Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We’ve been covering the AI trend quite extensively for a while now. There are so many interesting use cases in all segments. I’ve always been really excited about AI as a technology, but it took a long time to find its stride.

Shariq Mansoor: Yes, that’s because people are now focusing on solving problems. All the pieces needed to come together.

Sramana Mitra: The pieces were not there. All the pieces have come together now. Tell me a little bit about your company. You said you’ve been around since 2005 and you had some angel investors. What was the evolution of the company?

Shariq Mansoor: We started through angel funding. Some of our investors are, themselves, entrepreneurs. We angel-funded until the market started picking up.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Shariq Mansoor: From 2005 to around 2013, nobody was listening to cloud.

Sramana Mitra: They were listening to cloud, but they were not listening to AI. Cloud has been getting traction since 2007 to 2008.

Shariq Mansoor: Cloud application was there, but there are two levels of cloud application. In our case, we need core data for their systems.

Sramana Mitra: Until 2013, you angel-funded?

Shariq Mansoor: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How much angel funding did you put into the company?

Shariq Mansoor: It was around $6 million.

Sramana Mitra: That’s a lot of money from angels.

Shariq Mansoor: Yes, because they believed in this.

Sramana Mitra: But you were generating revenue all along?

Shariq Mansoor: Yes, but we wanted to go to the next level.

Sramana Mitra: So it was a linear growth until about 2013?

Shariq Mansoor: Yes. Then we started a fundraising process. We got so much excitement from the venture community, including NEA. They were very excited about it and they funded FusionOps. We closed it in 2014.

Sramana Mitra: Who at NEA?

Shariq Mansoor: Jon Sakoda. Then things started moving faster.

Sramana Mitra: You found the inflection point.

Shariq Mansoor: Exactly. Before NEA, we had under 20 employees. Within a year, we had over 100 employees. Earlier this year, we raised another round from Georgian Partners, a company that NEA wanted to bring in because they’re very focused on the applied analytics side.

Sramana Mitra: How many customers do you have right now?

Shariq Mansoor: We have several dozens of customers.

Sramana Mitra: If you think at the 30,000 foot level looking at the AI evolution, where do you see open problems? If you were now steering younger or newer entrepreneurs, where would you ask them to look for open problems?

Shariq Mansoor: The biggest thing people don’t realize is that AI is a bigger opportunity than the Internet. There’s this whole new layer emerging – the cognitive layer. They should not entirely replace existing systems.

To the new entrepreneurs, I would say, “Don’t just focus on tools in AI. Focus on the problem you’re trying to solve. You have to have domain knowledge.”

Sramana Mitra: That’s my thesis. If you have really deep domain knowledge about a vertical and a use case, those are some of the biggest opportunities.

Shariq Mansoor: There’re a lot of tools that are getting saturated. There’s no shortage of tools. What is missing right now is the applications of Big Data. What are you going to do with this data? How will you make sales people sell better? Don’t get discouraged if somebody is already there. If you can solve their problem in a much better way, then you have a huge market. People have been doing weather forecasting for the last 40 to 50 years, and the forecast is getting better now.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: FusionOps CEO Shariq Mansoor
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