Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How did you get that off the ground?

Erik Severinghaus: It began with me just investing my own personal money – the money I made at IBM and some of the money that I made at iContact. After maybe a year or so of running it, I started to look for outside capital and raised about a million dollars seed round.

Sramana Mitra: When you went out to raise your seed round, what was the situation? Did you already have a product in the market? Did you have customers?

Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 1)

Erik discusses his journey as a serial entrepreneur and we deep dive into the Positioning of Bloomfilter.

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

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell me a bit about the structure of these. As you were revolving from these pilots to actual deployment, sounds like your platform was strengthening. Who was doing the application layer? Was a part of your team doing the application layer or the customer’s team doing the application layer?

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s trace this a little bit more granularly. When did you launch the company? When did you quit your jobs, or did you not quit your jobs? Did you start it before quitting your jobs?

Anthony Scodary: No, I quit my job in November 2012 and I think we started a day later. I think we decided we were going to do this in the fall of 2012. Nico had previously been at a video game streaming startup called OnLive in Palo Alto. Evan had sold his last company, which was called Zappedy.

Bootstrapping First, then Raising Money to Build a $10M+ Generative AI Startup: Anthony Scodary, Co-Founder of Gridspace (Part 1)

Gridspace is a wonderful case study of a speech technology company on the bleeding edge of Machine Learning and Generative AI. You will learn how the founders managed to bootstrap to large paying customers and then raise strategic funding. You will also learn the nuances of how they used various Open Source components and existing ML models to get to a point where they can afford to develop more original technology. You will also learn the importance of solutions versus technology platforms.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Now, do you also do the A/B testing on landing page optimization and things like that? Because that would be part of your lead generation process, right?

João Aroso: That’s a very clever question and a part of our roadmap because that obviously affects the end result. However, currently we rely only on the customer’s landing page.

Sramana Mitra: Where is the lead collected? Is it collected on the customer’s website?

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: At the point at which this switch is happening, what are the dynamics of the company? Do you have customers? Are you still operating with that 1.5M in financing?

João Aroso: We’re still operating with the 1.5M in financing, but we’re starting a new fundraise. We have some early customers in Portugal and Italy. We were trying to figure out where to go in terms of differentiation when we realized that with GPT-3, we wouldn’t be scalable. So, we were trying to figure out where we wanted to go in that moment. That’s when we realized from a business standpoint that the only thing that matters to our end customer is what business the campaign is generating.

Building a Generative AI Venture from Portugal: João Aroso, CEO of Leadzai (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So then how long did you do this business? And what kind of revenue levels or what kind of scale were you able to achieve?

João Aroso: We did that business for two years and one of my co-founders from my first startup is still there today. I left, but the company is still very healthy.