Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 2)

Anji Maram: It triggered a need in me to do something – create a company and employment. I started thinking the way he thought. However, I was not able to figure out how to do all these things.

Bootstrapping a New Age AI Services Venture: Anji Maram, CEO of CriticalRiver (Part 1)

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.

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: Now, you raised your seed round on an IP-led hypothesis or plan.

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the P&Ls of these Infosys, WiPro, Persistence and various companies that have achieved scale in the services universe, how do the components of the P&L and the margins of these companies compare with the kind of company that you are looking to build?

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Right, you’ll learn as you go along. But there will be these three buckets, I think, even when you are a $100M or a $1B company. This is going to be the structure of your company. So the question then is, what is the distribution?

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Feroze, there are a few things that come to mind as I’m listening to you. First and foremost, you talked about delivery constraints and supply constraints in terms of the expertise that give you this moat. You haven’t talked about domain knowledge.

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, I’ve a number of questions. First and foremost, you said you acquired or acqui-hired the software from somebody that you started with. What is the financing of this company? Did you raise money? Did you self-finance? How did you acquire?

Building a New Age AI Services Company: Cognida CEO Feroze Mohammed (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, talk about what you pitched to your first clients and how you got them. Where does this begin?

Feroze Mohammed: Sure. I think even before we started, one thing we learned from our journey in Sierra Atlantic and later with Hitachi is to play the game only when you have an unfair advantage to win. And that comes from having very specific differentiation.