Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, grants and some consulting projects kept you going for a while. What happened next?

Gurjeet Singh: Yes, those were very lean days. My co-founders had done well enough that they could easily live without a salary for a long time. I was the only one, as the immigrant, who had to be paid a salary. I took the bare minimum. We didn’t spend a whole lot. We actually had a bunch of money in the bank that we didn’t spend.

Over the years, we ended up meeting somebody at the FDA and they introduced us to some people in pharmaceuticals. In fact, our first commercial customer for our software product ended up being a pharmaceutical company that wanted to use our product for discovering patterns in complicated genomic data. We were able to grow our business pretty quickly in the pharmaceutical space. We are able to grow our revenue to about a few million dollars in a matter of a few months.

Sramana Mitra: What year are you describing? When did the pharmaceutical coin drop?

Gurjeet Singh: This was around the end of 2011.

Sramana Mitra: Did pharmaceuticals then become your main focus?

Gurjeet Singh: Kind of. Back in 2011, Big Data was just becoming a thing. When we went and spoke to executives in large companies, nobody had any idea about Big Data. We didn’t even mention the word intelligence or artificial intelligence. We basically tried to stay, as much as possible, on the message around drug discovery and decreasing the cost of drug development and how we can reduce time-to-market.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like that around that point, you also raised some financing, is that right?

Gurjeet Singh: That’s correct. We raised a round of seed financing in 2010 from Ann Miura-Ko. I had met her in 2009 at a class in Stanford. She was a TA in the class. I was still at Stanford in 2009. I took the class and got to know her. When we did our final project in the class, she was super impressed with what we were doing.

I found her outside of our classroom on the last day of class. She had a blank check in her hand. She said, “Write any amount. I want to finance your company.” I turned her down. I said, “I don’t know what to do with the money yet.” We didn’t really have a prototype in hand. She was kind enough to keep advising us for about a year. Finally in 2010, we were ready. She wrote our first investor check for $2 million.

We ended up doing a few deals with the pharmaceutical companies and a few deals with some other government agencies. These deals were software deals in which we were selling software to customers. Based on that, we raised a round of Series A financing late in 2012. At that point, we hired a small team. We were about 20 people. We did a public launch of the company. There was such a huge amount of interest that we didn’t really know what to do. I was answering phones for a good amount of time during that period. We sold our software to lots and lots of industries.

Sramana Mitra: You were selling based on inbound interest?

Gurjeet Singh: All of it was almost inbound interest. It was either customers passing on our references to other customers or inbound interest.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Gurjeet Singh, Co-Founder and Chairman of Ayasdi
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