How Ambit-Ai CEO Mark Bregman grew Ambit-Ai to $3.5M revenue and 18 customers in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is josh comrie he's his current primary day job is as the ceo of ambit an artificial intelligence platform company they serve customers staff investors and partners and talk widely on how to extract value from this nascent technology his perspective of ai is unique as he blends the human element at a business level view of technology in the future of work josh you're ready to take it to the top let's do it all right so what's the company do exactly there's a lot of kind of jargon in that it did kind of give a real example what you guys do yeah too much jargon we're simplifying it at the moment as it goes so we're a conversation platform so we work with enterprises those businesses that serve large volumes of end user customers themselves so telcos utilities financial services institutions and they have a lot of pain points when it comes to working with their customers either attracting them onboarding them resolving their queries so we provide a platform that enables them to design build and manage any one of a conversation agent and that could be manifested through voice the digital avatar you know the talking digital head or obviously through a text-based spot those are known as chatbots we avoid we avoid that nomenclature because of the associations that people have with chatbots as in the first generation of chatbots were dreadful and so we've constructed a very strong nlu model a great machine learning suite and then the studio that enables it to design and build of that experience on behalf of those organizations and so what are folks paying on average per month for this it starts at 5000 per month goes up from there our average customer spend is six and a half thousand and uh that's at the kind of what the us would describe as the uh small enterprise space so we're targeted at that tier that just sits below you know classic large enterprise so i'll shouldn't be small enterprise and put this on a timeline for me when did you guys launch so the i i brought the group together that did the thinking just on three years ago and we constructed an mvp at the back end of 2016. went on to market in 2017 started building for customers in the middle of 2017 so registered the company in early 2017. how much did you spend building the mvp before you had your first dollar of revenue that quarter of a million okay and and i mean what cost so much was it just development talent yeah it was development talent and then we're factoring into that because it's a smart way to go about you know kind of reasoning your time investment that you put into these things we factored and found the time of which there was three of us okay and so fast forward today how many customers are you serving we're serving 18 customers and then we have an addition to that about a dozen prototype or proof of concept customers okay can i take 18 times 6 500 bucks a month you're doing about 117 grand a month right now in revenue yeah there abouts and where were you exactly a year ago do you remember yeah about half of that just under half that oh good okay call it 50 grand something like that yep and wait i mean so take me back to day one where'd you and how did you land your first customer yeah so um we were kind of creating the space um in our part of the world as it didn't really have any um any built model behind it so first thing we did was to go what's the uh what's the approach that customers or prospects are likely to want to take and it would be about going understanding what the journey could look like and constructing one of these things so we built a consulting offering we spoke to a whole bunch of customers i go right back actually we had a uh the notion was to build a coaching bot so what we refer to as a vertical bot that resolves a specific problem so we built a coaching bot and that was really to test the technology the next stage was to build a bot that enabled a sales organization to have more well-functioning sales people so our sales assistant bought in both instances we realized that the market was going to be quite quite constrained and so we saw the real values lying on the platform and so we went out to market with the notion of a platform but people unless they have imagination or experience that they can draw from and kind of refer to other examples of where that's come to life effectively they struggle with how to kind of view that um playing out their business josh specifically the first paying customer who was it on the sas product who was it and how did you find them yeah so there's two phases the first paying customer was the uh the consulting offering yeah product yeah on the sas product it was late in 2017 and it was a small bank and we landed three at the same time it was a small bank a mortgage brokerage and then a large utilities company okay so did you reach out to them or do they find you reached out to them okay how do you know target them yeah so just i'm a customer of these types of organizations myself as most of us are most of us have to deal with banks telcos and utilities and i'm very acutely aware of the pain that we have to go through when resolving an issue dealing with contact center cues and the very low level typically of capability that sits inside those organizations so when we started the business we go right back to the day we went looking for big problems we thought that the type of solution that we were interested in building as an ai would be able to resolve so what title did you target so like did you go on linkedin and look up mortgage brokers specifically how did you find these guys cdo chieftail officer so we started with our network you know the low-hanging fruit and so there was people that knew of us and therefore would trust us and would take a bit of a pump because at the very start you have no paying customers so how did you find the chief digital officers their email or their phone number uh so linkedin you know just just classic old business searching so i knew people inside the organization so the first one was a bank ceo sorry the mortgage broker ceo personal friend of mine uh the bank ceo i was connected with him directly and the cdo at the utilities company was actually a cold call and where today are you getting the most customers from uh we're just in the process of finalizing our outbound marketing so we did what i preferred was organic marketing during year one which is create a whole bunch of content uh target events that we could speak at um write blogs uh be invited to podcast this type of thing uh year two we've kicked into being much more uh systematic about our marketing so we've purchased lists we're communicating with those folks on an outbound basis we're doing this that you purchased uh tech target was with us that we purchased tick target spell it tick t-c-h target oh tech target okay got it um okay so most year so most your new leads and customers today are coming from purchasing lists yeah so that's top of the funnel stuff so we're actually still being most effective with either outbound firstly and this is direct sales and we have a channel model as well uh and also folks that know us through the network and so that's the inbound stuff okay very cool and then talk to me about funding did you raise capital are you bootstrapped we've done two rounds so first round uh the very first uh funding was through the founders then we did a friends and family round uh just on two years ago uh that lasted us for just over a year uh in fact it was about nearly 18 months and then we did a slap set right in between uh the angel and series a in new zealand so he raised just under two million dollars in new zealand at the back end of last year okay so two million total into the company uh we've taken 2.4 million in total okay two four total and then today are you burning capital are you casual positive so uh some months we're cash flow positives some months we burn we have a services offering as well because we do charge for the build and so some months we might have 100k of services come in over the past 12 months what percent was service revenue versus sas it's about 70 sas and 30 services okay so the services help with cash flow yeah i'll just fill in the gap there so we've switched on our services partners integration partner channel and so that means that those organizations will either do the selling or largely what's happened is that we've helped them with the selling and they take that services revenue but we do still have some that we retain so high profile logos that we have uh attracted and uh won through a sales process ourselves we'll make a decision as to whether we pass it on we're going to keep it ourselves okay and talk to a team size how many people today three zero yeah and offices and lee where i live i live in sydney australia i'm a kiwi where the company is founded and the remainder of people are based in auckland new zealand churns critical in a sas company what's your turn over the past 12 months customer tune uh revenue oh revenue turn yeah so uh we've gone from the raise let's talk about that uh we've turned about 30 percent of that raise money sorry no no revenue churn from customers so if the customers who signed up a year ago were paying 10 000 a month and they went down to 9 000 today then it's 10 revenue churn oh i see okay it's a different description of the same metric so um we've increased so our average customer increases...