Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a bunch of customers who are using you across three of your use cases?

Dorian Selz: Across two and, in one case, across three use cases.

Sramana Mitra: That’s all in financial services?

Dorian Selz: Predominantly in financial services.

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like your financial services opportunity is very large. In financial services, all three use cases are applicable and you seem to be starting to get the hang of how to sell into financial services across the board.

Dorian Selz: Let’s start with the good part first. Financial services is one of the verticals that spends most on IT technologies.

Sramana Mitra: Very big budgets.

Dorian Selz: Absolutely, but it has extremely long sales cycles. To crack that first dozen or so marquee customers, you deserve a medal for grit if you pass that stage. It becomes a bit easier after that. In our case if you can go around and say Standard Chartered and HSBC are using our technology, you will be listened to.

In Europe, if you say that three of the continent’s most prominent central banks are using you, people start to listen to you. It doesn’t necessarily make the sales process shorter. Every bank thinks they’re special and their requirements are unique.

Sramana Mitra: Selling big deals is always a lengthy process.

Dorian Selz: Absolutely.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have an easy POC process that you can run to show people that you can make an impact quickly?

Dorian Selz: Yes, we constantly try to become better at that. We differentiate that between non-invasive and invasive type of POC. Non-invasive is when you don’t touch any corporate system. The moment you touch corporate systems, you need to go through NDAs and onboarding. No sane bank will suddenly give you full access.

We have teamed up with Refinitiv where we take those premium datasets and classify those datasets. The global banker wants to know if there is something happening to my accounts. We provide them a web-based solution. We do that for allocator insights and we do that for asset management houses where we simply point to the big allocators talking about bonds. You can go test out and if you find that interesting, we have a forthcoming conversation.

Invasive is when we provide a sandbox where a potential customer can come in with a limited number of datasets. Maybe an extract of maybe a hundred or so call items with some pretrained models. Within a week, we set that up in a secure environment.

Sramana Mitra: One of the things that is critical for AI companies is to be able to do a proof of concept with some data. You can do a proof of concept with non-invasive data but very few AI companies succeed in doing that. They tend to need to have access to internal data to show what they can do. This is a good point that you raised. What is your situation? You said you have raised some money?

Dorian Selz: We did. Over the nine years, we have been ahead of the curve. We’ve paid a price for that. Ten years ago if you talked AI to someone, they looked puzzled. Not much traction in the customer and the VC side. We financed a good chunk from our previous endeavors, but we also had a couple of early stage business angels that supported us. Back in 2017 and 2019, we did two institutional rounds. One was with Salesforce Ventures and the other with some European-based participants. We’re about to breakeven.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a great situation. What level are you at revenue-wise?

Dorian Selz: Shy of $6.5 million. If everything goes well, $7 million ARR.

Sramana Mitra: Now that you have the reference customers, things are going to accelerate because you will be able to close these bigger deals faster. Not hugely faster, but you will get more of them.

Dorian Selz: We bet on that.

Sramana Mitra: It was a pleasure. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Squirro CEO Dorian Selz
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