Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: My thesis is that the best approach to build truly serious, complex systems leveraging all the capabilities of AI—whether it’s generative AI, agent-based AI, or others—is to go to market as an IP-plus-services company. Pick domains to focus on and develop deep domain expertise. That, I believe, is one of the most effective ways to build very, very valuable companies. Is that what you’re trying to do?

Marty Sprizen: Well, a little bit different. We supply the technology to the types of companies you’re talking about.

Sramana Mitra: No, I don’t think so. The types of companies I’m talking about have serious technologies of their own. If you’re talking about supplying technology to Accenture, KPMG, and Infosys, that’s different. That’s not the category of companies I’m talking about.

Marty Sprizen: Okay. I’m talking about supplying technology to startups. For example, we’re working with a healthcare startup doing remote patient monitoring. There are some real challenges in that area.

You probably heard about the Hajj where thousands of people died from heat stroke. We’re working with a company building a solution using our technology—monitoring and location services—to help with that kind of problem.

Another company is building a monitoring system for Air Force personnel before they’re deployed.

So maybe it’s a little different. But what we do is work with startups. The advantage we offer is time to market. Yes, they could do it themselves, I think, and that’s what you’re saying. But we can build an application using a component where you describe the app and its performance requirements.

We’ll deploy components on the edge, in the cloud, and set up the communications—a very advanced event broker. We structure the whole system by simply talking to it.

Sramana Mitra: Okay, so your model is: you have these platform components, and you want startups with domain expertise to build the application layer. That’s the model you’re working with?

Marty Sprizen: That’s half of it. The other half, as you pointed out, involves working with large firms like Deloitte. We also have a large company in Japan building 20 applications with us. They’re a large product company, building their next-generation products with us. So our model is a hybrid in that case.

Sramana Mitra: But is that the end customer? Or is there a system integrator between you and that Japanese company building the 20 applications? Are they a direct customer?

Marty Sprizen: They’re actually a very large product company. They also do some system integration. They build products in healthcare and manufacturing for other big companies. They view this as building their next-generation systems.

For example, they already have a manufacturing system managing production for large companies. But it’s not real-time. They’re using our tech to add to that and build a next-gen real-time system.

Sramana Mitra: What is the organizing principle behind the types of customers you’re targeting? What verticals? Or is it completely vertical-agnostic—a pure horizontal play?

Marty Sprizen: Pretty much, yes. What we’re seeing is that governments are pushing for applications to be built in sectors like healthcare, disaster management, and defense—including drone applications. When those pushes happen, we have partners building the apps for those markets.

But we don’t want to build that vertical expertise ourselves. We focus on the infrastructure. We’re almost like a next-generation operating system—an environment where people can build super-scalable, reliable systems very quickly.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen
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