Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Your friend gave you some money and gave the money back. What other financing has happened?

Ankush Sabharwal: My two friends who joined as co-founders gave me money. We took angel funding just before IRCTC went live. Then we got funds from Canbank VC. Now we will be announcing a fund raise.

Sramana Mitra: What is the total amount of funding so far?

Ankush Sabharwal: Around a million dollars.

Sramana Mitra: Small amount of funding.

Ankush Sabharwal: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You are not at $5 million right?

Ankush Sabharwal: Not yet. We are tech-focused. Now we got a sales guy who joined recently.

Sramana Mitra: I was under the impression this was a $5 million company.

Ankush Sabharwal: No, our revenue was $1.4 million last year. We are growing double.

Sramana Mitra: What have you done with generative AI?

Ankush Sabharwal: That’s a very interesting space. We are going to launch our own generative AI offering soon. We are doing the grounded version of generative AI. The other popular generative AI companies are good in giving general content and answers.

Since we are more of an enterprise-focused company, we are working with one of the top banks in India. Yesterday, we completed the project. There is one process and the process gets amended every day. They are getting emails from regulators saying, “This clause has changed.” They add all this content in our generative AI. The answer comes from the content of our client.

Sramana Mitra: It’s domain-specific generative AI. Have you used a core NLM for this?

Ankush Sabharwal: We have taken open source. The success of open AI and ChatGPT is not the technology. The technology is open source. The success is with the data.

Sramana Mitra: Absolutely. Which technology are you using?

Ankush Sabharwal: We are using multiple open-source models. Different models are good at different things. The good thing is we have taken the open source, finetuned it, and added our own parameters. It’s hosted in India. In India, the Data Protection Bill is coming. All these other platforms are not in India. They’re not even close to India.

Sramana Mitra: What timeline do you have in which you’re going to hit the $5 million revenue mark?

Ankush Sabharwal: Next three years.

Sramana Mitra: It will take you three years to get to $5 million.

Ankush Sabharwal: More. I think we’ll be around $12 million. We’ve got around 450 inbound leads. We are very popular in this space.

Sramana Mitra: 450 inbound leads from enterprise customers. What is your average deal size? If you execute on these leads, you can easily get to $5 million.

Ankush Sabharwal: Currently we are enterprise-focused. We work only with the large enterprises. When I said 450, they’re not all very large. A few of them think it’s free or inexpensive.

Sramana Mitra: You’re saying that 450 leads are not all good leads and only a small portion will turn into revenues.

Ankush Sabharwal: Yes. We are also now going to launch the self-service platform.

Sramana Mitra: Great. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Bootstrapping an AI Chatbot Startup with a Paycheck: Ankush Sabharwal, CEO of CoRover
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