Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: This is a very wide range of use cases. It sounds like you are going to market as a platform company.

Brian Sathianathan: Correct, but we work with the appropriate service providers. We also build accelerators on top. If you look at a lot of the low-code platforms, they are purely platforms. It’s the empty canvass problem. Over the last seven to eight years, we have abstracted a lot of knowledge across industries.

We can now build accelerators. We have these blueprints and customize them quickly, which allows the marketing team to go to market quickly. If you look at the IT world, they are heavy platform and system integration projects, big databases, and big deployment platforms.

The tolerance for taking a long time for projects is built into their budgets. On the other hand, Marketing and Innovation operate on a shorter timeline. They throw something out there and see if conversion is happening. There’re accelerators built in so you can go to market a lot faster. We can actually go to market about 17x faster.

Sramana Mitra: How long does it take a client to go to market?

Brian Sathianathan: If they were to launch a quick campaign and test the market, you could do something in six to eight weeks. If they want to roll it out to a store or test it with some customers, they can go to market as fast as six weeks. If something’s more complicated, probably around three months to roll out.

Sramana Mitra: Cutting the deployment time to half or less is what you’re saying.

Brian Sathianathan: Right.

Sramana Mitra: What are some accelerators that you are offering?

Brian Sathianathan: Currently, we have a commerce engine accelerator. We are one of the world’s first low-code headless [accelerator]. We have computer vision accelerators for things like people and animal counting. We have a weapons detection system. We have one deployment in a school in Denver. It recognizes shooters.

Those are the accelerators we already have. We have some payment accelerators built in. You can connect and take advantage of 10 payment platforms. We also have a lot of OCR and document routing accelerators with non-template based recognition so you don’t need a template.

Sramana Mitra: What scale are you at?

Brian Sathianathan: We have double-digit million revenues. We are profitable. We raised little angel funding in the past and have one corporate investor. We are not raising money. We just want to build the business.

Sramana Mitra: Did you put in your own money?

Brian Sathianathan: A bit, but that was just in the beginning.

Sramana Mitra: When you do large enterprise projects, you can get very large checks if you are solving interesting problems. Those don’t need a lot of external capital.

Brian Sathianathan: Correct. I don’t understand B2C well, but I understand B2B well. A lot of folks in our team come from these enterprise environments. The larger the enterprise, the better we work. In fact, we don’t work with enterprises under a billion dollars in revenue. Unless traditional SaaS, you’re optimizing time against dollars. We believe that you can also build a fairly large company traditionally.

Sramana Mitra: How do you charge?

Brian Sathianathan: It’s an annual licensing fee, but it’s not a self-sign low-dollar fee.

Sramana Mitra: It’s more technology licensing.

Brian Sathianathan: Right.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Iterate CTO Brian Sathianathan
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