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
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.
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
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?
In this case study, you will hear Vahe talk 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.