Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore (Part 6)

Arijit Sengupta: They won’t tell you how much they’ve made, but you can tell that they have made more than you are going to charge them. That changes the conversation. I like to see this pattern. If somebody starts buying and within 24 hours, you see a couple more people buy. We had a client where their firewall blocks any product that is not whitelisted. It was blocking Aible. The customer fought with IT and got us whitelisted. It was helpful. It wasn’t a conflict. They really pushed IT to get Aible whitelisted.

That’s the kind of thing I like seeing. You want to see if the customer has this kind of vehemence where they’ll break through a wall for you. They actually care.

Sramana Mitra: They believe in what you’re doing. Did you use your own money to fund this and bootstrap, or did you raise money right away?

Arijit Sengupta: I put up the money myself. As I started, some of my former investors immediately came in and put in their money. Some new people wanted to do it. A significant part of the money came from other angels. We’ve done it as convertible note. The goal is to get it to a point where it makes sense to raise.

Sramana Mitra: How much money did you raise in convertible notes this time?

Arijit Sengupta: That is not public, but it’s significant. I only drew 20% of what was offered. We have customers in three continents already. For the majority of customers, the time to close has been zero to 30 days.

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the pilot and what is the upsell?

Arijit Sengupta: This time, the pilot is much smaller, as low as $5,000. The upsell is, we usually give a package of licenses. As you go up, we’ll go up. We’re trying to go in with low cost. The value creation is very rapid.

Sramana Mitra: You want people to get addicted to your software as soon as possible.

Arijit Sengupta: There was one guy who giggled when he looked at the price. I fundamentally believe that AI will have a bigger transformational impact on the world than the internet. In that situation, you don’t try to focus on trying to extract as much money out of your customers. You try to focus on creating as much value as possible. Over time, you’ll get a lot of money.

Sramana Mitra: This is good strategy. What kind of use cases are you seeing? Are you seeing a large variety of use cases, or are you focusing on repeat use cases?

Arijit Sengupta: We do see a variety of use cases. We guide our customers to a few specific ones to start with. In the AI journey, it is easiest to quantify value when they are going for things like revenue. If you can give someone a few million more of revenue like in the case of Charlie Merrill, it’s very easy for him to quantify.

If you can’t get somebody to revenue, then you go for things like marketing promotion effectiveness. You’re helping them make more money. Then you get to cost. Worst of the lot is risk.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building Two Capital-Efficient AI Companies: Arijit Sengupta, Founder and CEO of Aible and BeyondCore
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