Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz (Part 2)

Dorian Selz: What differentiates us from the pack is that most of these companies predominantly use external datasets, for example, for public reporting of the company. Our specialty is that we effectively crossed the bridge from outside to the inside. Most of our customers predominantly use us to analyze company internal datasets. These are quality reports, email, and all types of meeting minutes.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz (Part 1)

Dorian tells a great story of AI applications within Financial Services.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Squirro.

Dorian Selz: I’m the Founder of Squirro. Squirro is Zurich-based but global AI company. We have over 40 years of recognizing structured and unstructured data.

From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the customers are in the $10,000 range?

Julien Salinas: Among our paid customers, it’s 10%. Maybe a bit less.

Sramana Mitra: How much of this is what you call major account customers?

Julien Salinas: I don’t have the exact number today, but I think it’s something like 150 to 200 like SAP and Lufthansa.

Sramana Mitra: All the lead generation seems to be happening on your blog.

From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your customers are all developers?

Julien Salinas: Less and less, but still most of them.

Sramana Mitra: Is there a specific genre of developers? Are they developing a particular platform?

Julien Salinas: Initially, it was mainly machine learning engineers that use Python. All the machine learning engineers are Python developers. They taught me a lot of things. Then gradually, I started moving to a more global developer market. Today, I have developers who are developing on any platform and language.

From Developer to Entrepreneur with $20M in Bootstrapped Revenue: Julien Salinas, CEO of NLP Cloud (Part 1)

Numerous developers around the world are turning into successful entrepreneurs. Julien provides a textbook case study of a brilliant journey that is a highly repeatable blueprint to follow.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 4)

Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’ll give you an example. Today, 80% of data is hidden in documents in enterprises and is very inaccessible. Why don’t we apply AI to solve this problem? Let’s build a horizontal platform – a domain-agnostic platform – to extract information. While the platform can do it, as soon as you start throwing it to a customer, they say, “What do I do with it?” It’s a very natural question.

We went through an exercise of saying, “What are the areas that we can pick?” This is a problem that’s faced by many entrepreneurs. We don’t have domain capabilities. We are technologists. We build horizontal platforms. How do I bridge that gap? We decided to engage with a customer.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The use case that you just described works a lot better in automation than as humans. For humans to look at things and decide at what price to bid and whether to bid or not, there is no way humans can beat AI in doing something like this.

Sateesh Seetharamiah: It was done by humans. Even today.

Sramana Mitra: Wall Street traders made huge amounts of money in functions that don’t need to be done by humans.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: EdgeVerve CEO Sateesh Seetharamiah (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s pick three use cases and talk about what problem are you solving. What is exciting about that use case?

Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’ll pick three use cases that are publicly available. One of them is Philips. Philips had an opportunity to drive tremendous automation in its entire accounting and finance space. They had hundreds of people. Reliability was not up to the mark. There was a tremendous opportunity not just in terms of automation but also in terms of timely and efficient interventions.