Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you did the spin off and InQTel was part of that process, were they aware of the kind of go-to-market that you were going to pursue?

John Benkert: We explained what we wanted to do and why we wanted to do it. They were great partners and gave us great feedback.

Sramana Mitra: How much did you raise from InQTel?

Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on what you said. I get the sense that you have a company where you were experimenting with some technology. You were experimenting with how to protect data. Explain more about the technology.

Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You retired from the Air Force and decided to do your own company.

John Benkert: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: What were you going to offer and to whom?

Blocking Ransomware at the Hard Drive Level: John Benkert, CEO of Cigent (Part 1)

Ransomware is a key Cyber Security challenge that drives enterprises and governments crazy. John has built a very interesting company to address this problem with a unique approach and lots of patented Intellectual Property. In this case study, you will also learn a lot about Go To Market Strategy through Firmware.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s go to the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised? What kind of background?

Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. You’re doing almost like an AI fintech incubator where you’re doing services projects for large companies. Those are exclusive. The datasets are on their premises. You’re not touching them, but you’re building the models for them. Then you’re taking the knowledge and turning them into SaaS that you take to the midmarket.

Vahe Andonians: It is correct, but not that we’re learning from the data and selling that. We develop our platform and we sell it.

Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Now we’re in 2017?

Vahe Andonians: 2018.

Sramana Mitra: What problem were you going to solve next?

Vahe Andonians: It all started with Moody’s. They approached me with a problem. The problem was extracting financial PDF. They had identified this as a pain point of the market. They had just created a unit called Moody’s Accelerator which was trying new ideas and products. They approached me along with others and asked us if we can automate it.

Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level did you reach with this?

Vahe Andonians: About $8 million. It was difficult. The 2009 to 2012 period was a difficult time for the area we were operating in.

Sramana Mitra: Your clients were the banks and financial service institutions?

Bootstrapping with Services at the Cusp of AI and FinTech: Vahe Andonians, Founder of Cognaize (Part 1)

In this case study, you will hear Vahe talk a lot about bootstrapping – bootstrapping to exit, bootstrapping with services, so on. You will also learn a nifty way of building domain knowledge on top of horizontal AI expertise. This is a valuable and extremely interesting way of building AI companies for entrepreneurs to consider.