Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

In this case study, Cognaize Founder Vahe Andonians talks 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.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Vahe Andonians: I was born in Iran. When I was a couple of weeks old, we moved to the United States. Then my parents moved to Austria. I grew up in Austria. I studied there. I studied high-frequency technology. I did my first job there. From there, we went to Germany. I’ve lived in Germany now for 12 years.

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Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 4)

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.

Vahe Andonians: It is correct, but not that we’re learning from the data and selling that. We develop our platform and we sell it.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services to a $300M+ Exit

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 Allis: I was born in the Netherlands to a middle-class family. My dad worked as a plant manager in the aircraft industry. My mom took care of five kids. I was the youngest of five with four sisters. In school, I was the second-best in math in the Netherlands. I took part in competitions. I became a math student with the dream of becoming a math professor.

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Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 3)

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 called Moody’s Accelerator which was trying new ideas and products. They approached me along with others and asked us if we can automate it.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped Using Services and Piggybacking

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+ in revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Mikel Lindsaar: I’m Australian. I was born in Adelaide in South Australia which is the driest state in the driest nation.

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Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 2)

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?