raghu Ravinutala: Not a lot. We do see Moveworks and Core.ai.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Bootstrap First, Raise Money Later and Build a World-Class AI Startup from India: Raghu Ravinutala, CEO of Yellow.ai
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