Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now, on this timeline, we are in 2022. This is also when AI is starting to hit the popular consciousness and the venture capital industry in a big way. What impact did that have on your product strategy, go-to-market strategy, et cetera? So, tell me more about what’s your AI strategy and

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Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise in your first round? Cynthia Chen: First round was $2.5 million. Sramana Mitra: What milestone did that get you to? Cynthia Chen: It got me to tens of thousands of active users.

Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go back to the beginning of when you decided to quit Figure and kicked off Kikoff, what were the circumstances? How did you kick this off? How did you get this off the ground?

Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Okay, but that’s not the company we are talking about today, right? Cynthia Chen: It’s not. I was at Figure for almost two years. I was the founding Chief Risk Officer and then became Chief Revenue Officer. Then I saw this opportunity for building a private company, and I started Kikoff with my

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Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to about 2012 when you have spent seven years in Deloitte in credit and consumer credit. What did you do next?

Building a Legitimate, Profitable FinTech Unicorn Using AI: Cynthia Chen, Founder of Kikoff (Part 1)

In the past year, 330 out of 1200 Unicorns have lost status. You read a lot about Unicorns that raise lots of VC money and then fail to scale. Cynthia Chen tells a very different story. She has raised about $43M and built a highly profitable $100M+ ARR company called Kikoff. Read on to learn

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Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your financing strategy. Ganesh Padmanabhan: We didn’t raise any moneyfor the first year until we got about $200,000 in revenue. Once you take money from an outside investor, you’re bound to that. For me personally, I wanted to have so much conviction before we actually raised outside capital. That was one

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Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like in your go-to-market strategy, you’ve operated as a co-pilot to human in the loop. Is that a correct observation?