Making Millions Out Of Artificial Intelligence: Brighterion CEO Akli Adjaoute (Part 4)

Sramana: What happened with the company that you started as a PhD student?

Akli Adjaoute: My biggest customers were French and European firms, as well as the military and some banks in France. The company grew to 62 people, and we made about $5 million of revenue per year.

The banks were using our software to make determinations about when to buy or sell currency. Another application was to try and find the best way to overcome fraud in paper money. The people that deliver the money on the trucks would use the software to determine the best route to take to avoid getting attacked en-route. There were a lot of attacks against bank trucks at that time in France. Gangs would blow up the truck to get to the money. We would evaluate calendar days and traffic routing, as well as other factors.

For the military we designed an application for a French Leclerc tank. We evaluated the data and imagery we received to determine the best way to position the turret. Some of the military aircraft manufacturers used the software as well to optimize engine performance.

Sramana: Would you build custom-designed smart agent applications for these customers?

Akli Adjaoute: I started with smart agents and then I added business rules, neural agents, and several other technologies. We had 10 technologies in total. We added fuzzy logic, simulation, constant programming, genetic algorithms, data mining, and we also had our own interpreter similar to the eventual Java interpreter. We integrated all of those technologies and got them working together.

Sramana: What happened to that company? Did you sell it?

Akli Adjaoute: One day I received a call from one of my students in California. He told me there was a benchmark review of data mining tools and they wanted to see what our technology could do. The reviewed our technology and their report determined that our data mining technology was the most advanced available. It made the news all over France, which was compacted by companies in the U.S. who wanted to work with me based on the results of that report.

I decided that in order to be involved in the technology world, I needed to move to California. When I moved here I thought I would start something, hire an American CEO, and go back to France. My wife was not interested in moving to the U.S. Once I got here and I started looking at the markets, we determined that real-time fraud prevention was the right market.

Initially we started with healthcare fraud before I realized that the market for a company like us would be better suited for consumer fraud. MasterCard was looking and comparing all the products at the time and we had the opportunity to be in that comparison. They were impressed, so we did some real live data testing in Europe for them, primarily in Belgium. In 2005, they did some testing in Italy and moved to U.S. testing in 2006. In 2007, they bought a license.

Because MasterCard liked the product so much, they decided to resell it to all of their bank members. They also elected to become investors in the company. Today we are proud to have a great partner who is the best partner we could ever have dreamed of. We are proud that their real-time scoring system is based on our product.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Making Millions Out Of Artificial Intelligence: Brighterion CEO Akli Adjaoute
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