Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: So, for six-seven years, you stayed in the same company, is that right?

Erik Severinghaus: No, I was at SpringCM. We built that. We got it growing again. We ended up selling that to DocuSign right before the pandemic.

I operated at DocuSign for a couple of years and then left DocuSign and went to a private equity owned software business called Conexiom. I stayed at Conexiom for about a year and a half. We sold the bulk of that to Warburg Pincus, and I left Conexiom.

I thought I was going to retire. By that time, I got married. I had two young children. I thought I’m done with all this working stuff, I’m going to invest in early stage companies, and I’m going to mentor and help and advise. I was an entrepreneur in residence with Techstar Chicago once again. Life comes a full circle so often.

Through Techstars, I met a company that I just absolutely fell in love with. I fell in love with the team and the technology. I fell in love with the vision of using AI to transform the software development world. I became very excited about it. They asked me to join them and I ended up as co-CEO of Bloomfilter about a year and a half ago.

Sramana Mitra: So tell me more about Bloomfilter.

Erik Severinghaus: We’re a process mining platform built for software development. The company is about two years old. We connect into all the different systems that people use to build software such as code repositories like GitHub and GitLab, project management tools like JIRA and DevOps tools, and design tools.

We pull all of the software process information out of all of those different systems and up until recently, this has been impossible to do at scale because there’re so many different tools and the processes aren’t aligned. It’s impossible to make heads or tails of what the process flow looks like.

This is luckily where generative AI comes in. We’re able to use generative AI to take an intelligent view to how we can stitch together this complex business process. Then we can model it and analyze it. We can help people understand where it’s working and where it’s not. We can identify places where it needs improvement.

This then becomes foundational for using additional generative AI tools to make that process more predictable and more efficient. We work with typically mid-sized to large companies and help them understand where their process needs improvement. They can then use tools and processes to improve from there.

Sramana Mitra: So, it’s focused on software development processes, that’s the positioning?

Erik Severinghaus: That is our positioning. That’s what we’re focused on. What we find from our customers is, they then get excited about it and start using us for other use cases. They use us for core IT functions and other things that they want to be able to improve from a business process perspective. But our focus and our positioning is very much on software development.

Sramana Mitra: Can you do maybe a couple of use cases with me because this is very abstract. So take whatever use case you want to, but step me through kind of more visceral examples of how Bloomfilter works.

Erik Severinghaus: I’ll give you an example. If I’m a private equity firm and I’m thinking about buying a software company and I want to understand historically how good are they at building software.

We can connect Bloomfilter in and we can pull all of this data from all of these historical systems. We can say, here’s where the process works and here’s where it doesn’t. We create dashboards and visuals to allow them to understand are they building software on time? Are they building it on budget? Is work going backwards? How efficient is the process?

Then what they do is, the board will use us. If you think of like a CRM system on your sales team and you’ve got dashboards and visuals that allow you to understand how well is the sales process working? At what stages are there issues? Which of your reps are productive and which ones are below quota? We provide a similar view into the world of software.

So our customers use us in board meetings. They use us at executive team meetings to understand where are they allocating resources? What teams are working on what projects? When are things likely to be complete? Are they going to be complete on time or not? Again, where are their hot spots? Where are their inefficiencies in the process that they can go work on? A lot of the use cases we get used for is due diligence, executive team meetings, and process improvement scenarios.

Sramana Mitra: So this is not a great positioning, Erik. Private equity is a tiny market for business process analysis. That’s a terrible use case. You can’t build a scalable venture out of that. Is this a venture funded company?

Erik Severinghaus: I appreciate the candor there. I would push back on the size of the market. We are a venture-backed company, that’s correct.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Positioning a Generative AI Startup: Erik Severinghaus, Founder and CEO of Bloomfilter
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