From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 1)

Valon is a software developer who made a successful transition to an entrepreneur and had a quick exit with his first venture.

His second venture is already at $5M+ in revenues with just a pre-seed round of financing. This venture, Behemics, has already received two acquisition offers. Fabulous story!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Valon Xhafa: I was born at a difficult time in Yugoslavia, in present-day Kosovo, during the wars. My family immigrated to Denmark and moved back to Kosovo to rebuild everything. Seeing everything destroyed, especially my parents’ business, and seeing my parents trying to start over was a big lesson and a very important experience. Seeing them starting from scratch is my inspiration when there’s a failure in my life. There is always a comeback.

Fast forward, I moved to Germany to do my Bachelors and Masters. I was studying Computer Science in Munich. This was the time when I founded my first startup. It was an AI-driven engine for classifying or aggregating news media. More specifically, political opinions about specific topics. These days, the media is positioned in a way that they either have a pro or anti stance.

As a reader, it’s very important to have different perspectives about that topic. At that time, there was no automatic engine to search for these things where you have two different columns. One column for that topic and another column contradicting that topic.

Sramana Mitra: What year are we talking?

Valon Xhafa: That was 2017.

Sramana Mitra: You were in Munich?

Valon Xhafa: Yes. I started this with some journalist founders. Google jumped in. They invested in this startup.

Sramana Mitra: You were the software guy on this project.

Valon Xhafa: Yes, I was the software guy working with journalists.

Sramana Mitra: How did you meet these journalists? This required significant journalistic domain knowledge and you had co-founders who brought that.

Valon Xhafa: During that time, the startup scene in Munich was starting to boom. I was there at the right time. Things were just starting to grow. A lot of people were moving there. My journalist co-founders moved to Munich. In Munich, there are a lot of startup events and accelerators for media and journalistic startups.

One weekend, I attended one of these events and I met these journalists there. We started talking and they were telling me that they were working on this manual aggregation of data. Right away, it came to my mind that it’s hard to scale. As an engineer, we always learn how to optimize stuff. I suggested using AI to grab all this data, aggregate and pre-process them, and then classify them as pro or against a specific topic.

We started working right away. I built the MVP. They talked with the media and marketing people. We found out that Google was investing in such startups. We approached Google and we got a pre-seed investment from Google right away. We started building the platform. We got great traction. While we were talking to some media companies, we got some of the big companies interested in this product. They offered us a really good deal. We accepted the deal and made an exit.

Sramana Mitra: You only raised some pre-seed financing and went straight to an exit.

Valon Xhafa: Yes. Being 21 years old, having that exit is the best thing that can happen to you.

This segment is part 1 in the series : From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa
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