How Aiqudo CEO Rajat Mukherjee grew Aiqudo to $996K revenue and 1 customers in 2019.

hello everyone my guest today is mukherjee he is the founder he's sorry leading product now at a company called iq prior to that he was cto at a different company working on deep mobile search and before that led ecommerce business inside of yahoo small business unit he launched yahoo stores in yahoo commerce central after the acquisition of electricity and before that was product lead at google on various projects from custom search to site search search appliance ads automation and many others all right you ready to take it to the top yeah yeah absolutely all right thanks so having me on of course yeah so tell us what iketo does and how what's your revenue model how do you guys make money sure so we are really about uh helping people get things done so we are about voice to action and the goal is to basically take users from simple voice commands directly into actions that help them you know get things done so we focused a lot on uh mobile apps in the beginning of course we've got bro you know we branched out a lot since then but uh we noticed that there was a big hole in the market in terms of getting people from their voice commands directly into the apps that they use on a daily basis their personalized apps so for example i can call my mom using facebook messenger i can you know communicate with my colleagues using slack i should be able to make a payment to somebody using paypal or venmo and those things were not enabled in the existing platforms so we started focusing on that and now we have a full-blooded platform that helps people get things done quickly we have a metric that we call time to action that helps us you know measure this so that we are true to ourselves okay so you could pick up the aikido app on your phone and say something like tell justin i'm running late for the meeting and it will use whatsapp to automatically send that message absolutely and if you have multiple apps which is another thing that we are you know is a differentiator for us it will give you a choice in the beginning like do you want to use whatsapp or do you want to use a messenger okay but your interface was a mobile app is that right uh actually ours is a platform so yes in terms of delivery to end users it is through other people's apps or through other applications yeah but how do i initialize it like right now on my phone if i'm going to be late to a meeting today and i want to say you know tell them i'm going to be late how do i tell you to tell the app on whatsapp to message my friend who i'm going to be late so right now we have for example a sample app in the app store that you can download for your for your phone but what we've done is we are working with partners like so we are live for example with motorola so we are powering motorola's moto voice product the actions there so you can that is that comes built into the phone so we are working with partners like phone manufacturers or with auto manufacturers or with app developers um and we can talk more about some of the partners we're talking to uh to actually get our technology we're a technology provider so our platform is embedded into other people's solutions okay and how do you guys make money is it sas or something different so we are a licensing model and then down the road once we have volume we are also going to have the ability to monetize that so this is a search model this is very not very different this as you guys know voice is really a search problem and that's why you know this is a you know this is where google and amazon are really you know focusing on because the idea there is that every command effectively could be a separate uh monetizable unit so when you say licensing model i mean give me an example of a sample contract is it monthly annually multi-year and what are they paying for so typically it's multi-year and i think we mentioned that we can't get a lot into the revenues aspect of it because it's still a private company but i can talk about the the overall business model which is that when we talk to large partners for example the phone manufacturer or car manufacturer we're talking about a multi-year contract where we monetize upfront there's some some aspects of customization which we also charge for but really the goal is down the road we're going to be charging effectively for those transactions because those transactions transactions that's what i'm asking what are you pricing against when you say transaction is the number of times people on a motorola device use your tool to give a command in a given year and that's going to be in the billions probably or again what do you price against yeah so our uh respon our relationship with with a partner like motorola is a licensing model so it's a fixed licensing model and if they go beyond a certain number of commands that's when we start charging on a per command basis yeah sorry we don't know what commands mean that's why i'm asking what you're pricing against what does a command mean so if i say for example um find me a product on amazon right and we take you to the amazon app or we say you know find me a shirt and we take you to the walmart app that is a transaction for us it's like a transaction or a command a command is a transaction because in our world a transaction takes you all the way yeah this is why i'm asking these questions right you're in the business we are not in the business so i want to get very clear on these metrics right so you you basically sell to motorola and say here's a fixed fee model based off the number of commands you believe motorola phone users will put through motorola in the next year to four years correct correct okay and the pricing is basically on an annual basis okay and i mean are i'd like to get some general sense of how aggressive motors being in terms of how how much they think this will be used are they talking like hundreds of millions or is it in the billions of commands per year yeah so i can't get into the details of that because that's pretty proprietary as you can imagine but the idea is that this is like a search model that's why i bring it back to this which is people are going to be using this on a daily basis i'll give you a concrete example was it billions though or maybe ignore motorola this space in general billions or million we're still in the high hundreds of millions range so this takes time right it's not going to happen overnight so this is this is something that's going to build up but think of it as eventually in the billions of billions again i'm trying to ask what so for me i don't currently do this on my phone so if i was on motorola i would be a big zero right now they have millions of users what i'm trying to understand is today right the volume the pure the volume whether it's through you guys or not through your competitors the volume of voice commands like this through these kinds of deals is it in the scale of billions yet at this point or is it still you know nascent in the hundreds of millions it's already in the billions but our share of that is smaller as you can imagine right yeah alexa we're talking about google alexa siri this is the domain that we are in but we are powering partners white cable solutions if you will right uh so so a partner would go in with their own brand and use our technology in their products and so but the domain is really in the in the billions already yeah so i mean how are you gonna beat google like the ones you just mentioned shouldn't they do this so they are doing it but let me tell you why we are still useful so more and more partners are realizing that they need their own brand voice because they don't want to be necessarily behind an alexa or behind a google and there are companies that actually try to serve that need and that's where we play which is providing our technology as a platform to these guys and many of them want to build their own products their own apps they're starting to turn on voice in their own apps for example bank of america you might have heard has launched their own voice assistant this is becoming pretty commonplace yeah but the newer genre on earth is going to install an app specifically for their bank voice assistant i mean that's why google and alexa are the major players because this is not actually a tech problem it's a distribution problem you're absolutely right and in fact the distribution is in the mobile app so let me kind of make the point when we talk to app developers they realize that their uh the actual access through say an alexa is actually minuscule and that's because people are not necessarily it's not convenient it's not ubiquitous whereas when i'm on the road for example why would i not be able to talk you know use um i use the uber app or the lyft app to actually call a cab right so more and more people are realizing that the usage is still in the mobile on the mobile side of the house and it is very valuable and is getting more and more commonplace to actually be able to talk to those brands directly so that's happening it's still very early in the process but in terms of our platform it's already playing in other sort of areas for example in cars we're talking to partners in the auto space where you know obviously voice is very important for safety and privacy as well and then we are also talking to media players where for example you're watching tv but you're not able to...