Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What do you want to do with this company? You have built a profitable company growing at 80%. What do you want to do with it?

John Rauscher: We want to become public. We want to keep on building and growing. As we have been positive, becoming public may come sooner than we think. When we think that it will be time to accelerate and raise money through IPO, then it will be the time to go public. Being profitable year after year is critical.

Sramana Mitra: From an IPO scale point of view, you’re still too small.

John Rauscher: Yes, but the market accelerates. We win larger deals. I cannot give names due to NDAs. The names and the customer success we have today is fantastic. We are the only artificial intelligence software focusing on generating a language where customers can configure by themselves. We see it gaining momentum now. We hope the 80% growth will go even faster. Probably, we are a few years away from even thinking about IPO. What’s important is that is possible.

Sramana Mitra: Where are you seeing the traction in terms of use cases or industry sectors?

John Rauscher: Where we are seeing the biggest traction is on the Smart machine side. Smart machine approach is an approach where we can automate expertise. We can bring expertise more reliably to help customers. Why has nobody been able to automate and to industrialize expertise? Because expertise requires three things. The first one is the ability to do reasoning based on best practices and experience. You do a reasoning on data. Data may be from an IT system or from a dialogue with the user. Being able to dialogue is important because when you talk to an expert, let’s say a doctor, your doctor will be asking you questions. Why do you suffer from your knee? Do you suffer when you put on weight? It’s the expert asking questions. Then you do a reasoning and provide a personalized answer.

We are the first solution that is able to automate that approach. Reasoning and dialogue from the software to the user, which is exactly the software asking question to the user to qualify the issues, problems, or requests. Google doesn’t generate content. You ask questions to Google and Google indexes documents that already exist. Yseop knows what is the subject and it can write an answer just for you. That is tremendous because it opens the door to a new market that is automating expertise in any industry. Every expertise can be put into Yseop. This is our big vision. This is where we see the momentum.

Sramana Mitra: What industry sectors are you seeing the traction?

John Rauscher: The easiest one for us is the financial market.

Sramana Mitra: Financial advisory?

John Rauscher: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have competition in the space?

John Rauscher: Yes, our competition is IBM Websense but they have a very different approach. People, very quickly, understand that the way they focus on expertise does not provide a personalized answer. There’s no dialogue. They aren’t able to provide a personalized answer. We have a different approach. What is great when you compete with very big guys like IBM is that there is a market. They say a lot about what they do. They raise the market because they’re big enough and credible and that brings the traction. Then people compare both and say, “Which one is best for me?” You can try our solution with a website that is called vetonline.com. It’s an example of Yseop technology. You will see that the system asks you questions without pre-defined scripts. There is no decision tree. The system provides a diagnosis.

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Self-Financing an Artificial Intelligence Software Company: John Rauscher, CEO of Yseop
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