How To Build AI / Machine Learning Startups | Sramana Mitra
The 1Mby1M Methodology is based on case studies. In this course, Sramana Mitra shares the tribal knowledge of tech entrepreneurs by giving students the rare seat at the table with the entrepreneurs, investors and thought leaders who provide the most instructive perspectives on how to build a thriving business. Through these conversations, students gain access to case studies exploring the alleys of entrepreneurship. Sramana’s synthesis of key learnings and incisive analysis add great depth to each discussion.
One of the single hottest trends in technology startups is Artificial Intelligence (AI). Machine Learning, Natural Language Processing, and various other nuances are being constantly applied to problems up and down the alleyways of all industries from Manufacturing, to Retail, to Education, to Drug Discovery.
All the methodology building blocks you have been learning through Sramana’s entrepreneurship fundamentals courses apply. You can, for instance, bootstrap an AI startup with Services, then raise money (or not). You can build a Unicorn (or not).
In addition, you will learn domain specific lessons from entrepreneur case studies and thought leader interviews. You will also listen to investor perspectives on AI ventures and new trends they (and Sramana) have identified.
Artificial Intelligence still has a lot of white space. Therefore, entrepreneurs looking for ideas to develop as new startups would do well to study the trend and the opportunities thereof. In the interviews, Sramana always spends time with practicing entrepreneurs exploring what open problems they see in their domains, from their respective vantage points. These serve as excellent pointers for entrepreneurs to go dig in fertile soil in search of pain points around which to build new startups.
Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning will be changing the world without question. Entrepreneurs with interest and expertise in this field are in high demand.
This course should help you streamline your thinking and zero in on a concrete game plan of where to focus and how.
The 1Mby1M courses are all heavily based on interview-based case studies on Innovation, Business Models, Go To Market Strategies, Validation Principles, and various other nuances of an entrepreneur’s journey. We offer extensive opportunities for entrepreneurs to learn the lessons from the trenches from successful entrepreneurs who have done it before and Investors who support their ambition.
How to Build Artificial Intelligence / AI Startups
CEO Adit Jain and his cofounders started Leena AI in India, bootstrapped to validation, applied to Y Combinator, and got in. Since then, they’ve built a fantastic, venture-funded global HR Tech business that is successfully competing with Salesforce and ServiceNow. Superb story!
Founder Nitesh Chawla bootstrapped Aunalytics while keeping his academic job at Notre Dame.
Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa is a software developer who made a successful transition to an entrepreneur and had a quick exit with his first venture. His second venture is already at $5M+ in revenues with just a pre-seed round of financing. This venture, Behemics, has already received two acquisition offers. Fabulous story!
Aparna Dhinakaran, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer of Arize, talks about the missing Machine Learning infrastructure tools that she needed as a ML engineer, and how she went on to build them.
We’ve covered ML Ops before in interviews such as Arize. Gideon provides a comprehensive overview of how the space is evolving and the opportunities on the horizon.
I always love doing stories of my readers. Findability Sciences CEO Anand Mahurkar has been following the blog since 2010. He has built a terrific, fundamentals-focused AI company. And I am thrilled :-)
Yellow.ai CEO Raghu Ravinutala has built an incredible, world class AI startup from India with a global base of enterprise clients. Fabulous story!
Deepak Gaddipati, Founder of VirtuSense, has built a capital efficient fall-detection company from Peoria, Illinois with a backend engineering team in Rawalpindi, Pakistan. It’s an impressive entrepreneurial journey with a mission-driven company that is making real impact in the lives of seniors with fall risk.
This is a very interesting story of bringing really complex technology from India to the global market with a complex sales cycle. The long term potential is huge. The short term complexity of the business is equally huge. The founding team is doing an admirable job navigating the opportunity with commitment and resolve.
Infima Founder and Chief Scientist Kay Giescke is a Stanford professor. He has applied Deep Learning Models to various use cases within the Mortgage and Mortgage-backed Securities space to build Decision Support tools for Traders and Portfolio Managers. The general principle applies to other forms of credit as well, besides Mortgage.
Arijit Sengupta is Founder and CEO at Aible. Previously, Arijit founded another AI startup, BeyondCore, which was acquired by Salesforce.com. This is an excellent discussion, and I urge you to check it out.
Jana Eggers is CEO of Nara Logics. 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 personalization.
Lloyed Lobo, Co-founder and President of Boast.ai, discusses his failures and eventual success building AI startups. Wonderful conversation.
Oleg Rogynskyy is Founder CEO of People.ai. This is a fantastic discussion on how to cold-start an AI company, build it to scale, etc. Also, excellent guidance on white spaces around which to build new AI companies.
Sivakumar Lakshmanan, Co-CEO of Antuit.ai, has bootstrapped an AI SaaS company with Services. He shares invaluable insights on accessing data for building AI models and product strategy choices the company has made.
In this discussion with Jeff Feng, CEO of CloudPick, we explore use cases of Vision Sensors within AI.
CEO Carl Ryden and his co-founders have bootstrapped Precision Lender to over $10M from North Carolina. It’s a superb story, including how the company has formulated an AI agent Andi.
Here are more instructive and inspiring case studies of AI startups for you to learn from. The transcripts of our interviews are shared as external resources:
Dave Copps, CEO of Brainspace: Artificial Intelligence startups are very hot these days. Read how Dave Copps has built Brainspace from Dallas.
Amjad Hussain, CEO of Algo.ai: I am always thrilled to see great entrepreneurship in various parts of the world that are off-center. Well, here’s a great one from Detroit.
John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop: John has self-financed and scaled an interesting AI software company built on French technology, and would like to take it public. Very impressive execution!
Akli Adjaoute, CEO of Brighterion: Dr. Adjaoute is a leading figure in the international cognitive science community and the CEO of Brighterion, which offers a full suite of products for real-time fraud prevention, compliance, and homeland security intelligence.
Sanjay Jupudi, CEO of Qentelli: AI will disrupt outsourcing services companies in a very big way. We talk to Sanjay on how he plans to prepare.
Investor Perspectives on Artificial Intelligence
Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures, discusses AI, PaaS and Deeptech investments.
Alok Nandan discusses explainable AI in the context of Emergent Ventures’ investment focus. Alok is now Founding General Partner at First Rays Venture Partners.
Evangelos Simoudis, Founder and Managing Director at Synapse Partners, takes us on a deep dive into AI investing.
Eric Benhamou is Founder and General Partner, Benhamou Global Ventures.
Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence
Aisera is doing some incredibly advanced stuff with AI-driven workflow automation within the customer service space. CEO Muddu Sudhakar talks eloquently about these innovations. Read on!
Actuate AI CEO Sonny Tai talks about AI in the physical security industry,
DARVIS CEO JP Mohr discusses his virtual Computer Vision company that spans Germany, Nashville, Islamabad and more, and caters to very large customers in Logistics, Retail and Healthcare.
This discussion with Yamin Durrani, CEO of Kami Vision, explores the cutting edge use cases in Computer Vision across Home, Health, Retail, etc. Excellent perspective into viable GTM strategies.
We explore the topic of Vertical AI further in this interview.
Squirro CEO Dorian Selz tells a great story of AI applications within Financial Services.
AI and ML are largely being applied to problems within the enterprise. Here is an exception where a solution to an SMB problem is being achieved through AI. Very cool story!
The field of customer service is getting revolutionized as AI and ML drive tremendous value out of data. SupportLogic works in the B-to-B tech sector and drives immense gains.
Big Data Analytics and Machine Learning techniques are starting to achieve dramatic impact on drug discovery and precision medicine. Pumas.ai is a bootstrapped venture at the cutting edge of the field. I learned much from this conversation. You will too!
In this interview, we explore the priorities of enterprise decision makers through the lens of an AI platform vendor.
Manyam Mallela, Co-founder and Head of AI at Blueshift, talks about another variation of the personalized marketing topic during this podcast interview.
QuillBot CEO Rohan Gupta discusses AI-empowered writing as an emerging field. The company has 12 million users and has recently been acquired by Course Hero.
Raj Koneru, CEO of Kore.ai, is building his fifth company, a conversational AI platform and solutions venture. I really like the PaaS strategy he shares during this podcast interview.
During this podcast interview, we had a terrific conversation with David Talby, CTO of John Snow Labs, about NLP and domain specific taxonomy building within the healthcare and pharmaceutical industry. 50% of the customers are ISVs building on top of their platform!
This is an awesome podcast interview with Vasco Pedro, CEO of Unbabel, on the cutting edge of language translation. Note, a large chunk of Unbabel’s customer base comes from the Zendesk PaaS ecosystem. On the other hand, Unbabel itself would, most likely, create its own PaaS ecosystem to address a broader range of use cases.
During this podcast interview, Wasim Khaled, CEO Co-founder at Blackbird.ai, delves into how fake news and misinformation are playing havoc with modern society.
CEO Zohar Bronfman's Pecan.ai is a terrific PaaS company in the making with substantial predictive capabilities.
Martin Neale, CEO of ICS, has built his AI startup within the Microsoft ecosystem. He shares interesting perspectives on how to leverage Microsoft.
Pandio Founders, CEO Gideon Rubin and CTO Josh Odmark, explore AI Connectivity in this discussion.
First, Sramana Mitra answers the question, "What could be good ideas for Artificial Intelligence startups?" Below we share as external resources these meaningful and memorable conversations with AI thought leaders for you to read:
Ashutosh Garg, CEO of Eightfold.ai: This is one of the best AI interviews I have done. Ashutosh has founded two AI-driven companies, so have I. We kick around heavy-duty material.
Danny Tomsett, CEO of UneeQ: This is an exciting conversation on cutting-edge Digital Human technology and its applications. Very cool stuff!
Ram Swaminathan, CEO of BUDDI.AI: BUDDI.AI is taking an AI-driven approach to healthcare coding and billing.
Spence Green, CEO of Lilt: This is a terrific conversation about a SaaS-enabled BPO company, Lilt, in the domain of language translation.
Zach Shelby, CEO Edge Impulse: Zach is building a Machine Learning platform company upon which 12,000 developers are building apps. This is a terrific conversation that spans how to build developer networks for a PaaS company, and numerous related issues.
Divyabh Mishra, CEO of CrowdANALYTIX: Super interesting crowdsourced data model conversation! 25,000 data scientists participating in building algorithms for specific use cases.
Charlie Delingpole, CEO of ComplyAdvantage: This conversation explores the use of AI to create a database of questionable players to address money laundering and other shady behavior. Excellent PaaS strategy.
Carlos Melendez , COO of Wovenware: Wovenware is a Puerto Rico-based AI solutions company working in Computer Vision and Insight Management.
Venkatesh Bala, Chief Risk Officer, Biz2Credit: Small business credit has been upended in COVID. Banks are processing PPP loans at a frantic pace without the scalable infrastructure to do so. This discussion delves into the realities of that world.
Peter Brodsky, CEO of Hyperscience: AI-enabled automation is making good headway. This discussion looks at some use cases.
Mike Orr, CEO of Grapevine6: This conversation delves into the whitespaces in Content Marketing that AI enables.
Stuart Nisbet, Chief Data Scientist, Cadient Talent: A conversation on AI in the hiring space.
Prashant Kumar, CTO of Cardinality: This is a deeply technical discussion about a specific layer of the technology stack where Data Engineering and other data related disciplines are handled.
Frequently Asked Questions / FAQs
Additional Content
Please pick your favorite case studies from the course and run them through a validation and positioning exercise. Use the 1Mby1M Self-Assessment questionnaire and try to answer each question in it.
Here are examples of some pitches that took place during one of our free and online mentoring roundtable programs. You will find a pitch template under Resources. Once you are ready, come pitch your business idea at an upcoming 1Mby1M Roundtable.
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