Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapped a New Age AI Services Venture

CEO Anji Maram has bootstrapped CriticalRiver to $50M in revenue and is introducing AI into his services business model. We expect to see a lot of this happening all over the tech services ecosystem. AI Services is going to become a massively valuable category. Sramana Mitra: All right, Anji, let’s start at the very beginning

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Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You said at the beginning of the interview that you were trying to make up for the margin gap in services companies with velocity. Did you succeed in doing that? In the ten years that you’ve been in business, did you succeed in growing at a very high velocity?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: A lot of enterprise conversational AI applications that you’re talking about are happening more on the customer end – customer service, sales, or customer relationship management. It’s not much on the finance end. So, you rightly point out that this is a more of an open area where you’re starting to see traction.

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Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now I’m going to ask you about the delivery side. So you and your friend Chandra started the business. How did you grow the implementation team?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: If you quantify what was happening in these accounts, you were landing the accounts with your ERP channel and partnership management expertise and then growing those accounts. So, when you landed those accounts, what were the deal sizes and what kind of deal sizes were you able to expand these accounts to?

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: In this niche, did you have customer relationships? Anji Maram: Yes. Especially in the Bay Area, there were several customers who needed this business process to be implemented. Due to my consulting experience and my prior company’s experience, we already had a trusted relationship with the industry.

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 2)

Anji Maram: It triggered a need in me to do something – create a company and employment. I started thinking the way he thought. However, I was not able to figure out how to do all these things.

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 1)

Anji has bootstrapped CriticalRiver to $50M in revenue and is introducing AI into his services business model. We expect to see a lot of this happening all over the tech services ecosystem. AI Services is going to become a massively valuable category.