Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 3)

Swapnil Jain: When you call your bank, you hear that the call is being recorded for quality and training. A human would come in and listen to it manually. While listening, they are filling out a form about the call details. Then on the other side, the supervisors who are coaching the agents are doing the same thing. The operations team, which is trying to improve processes on how to best handle these calls, is doing the same thing.

Everything around conversation is being done manually. Humans don’t need to spend so much time in understanding speech. With AI, we can solve that problem. What we came out to market with was this conversation intelligence platform that can understand 100% of the conversations in the contact center in real-time, and provide all the right workflows so they can provide better coaching and get the right analytics.

Today’s knowledge management systems are extremely generative. They are not search databases. In earlier technologies, I’d have this knowledge base on which I can do a keyword search. We’ve moved past that. Those are the gaps that we addressed and changed how contact centers operate.

Sramana Mitra: In the process of validating your idea, how did you gain access?

Swapnil Jain: Hustling. Whenever I go to Manila, I created a deck. I started reaching out to these VPs and Execs saying that I already have the product. I started acting like this is a real company. They gave us time. Why are these people giving us time? This means there’s something here. We just don’t know yet. We talked to them and presented the use cases. You are somehow faking it. It’s a vicious cycle.

The problem you have is, you want to talk to an enterprise to get feedback, but they won’t talk to you because you haven’t built anything. You are stuck in this loop. We built mocks and screenshots to fake it. That’s how we got feedback. As we started getting feedback, we started learning from them. It was pure hustle. Back then, there was a company called Salesforce IQ that Salesforce acquired eventually. It was a mini CRM. I used that to track all companies I’m talking to. I would write 20 emails and see if someone responds.

Sramana Mitra: You were bootstrapping this whole process all the way?

Swapnil Jain: Yes. We were able to raise a seed round on the vision of a voice and contact center. It was some kind of external force. When we raised money, it pushed me to be in this market. One of the things with entrepreneurs in general is they could be doing 20 things. It’s very easy for smart people to argue and say why Airbnb shouldn’t work. We can talk about that at length. This was what was happening with me. I could prove to myself that this is not going to work and move to the next one. That narrowed our focus.

Sramana Mitra: Talk to me about how you raised the seed money. Other than the space, you don’t have a whole lot figured out yet. What is the basis of the funding?

Swapnil Jain: The basis of the funding was space and founders. I had decent credibility that helped. The investor was an ex-IIT Delhi alumnus. I would say that a lot of the initial funding happened on the willingness to take a bet on the founder and his or her desire to build a large company. Then the feeling that with a voice and contact center, there could be a large company.

If I were doing something in a space that was not big enough or that was not going through a change, then I would have a hard time raising. The fact that voice was picking up and similar companies were doing good in the space, and that the founder looks decently credible.

This segment is part 3 in the series : Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain
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