Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: How much seed funding did you get?

Nitesh Chawla: I don’t remember, but it was enough to pay salaries for multiple individuals.

Sramana Mitra: Like in the hundreds of thousands?

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What you’re describing is the journey of a lot of techies into entrepreneurship as well. It’s not about technology looking for a problem to solve. It’s about identifying the problem and then figuring out how to solve that problem using technology. In AI, this is a major issue.

Nitesh Chawla: It truly is.

Sramana Mitra: This is why domain knowledge is important. It’s very difficult for AI experts to come up with a problem to solve. They know the technology side of it. They don’t really know what the problems are. We’re seeing this massive interest in the AI segment now for people who have domain expertise.

Bootstrapping an Artificial Intelligence Startup with Services: Nitesh Chawla, Founder, Aunalytics (Part 1)

Nitesh bootstrapped Aunalytics while keeping his academic job at Notre Dame.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: QuillBot CEO Rohan Gupta (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. What is the trajectory of your company? How did you get started? Where does the AI expertise come from?

Rohan Gupta: It’s a stereotypical startup story. My co-founders and I were in school. My co-founder, the CTO, is a college dropout. My third co-founder was one year out of school and he quit his full-time job. We started with a Google Translate interface. It just took off. We started seeing a ton of organic traffic. It motivated us to pursue it full-time.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: QuillBot CEO Rohan Gupta (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. I have had a blog for 17 years. I’m always a bit annoyed by the rubbish that gets produced out there.

Rohan Gupta: I am too. As a company that started content marketing, we need to eat our own dog food and produce content in a very thoughtful way.

Sramana Mitra: It’s a funny industry. Recently, we started working with Udemy. We have thousands of hours of entrepreneurship curriculum. We started packaging these into Udemy courses. We’ve released 30 courses on Udemy.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: QuillBot CEO Rohan Gupta (Part 1)

Rohan discusses AI-empowered writing as an emerging field. The company has 12 million users and has recently been acquired by Course Hero.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Quillbot.

Best of Bootstrapping: Building an AI Software Company from Dallas

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Artificial Intelligence startups are very hot these days. Read how CEO Dave Copps built Brainspace from Dallas. After we spoke in 2016, Brainspace was acquired by Cyxtera Technologies in 2017.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with the very beginning of your story. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Dave Copps: I was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. My dad was an eye surgeon. My parents had moved down from Wisconsin. They were snow birds, as they called themselves. My mom was a community leader. My dad was very smart. He graduated from college at 17. His dad had the same background. He went to the Navy while his friends were graduating.

>>>

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Zohar Bronfman, CEO of Pecan.ai (Part 3)

Zohar Bronfman: Lastly, you also want to compute the label. The label basically means whether this customer has churned 30 days later. To generate the label, the platform will automatically take this transaction and identify whether there has been a churn event.