Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Aisera (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me more about this last use case where you take over the screen of the user and fix problems. How well-deployed is that?

Muddu Sudhakar: All of our customers are using that today. We now have 75 million users worldwide.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers is that?

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about the first customer? Was that a managed service provider or was it an end-user?

Sonny Tai: The first customer was an end-user. Our first employee attended a private school in Chicago called Francis Parker School. They’re very forward-thinking about how they want to deploy security technology to help protect their students. This school was our first customer. We started working with them on a pilot basis in mid-2018.

Cloud Stocks: Amazon to Test Prime Customer Stickiness

Earlier last week, Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN) announced its fourth-quarter results that had mixed reactions. While it fell marginally short of revenue expectations, it reported a significant increase in income, thus gaining the market’s confidence. For the longest time, Amazon decoupled growth and profitability, and the market went along with that sentiment. It is nice to see profitability returning to being a consideration.

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Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped with Services, Raised Money, and then Acquired by Salesforce

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

John Stewart and his co-founder have built MapAnything from Charlotte, North Carolina and Atlanta, Georgia. When we spoke in 2018, he had raised over $40 million in funding, proving that you can build sizable VC-funded SaaS businesses from anywhere. MapAnything was sold to Salesforce in May 2019.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where did you grow up? Give us some early story.

John Stewart: I’m from upstate New York. I’m from a middle class background. My mother was a stay-at-home mom. My father was in the construction business. He was an architect. I went to school in New England for Mechanical Engineering at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in western Massachusetts and graduated in 1997.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Muddu Sudhakar, CEO of Aisera (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you go back to the beginning of your journey and tell me about how you got this off the ground? Where did you get the data to train from? How did you get the customers to bet on your system in the very early stages?

Muddu Sudhakar: It was late 2017. The first thing to do is identify what you have to build. Having to stick with it is the key problem for us. You always need to have an initial set of customers. My initial set of customers were companies like McAfee and Zoom.

Thursday, February 10 – 563rd 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable for Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 563rd FREE online 1Mby1M Mentoring Roundtable on Thursday, February 10, 2022, at 8 a.m. PST/11 a.m. EST/5 p.m. CET/9:30 p.m. India IST.

If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea. You’ll receive straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and answers to any of your questions. Others can register to “attend” to watch, learn, and interact through the online chat.

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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Sonny Tai, CEO of Actuate AI (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Does it work in alerts?

Sonny Tai: We send alerts directly to the customer in any way they want. We integrate with their existing security protocols. It depends on what the customer security system looks like. It could be that they have a security operation center which means that they typically have a staff of a few guards who are monitoring intelligence in a room full of big-screen TVs pulled up.

We also have some smaller clients like schools and other organizations. They don’t have a security operations center. We send text message alerts to their security staff.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped First, Raised Money Later from Udupi, Karnataka

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

Robosoft Founder Rohith Bhat started a services company in his hometown – a small town on the west coast of Karnataka, India. When we spoke in 2017, fifteen years later, the company was generating $18 million in revenue and had raised two sizable rounds of VC funding. I found the story exhilarating!

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

Rohith Bhat: I was born in Udupi, India. It’s a small town on the west coast of the country. Then I went to the local school and university and studied engineering and computer science in 1992. Once I finished engineering, I had an opportunity to go on to work for a company in Japan for Recosoft. I worked for this company for around three and a half years.

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