Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What did AI do that was really unique to your product?

Swapnil Jain: We’ve always used LLMs in our tech stack. The key technology was transcription. A human doesn’t need to listen to a call. We can make it much more easier for them to understand the call. Then we also built a lot of NLP technology to further crystallize that. They won’t even have to go through the transcript or look at the keywords. We can just give them a summary. This was all not possible before.

Sramana Mitra: The AI is listening to a thousand calls and summarizing all of them.

Swapnil Jain: And doing all the insights and actions. I would know where to focus on.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of ROI case studies did you do?

Swapnil Jain: ROI is based on three metrics. One is sales conversion. We can come in and help you get more conversions. Let’s say I’m an insurance agent. My conversion is 17%. We can get you 5% to 7% increase. Earlier, they were just looking at one call. When they started looking at larger data, they were able to see what to prioritize.

The second is operational efficiency. Right now, a call may take 10 minutes. We can help you understand why you’re seeing long call times and help you address that. Third is compliance. Compliance is a big thing. This is a softer ROI. People pay a lot of penalties in compliance.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. Where are you now?

Swapnil Jain: 2020 was a mixed year. Q1 and Q2 was good. Q3 and Q4 were hit. Buyers started not buying anymore. Deals stalled. We started moving midmarket quickly. Starting Q4, we shifted to midmarket. This year has been great. We are seeing tremendous traction. Large deals are coming back. I further built out the exec team. We had more large deals. We focus on upsells now. That’s going to be the focus.

Generative AI happened this year. We quickly latched onto that. We launched our own NLM. We have our own technology there. We are now pushing for more use cases.

Sramana Mitra: General awareness shot up this year.

Swapnil Jain: Oh yes. Every CIO needs to know what is AI and generative AI.

Sramana Mitra: You’re at $150 million now?

Swapnil Jain: By mid of next year, we’ll be close to that.

Sramana Mitra: You raised a lot of money.

Swapnil Jain: We’ve raised series C. We raised $213 million in total, but we are not burning a lot.

Sramana Mitra: Are you a unicorn?

Swapnil Jain: I can’t share that.

Sramana Mitra: What do you think of unicorns?

Swapnil Jain: If you go by the definition, unicorn was coined because it’s rare. We like the word centaur now. Centaurs are companies with $100 million in revenue. We want to be a centaur in three years.

Sramana Mitra: The difference between the two is that unicorns can be manufactured by term sheet jockeying.

Swapnil Jain: Also the problem with valuation is, a lot of times, it’s not even in your hands. You can’t keep justifying your valuation all the time. Don’t focus on that. Focus on what’s in your control.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : Building a Venture Scale AI Company: Observe.AI CEO Swapnil Jain
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