Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Zohar Bronfman, CEO of Pecan.ai (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to back up a moment and ask you to describe your process of arriving at that collection of use cases. What were the drivers? What was the process of arriving at that?

Zohar Bronfman: On one end, we wanted something that is rich in data, easy to connect to the business need, and relatively easy to translate into non-data science terms. On the other end, we looked for where we thought the market would see the fastest time to value. Many times, you have amazing data science use cases but the whole cycle of value realization can take even two years. We wanted a platform that allows us to quickly and unequivocally show our customers that they have tangible value.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Zohar Bronfman, CEO of Pecan.ai (Part 1)

This is a terrific PaaS company in the making with substantial predictive capabilities.

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

Zohar Bronfman: I’m from Tel Aviv. Prior to founding Pecan along with my co-founder Noam, I spent most of my days in the academia. I did two PhDs in parallel in supplementary fields. I did one in the field of computational neuroscience, and the other in the field of philosophy.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What is happening in the algorithm? You are processing tons of resumes and training your model to determine what are good ways of representing information. You have a database of skillsets. Your model understands what’s a good way of representing that skillset. When you process resumes, you can figure that out. Is that roughly the algorithm?

Kiran Pande: It’s a lot about writing. It’s helping them communicate better.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Between 2009 and the time you raised your seed financing, you figured that piece out. You figured out that you were going to go after the US career development offices and you were going to build this product in India.

Kiran Pande: Yes, he was leaning towards having the engineering team from people in IIT. The Bay Area is also very expensive and competitive to hire from. Just the cost of building an engineering team in the Bay Area would have been a lot more than we were able to do at that time. 

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: When you went out to raise money, you didn’t pitch it as an AI company?

Salil Pande: I didn’t pitch to anyone. All my seed investment came from my ex-boss. He connected to his ex-boss.

Sramana Mitra: Friends and family.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the pricing structure? How much are colleges and universities willing to pay to train their student body in just the elevator pitch?

Salil Pande: We don’t ask that question. Our thing is we’re trying to be a collaborator with the university.

Sramana Mitra: But you’re doing $5 million plus in revenue.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Go down one level and explain more about the technology. 

Salil Pande: What we have done is essentially provide feedback on your resume. For feedback from someone qualified today, they would have to spend boatloads of time with you. There is an assumed knowledge that they should have about what’s a good resume and what’s a good role that is fit for you. Then they should be articulate in giving you concise, objective, and actionable feedback.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Salil and Kiran Pande, Co-Founders of VMock (Part 1)

Salil and Kiran Pande have built a capital-efficient AI company from India addressing the global career services market.

It’s a wonderful conversation that works in both AI thought leadership and also their entrepreneurial journey. Enjoy!

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself, your co-founder, and VMock.