Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk to me a bit about your go-to-market strategy? I understand the system integrator part is straightforward. You do partnerships with system integrators who build on top of your platform.

When you’re choosing to work with startups or product companies who are building their products on your platform, how do you find these people? How do they find you? What’s the go-to-market strategy for that?

Marty Sprizen: We go to a lot of seminars. We’re well represented at the Smart City Council. We also have a lot of contacts in industries like healthcare. Dr. Ryan Vega works with me—he used to be the Chief Innovation Officer at the VA, so he has strong connections and knows what some of the startups are doing. To some degree, it’s personal connections.

Sramana Mitra: So it sounds like a more personal than a formal go-to-market strategy. The system integrator part is more structured, but the product partnerships seem more opportunistic.

Marty Sprizen: That’s accurate. We have a brigadier general on our team who ran the RAF in Afghanistan. He knows the key players in that space, which is helping us get into defense. So it becomes a lot of word-of-mouth. Mass marketing doesn’t work like it used to.

Sramana Mitra: Enterprise software sales has never really relied on mass marketing. It’s always been about targeted, repeatable sales processes. There are established playbooks—we teach those playbooks. It sounds like you’re doing a combination of standard approaches and high-leverage, opportunistic outreach.

Marty Sprizen: That’s right. In healthcare, we know the major players—Philips, Siemens, GE. We know who they are and often who to speak to.

Sramana Mitra: And where your instincts are right is that a lot of these product companies, like GE Healthcare, don’t necessarily have high-level AI expertise. That kind of talent is rare. Look at what Meta is doing—trying to poach talent from OpenAI with $100 million bonuses. It’s not a scalable model.

Marty Sprizen: I agree. We often work directly with customers. We have AI expertise and can either help architect the solution or, in some cases, build the entire application with their guidance. Then we transfer the knowledge so they can manage it going forward.

Sramana Mitra: How did you fund the company? Was it all personal?

Marty Sprizen: Not entirely. We’ve raised about $100 million. I’m the biggest funder, and my co-founder, Paul Butterworth, also put in a lot. It’s mostly been friends and family, with very little VC money. Lately, some of our partners—large companies with their own VC arms—have shown interest in investing in our next round.

Sramana Mitra: I see. Is there anything else you’d like to share that we haven’t covered?

Marty Sprizen: Yes, I just want to emphasize why I started the company—to give back and help the world. While we aim to be financially strong, there’s a major shift happening in real-time systems. We’re about to automate so many tasks people currently do manually. This will fundamentally change how the world operates. With disasters like climate change, automation is becoming essential. Software is going to run the world, and this is the biggest market opportunity I’ve ever seen.

Sramana Mitra: On that note, I have a suggestion. Since you have strong healthcare connections, do you have any at Epic?

Marty Sprizen: I don’t think so. We have contacts at Cerner but not Epic.

Sramana Mitra: Epic has a huge share in health systems. They’re deeply embedded in hospitals and clinical environments, but they’re doing a poor job of integrating AI. AI penetration in healthcare is minimal, and Epic is a major bottleneck. If you can get into Epic and help them think through how to integrate AI, it would be game-changing.

Let me give you a use case: At Stanford Health, which uses Epic, there’s no feature that alerts for medication interactions or helps identify which drug may be causing a side effect like a rash. These are basic functions that should exist—and in real time—but they don’t.

Marty Sprizen: I might know someone who can help. One of our advisory board members, Dr. Saurabh Bhatnagar, is a Harvard MD and director. He’s involved with Epic in some capacity, so I’ll speak with him. He might have some insights or access.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Well, good luck and let’s keep in touch.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building an AI Platform Company for Real-Time Applications: Vantiq CEO Marty Sprinzen
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