1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do quickly a few other companies and just focus on the problems they’re solving. We don’t need to go into the stages, but let’s just get a sample of the problems they’re solving.

Jukka Alanen: So, another company is called Quandri and they are focused on providing AI digital workers for insurance companies, specifically insurance brokers and agents to automate processes. The problem that those insurance brokers and agencies have is that they have to do a lot of manual work to manage processes such as insurance renewals and revisions to policies. It takes multiple hours from these agents’ jobs every day and takes them away from actually building and growing their business.

So they created a fleet of AI digital workers that can manage these processes independently and do it ten times faster than humans would do and do it 80% cheaper than humans would do. It really enables the staff at these insurance brokers and agencies to shift their focus to more value-adding, more strategic, and more revenue-generating activities. So that’s an interesting vertically oriented play.

Another example I’ll give is a company called Activio. They provide AI sales agents that identify new sales opportunities in your ideal customer profile segment in the market and then start engaging and reaching out and growing the sales pipeline. Everyone wants more new logos and new customers, especially when you’re building out new segments. It’s often hard to know which are the best customers to reach out to and who are actually interested and qualified prospects that you should engage. So, they analyze over a billion different data points per day, then autonomously identify and recommend prospects based on that data so that they can start the sales engagement process.

So again, what you can see here is there’s a bit of a pattern. There’re a lot of things that humans have to do today in the sales world. Often, different SDRs or BDRs have to do a lot of manual reach out and just blast things all over the place and hoping to get some prospects that would be engaged. So, there are opportunities that we see here where AI can do that faster. AI can also tap into a lot of data and analyze and process that data in ways that would be very hard for humans to do. AI can also do this 24/7, so you can get some significant productivity gains. You can also aggregate expertise across a pool of organizations. You can basically have the best sales expert or in the case of Quandri, you can really have that expertise codified in the AI agent or the digital worker.

Sramana Mitra: Sounds like your strategy is entirely vertical AI, is that right?

Jukka Alanen: Not entirely. You could think about them in kind of three types of categories. Some are industry-specific vertical. Many of them are still building platforms in that area, but then they are vertically oriented platforms.

Some of them are what I would call more functional, like sales or engineering focused. They’re solving problems in those areas and trying to build more of a platform.

Then there’s a third category of companies, which I would call as more specialized platforms that can be more horizontal or more across industry, and they provide more enabling platforms for use cases. We haven’t really focused on basic LLMs as that space is increasingly getting commoditized and very competitive. But there are lots of opportunities for more specialized platforms that entrepreneurs build.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures
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