Sramana Mitra: Do you have a bunch of customers who are using you across three of your use cases?
Dorian Selz: Across two and, in one case, across three use cases.
Sramana Mitra: That’s all in financial services?
Dorian Selz: Predominantly in financial services.
>>>Sramana Mitra: I am going to ask you a couple of questions from the point of view of how you built this business. How do you scope the sizing of the market? How big is the TAM in financial services?
Dorian Selz: I do not have a single number to give to you. Whoever you ask gives you a different TAM perspective.
Sramana Mitra: Let me put it in the way we frame it. We look at average deal size and then multiply that by how many customers are out there. If you were to own 100% of the market, how many of these deals are you going to be selling?
>>>Dorian Selz: What differentiates us from the pack is that most of these companies predominantly use external datasets, for example, for public reporting of the company. Our specialty is that we effectively crossed the bridge from outside to the inside. Most of our customers predominantly use us to analyze company internal datasets. These are quality reports, email, and all types of meeting minutes.
>>>Dorian tells a great story of AI applications within Financial Services.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as Squirro.
Dorian Selz: I’m the Founder of Squirro. Squirro is Zurich-based but global AI company. We have over 40 years of recognizing structured and unstructured data.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What percentage of the customers are in the $10,000 range?
Julien Salinas: Among our paid customers, it’s 10%. Maybe a bit less.
Sramana Mitra: How much of this is what you call major account customers?
Julien Salinas: I don’t have the exact number today, but I think it’s something like 150 to 200 like SAP and Lufthansa.
Sramana Mitra: All the lead generation seems to be happening on your blog.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Your customers are all developers?
Julien Salinas: Less and less, but still most of them.
Sramana Mitra: Is there a specific genre of developers? Are they developing a particular platform?
Julien Salinas: Initially, it was mainly machine learning engineers that use Python. All the machine learning engineers are Python developers. They taught me a lot of things. Then gradually, I started moving to a more global developer market. Today, I have developers who are developing on any platform and language.
>>>Numerous developers around the world are turning into successful entrepreneurs. Julien provides a textbook case study of a brilliant journey that is a highly repeatable blueprint to follow.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
>>>Sateesh Seetharamiah: I’ll give you an example. Today, 80% of data is hidden in documents in enterprises and is very inaccessible. Why don’t we apply AI to solve this problem? Let’s build a horizontal platform – a domain-agnostic platform – to extract information. While the platform can do it, as soon as you start throwing it to a customer, they say, “What do I do with it?” It’s a very natural question.
We went through an exercise of saying, “What are the areas that we can pick?” This is a problem that’s faced by many entrepreneurs. We don’t have domain capabilities. We are technologists. We build horizontal platforms. How do I bridge that gap? We decided to engage with a customer.
>>>