Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You’re doing almost like an AI fintech incubator where you’re doing services projects for large companies. Those are exclusive. The datasets are on their premises. You’re not touching them, but you’re building the models for them. Then you’re taking the knowledge and turning them into SaaS that you take to the midmarket.
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Victor Allis bootstrapped Quintiq to $30M, raised funding, and then sold the company for over $300M. ActiVote is his second startup, currently self-funded. Sramana Mitra: Let’s start from the beginning. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background? Victor
Sramana Mitra: Now we’re in 2017? Vahe Andonians: 2018. Sramana Mitra: What problem were you going to solve next? Vahe Andonians: It all started with Moody’s. They approached me with a problem. The problem was extracting financial PDF. They had identified this as a pain point of the market. They had just created a unit
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. Mikel Lindsaar has built a services company in Australia and spawned six SaaS products out of it. One of them, StoreConnect, is a terrific Bootstrapping by Piggybacking story on top of Salesforce.com. He has exited four of the apps and expects to grow StoreConnect to $100M+
Sramana Mitra: What revenue level did you reach with this? Vahe Andonians: About $8 million. It was difficult. The 2009 to 2012 period was a difficult time for the area we were operating in. Sramana Mitra: Your clients were the banks and financial service institutions?
If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. RegTech is emerging to become a category of its own with numerous risk and compliance issues getting addressed by technology solutions. PerformLine Founder and CEO Alex Baydin has bootstrapped a wonderful business and is now doing a private equity-driven roll-up within the space. Sramana Mitra: Let’s
In this case study, you will hear Vahe talk a lot about bootstrapping – bootstrapping to exit, bootstrapping with services, so on. You will also learn a nifty way of building domain knowledge on top of horizontal AI expertise. This is a valuable and extremely interesting way of building AI companies for entrepreneurs to consider.
In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here: