Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Healthcare is big, but it’s cumbersome. It’s one of the biggest exit barrier systems, right? You’ve all these legacy systems that refuse to exit, that refuse to budge, and entrepreneurs have a really hard time getting their toehold – not even foothold – toehold into those homes.

Where did you find the entry point of something that you could sell?

Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How long did you stay there?

Ganesh Padmanabhan: About two and a half years. During that time, we went from about $3 million to about $30 million ARR. It was very fast growth. It was early days of AI and we learned a lot.

Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Okay. So, now I have a picture of your timeline to double click down on. So, tell me about the startup that you did – where you got acqui-hired. How long was that journey?

Building a High Growth Vertical AI Company in Healthcare: Ganesh Padmanabhan, CEO of Autonomize AI (Part 1)

Ganesh has executed on a textbook case study of building a vertical AI company in Healthcare with a clear human-in-the-loop strategy that VCs are salivating over. Read on, much to learn.

Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: So, what you’re describing is a very interesting scenario where you were able to incubate the company to a very large degree – $18.3 million revenue level within your parent company, and the board let you do that. It’s amazing that you were able to do this at this scale.

Now, how many people went with the spinoff – you and your co-founder and who else?

Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Wow. So, by this time you have spun out into a separate entity?

Christian Geyer: Not yet.

Sramana Mitra: Not yet. So, this $18.3 million is happening within, as a subdivision of the original company. Okay, and you’re probably making a lot more money than the original company, right?

Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How much did get paid by this customer that gave you the first use case?

Christian Geyer: I believe it was $300,000.

Sramana Mitra: And this $300,000 came into the original company?

Bootstrapping a High Growth Cyber Security Venture with a Paycheck: Christian Geyer, CEO of ACTFORE (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Were you aware of this regulatory requirement in your original business?

Christian Geyer: Yes. I was part of a cybersecurity incident response company back in 2016 at the Crypsis group I had talked about. We sold it for $260 million to Palo Alto Networks, a cyber security company.