Sramana Mitra: So now what about the go-to-market strategy? What were you settling into? You were talking to customers all this while. What was emerging as the go-to-market strategy?
Sramana Mitra: So, what gave you confidence that you would be able to solve this problem and build a product? Did you have an architecture already laid out? Did you have the product design already in place?
Sramana Mitra: Did you quit and then start or did you start while you still had your job? How did you get started?
Jonathan has found a great, very large niche within the AI-powered Developer Tools space.The idea was born out of deep domain knowledge and customer exposure. VCs love such depth of technical insights and have funded Moderne lavishly.
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.
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.
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.
Sramana Mitra: Now, you raised your seed round on an IP-led hypothesis or plan.