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Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Can you do one more level of double-clicking? You were distinguishing between clustering algorithms versus one-on-one recommendation and treating each individual as an individual. Can you explain how that works technically?

Jana Eggers: We take all of the product that you have. Let’s take retail. You may have groups of products and offerings. All of those products are connected to each other in a weighted graph to show how similar they are to each other across all of their attributes. Most people think of a product as a molecule. Think of our products as a bunch of atoms.

Those can be connected to each other in different ways and they’re not all the same type of atoms. One may be an iPad that has a certain level of memory. There’s a bunch of information about our product that we’re using and putting all of that information in a very large weighted graph to identify the product. How kid-friendly is a product? That’s part of the weighting in our graph that we figure out using lots of information that we have. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Where is the bulk of your business coming from? Is there a sector that dominates in your success?

Jana Eggers: It’s the large enterprises. We’re talking about the Global 1000.

Sramana Mitra: What industry sector? I’m trying to understand which use case is really dominating.

Jana Eggers: We aren’t saying that this is for retail, and going after retail. We’re overwhelmed with incoming leads. So many of the enterprises today realise that they’re not using their data efficiently and we’re one of those tools that can help them do that. Think of this more as business analytics that’s more of a horizontal. >>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Jana Eggers, CEO of Nara Logics (Part 1)

Most of the Artificial Intelligence recommendation engines are based on clustering algorithms and a limited number of parameters. Nara Logics is pushing the envelope on releasing both constraints, and going to a more granular level of personalisation. Read on to learn more.

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

Jana Eggers: I’m the CEO of Nara Logics. I’m a mathematician and a computer scientist. I started in research and really enjoyed the business side of technology and science. I went into technology—most of the time, in emerging tech. That was my career. Nara and I found each other, I would say, because I was looking for an opportunity that married science and business. That was what I was excited about when I spoke with the team about the work they are doing in artificial intelligence, but also the neural science that’s behind the idea. >>>

Building an Artificial Intelligence Software Company from Dallas: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: I wanted to ask you about location and where you’re building your team. Where is the bulk of the organisation?

Dave Copps: We’re in Dallas, Texas.

Sramana Mitra: Everything is in Dallas, Texas?

Dave Copps: We do have satellite offices. We have people in San Francisco, DC, New York, and London.

Sramana Mitra: But those are sales teams, right? You have your engineering and product team in Dallas? >>>

Building an Artificial Intelligence Software Company from Dallas: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you now?

Dave Copps: We are growing rapidly. In 2015, we grew 300%. I think it was our breakout year. We are already seeing that growth continue into this quarter.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of range are we talking? Is this now a $10 million company or a $20 million company?

Dave Copps: We’re not a startup anymore. I would call us an adolescent company that’s making multiple millions and growing very quickly. You were asking where we are. There are challenges as an entrepreneur as you reach different levels. When you reach a certain level, you have to change the structure of your company and business model a little bit to get to that next level. We’re at that point now. We are opening up new channels into the market.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re a $5 million to $10 million company? >>>

Building an Artificial Intelligence Software Company from Dallas: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Can you succinctly explain what it is that you have that these large companies don’t have that enables you to win those accounts?

Dave Copps: I’d say it’s two things. It’s our core technology and our user experience. We have built a technology that can learn dynamically without the use of any human intervention. Most companies out there, even the big ones with millions of dollars in funding, have some sort of a human-built portion – a lexicon or ontology – that backs their technology. We are one of the first companies to come out with this idea of completely unassisted learning.

You give me a million documents from your company, I’ll read those million documents and build them into an intelligent brain that everybody can use. We built a core technology that can learn dynamically from unstructured information without any human intervention, and that makes us very unique. One of the advantages it gives our customers is they can walk into virtually any company without any pre- >>>

Building an Artificial Intelligence Software Company from Dallas: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How big was the LexisNexis deal?

Dave Copps: It ended up being a multi-year deal that paid us over $3 million.

Sramana Mitra: That’s awesome.

Dave Copps: For a startup, it’s amazing.

Sramana Mitra: What about the early parts of this company? Obviously, you had made money from the previous company and you had some personal capital to put in. Did you put in personal capital or did you raise money? >>>

Building an Artificial Intelligence Software Company from Dallas: Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace (Part 3)

Dave Copps: I think when you have too much money, you get lazy. I like the idea that you’re always conscious of every dollar you spend. When I say we raised $3 million, that’s because we brought in more than that in revenue to continue bootstrapping a big piece of it. We were finally given a call by one of our clients. Marsh McLennan wanted to purchase the company and they did. We ended up selling the company for about $32 million.

Sramana Mitra: What year did you sell?

Dave Copps: I think that was late 2006.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do after that? >>>