Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Where are you now in terms of metrics or objectives? Where are you and where are you going from here?

Cynthia Chen: We have cumulatively served over 2 million customers, and we have over 1 million active subscribers now.

Sramana Mitra: Paid subscribers?

Cynthia Chen: Yes, we have cumulatively increased credit scores by 80 million points and still counting. We helped our consumers get almost half a million of new auto loans opened after they started to build credit with us. We helped them secure over $5 million in total debt savings via our debt negotiation services. We also helped over 30,000 people become homeowners because they were able to secure mortgage after credibility. We are very, very happy with the results impact that we were able to achieve.

Sramana Mitra: And are you profitable as a company?

Cynthia Chen: We are.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of a trajectory are you seeing going forward? What kind of revenue metrics are you at right now? Are you looking for an exit? It’s now been five years since you’ve been doing this or more?

Cynthia Chen: Yes, five and a half years. Metrics wise, we are very strong. I think we are probably the fastest consumer FinTech company to achieve $100M annual recurring revenue. We would like this company to be hugely successful.

In terms of exit, we are pretty agnostic. I think we are just open to any kind of exit mechanism as long as it is a great outcome for our team members, our customers, and our investors.

Sramana Mitra: Did you raise any further money beyond series B?

Cynthia Chen: No, we did not.

Sramana Mitra: So, the whole thing has been built with about what $30-$40M?

Cynthia Chen: Historically, we raised a total of $42.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: $42.5M funding and you achieved a $100M plus ARR in five years.

Cynthia Chen: That was a while ago.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So, you are a legitimate unicorn company.

Cynthia Chen: We are. Yes. We are a unicorn.

Sramana Mitra: No, not only are you a unicorn, you’re a legitimate unicorn because you’ve revenue, profitability, everything.

Cynthia Chen: Right. Thank you. Yes, we’re legitimate. Our secondary shares are trading at a unicorn valuation. So, we are totally legitimate.

Sramana Mitra: In your core business that is revenue generating, what role is AI playing? How much AI are you using in your core revenue generating business?

Cynthia Chen: In our core revenue generating business,we use a lot of automation and our core business really has a lot of different components, and AI has been incorporated in the way we generate documents for consumers and everything.

Sramana Mitra: So, it’s more Insights Enabling technology. Yeah.

Cynthia Chen: Yes. Obviously, we use AI in everyday customer service. We have AI agents that answer to customers when they have a question via online chat bots.

Sramana Mitra: Fabulous. Congratulations. Wonderful Story. I love, I love that you have achieved a legitimate unicorn status and not some fufu metrics that don’t make any sense.

Cynthia Chen: Thank you. For us, financial independence is very, very important. I came to the US as a 17-year-old immigrant on a student visa with no family, no friends, no money but just two suitcases.

I understood from a very early age how important financial independence was. That’s why we built Kikoff in a very fiscally responsible way so that we would not have to keep raising venture capital, we would be sustainable and profitable, we built our own destiny.

Being able to own our own destiny means that we do not have to take unnecessary pressure from VC investors to do things that maybe maximizing profit over the short term at the expense of customer impact or experience.

This gives us the greatest degree of freedom in building mission-driven products that will benefit consumers in the longer term. That’s why we are very disciplined in the way we spend every single dollar so that we could be financially independent and we also want to achieve financial independence and security for all our customers.

Sramana Mitra: I have one last question, Cynthia, before we adjourn. Do you think your profitability is improving substantially by introducing AI into your workflow?

Cynthia Chen: Yes, absolutely. Because if we have to have too many manual processes, it’s going to increase our cost, and the cost will have to be passed on to consumers. By using AI to do customer service, to do a lot of the internal processes, customer facing processes, we can keep the cost very low so that we can operate with a very lean team.

The team is only 120to 130 people, but we are serving so many customers, it’s because we are really empowered by AI to be super-efficient.

Sramana Mitra: So 2 million users and 1 million paying customers are serviced almost entirely by AI.

Cynthia Chen: So, it’s a combination. We also have a call center. The call center is still human agents, but lots of the questions are answered by the online chat bot.

I think it is a combination, but I see AI taking a bigger and bigger portion of that customer service responsibility.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Fantastic. Congratulations again. Thank you. I’m really looking forward to doing your story.

This segment is part 7 in the series : Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff
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