
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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Aisera is doing some incredibly advanced stuff with AI-driven workflow automation within the customer service space.
Muddu talks eloquently about these innovations. Read on!
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Aisera.
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Sonny talks about AI in the physical security industry.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s introduce our audience to yourself as well as to Actuate AI.
Sonny Tai: I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Actuate. We are a New York-based AI startup. I was born in Taiwan, but I grew up in South Africa. I’m an immigrant to the United States.
>>>Deepak Balakrishna, Co-founder CEO of Adya, which was acquired by Qualys. We review his lessons from the trenches, steering a Bootstrapping to Exit transaction.
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Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in the second round?
Jonny Grubin: Probably about £300,000. In total, we raised about £900,000.
Sramana Mitra: Excellent. I love capital-efficient businesses.
>>>Sramana Mitra: 2014 and 2015, more of the same?
Jonny Grubin: Our focus and what I had built this business around was gifting samples to a friend. We were doing well with that. There was nobody else in the space. Brands loved it. We were on a pretty exciting trajectory. We had a lot of brands come to us saying, “We want to be able to sample in other ways. We don’t do it through just a gifting experience.” It was only down to my stubbornness that we focused solely on gifting for so long.
>>>In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here: