How Artial CEO Egor Folley grew Artial to $55.7K revenue and 1 customers in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is igor foley he's an experienced ai tech lead in r d robotics deep learning and computer vision he's got solid knowledge of problem solving and strong leadership skills and ran ai for nanobiotec a phd and and it was a program dropout in that in that program he's now building our shell.co that's a r t i a l dot ceo an ai driven urban safety drone platform igor you ready to take us to the top yeah let's go ahead nice to meet you all right so who's buying this are these drone operators like like amazon or delivering packages or what well right now we're focusing on delivering the software as a license uh we're building autonomy engine that brings a new level of drone intelligence uh basically by providing the higher level of autonomous exists right now and we're mostly focused on licensing it for the drone manufacturers or autopilot programs and we also have revenue sharing options for the specific applications like um flying uh in making inspections of the building bridges in obstacle dance environments uh public safety basically providing the assistance for the police department or maybe some kind of guardian urban guardians uh security surveillance of course and smart and safe air and i mean by that we are providing the options right now for the companies who want to apply drones for the smart cities or urban environments so just to be clear when you say you're selling the software into manufacturers these are not like department of defense kind of people these are not military capabilities these are more like for inspecting telephone lines or water treatment plants things like that yeah right now we're mostly focusing on providing the safety technology for drunken to fly safe uh make less crashes and to be more accurate in the delivery task uh it's not like super autonomous but for who igor i'm trying to get the use case is this for defense killing people in ukraine and russia i mean what's it for no no it's for the companies who want to make their drones uh stability flight uh so they are playing it for different use cases in cities so it's mostly for the people who want to make a drone safe safer more drone safer technology and fly accurately without fearing of corruption the people using the drones are doing things like inspecting skyscrapers in new york or telephone lines or gas pipelines in the middle of the country or these sorts of use cases yeah yeah absolutely okay and so what does your software help them do is it literally don't run into other drones or don't run into trees or things like that yeah uh well most people focus on leveraging their bvlos technologies like the own visual line of sight basically it helps the certified pilot who can show the drone to automate the majority of the task and to help them fly more secure and more safely within the obstacle dance environment than i mentioned before and it helps them to be more um i would say more prominent on the task delivery so it has a native obstacle avoidance and ai driven navigation so imagine the situation when a drone is really easy to crash in some kind of building obstacle like as you mentioned like the branches of the tree or maybe power lines and we're making the technology so john would have a self-awareness to perceive it and make an accurate decision based on its uh intelligence and make a delicious decision-making system i see okay and so what are companies paying on average per month or per year to use this technology uh right now it depends like um the certified pilot costs like 300 euros or dollars it depends on the use cases and drone it may cost like 3 000 or maybe 5 000 for the commercial use like the dry drones and up to 20 maybe 50k for the specific inspection or the specific task delivery like logistics oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're going to get a different valuation a vc is going to pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're going to do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raised they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview i guess i don't understand so you're not actually building a drone you're selling software that these manufacturers install on the drone so how do you know like how do you know whether to charge 20 000 for the software install or 300 for the software install well uh no i mean the drone itself or this way but we're providing the software layer above the drone so they could install it above their own software so we're leveraging their capabilities of this drone so extending the feature pack that they have right now and we are mostly focused on the software delivery tasks not the hardware application or hardware automation stuff so do you charge based off the number of drones they install your software on yeah oh well let's just be clear we're only four months old we'll just establish incorporating in in the december and we have a prominent drone manufacturer was from united states and they have a really good like company building their helicopters for automation and they're like okay guys we need this software let's just combine some kind of skills so basically they're our validated customer and we are now mostly focusing on them but we have three to five rather potential customers who are willing to pay their prices to provide uh and we are in stage of agreement right now we're under nda and we're more flexible on the prices because we're not already a product so you don't know what the price is going to be you're doing consulting work to figure it out you have a first customer that sounds like they're paying you what 50 to 100 000 something like that to figure out the use case for them yeah well they have potential customers when they say okay we have this x for example prices and say like yeah we're fine with it but we need some kind of upgrades for the specific task delivery because we are mostly focusing on the three types of software the first one is just uh the basic autonomy engine for safety flies and dynamic obstacle avoidance and some upgrades depending on the weather conditions like it could be enhanced computer vision technology maybe night vision maybe snow rain all that stuff and we are those are two things there's basic and then there's weather upgrade any other upgrades yeah the other upgrade going to be in approximately one year we're going to be the creating the omnidirectional system it's going to be 360 uh degree of the observation of the surroundings okay got it so basic safety to start upgrade for weather snow rain and then another upgrade a year from now you'll have an option for 360 omni directional views yes absolutely okay but this first test you're running with this one customer how many drones are they gonna install your software on right now we're focusing on 20 to 25 drones depending on the need and we have as i said before potential customers and we're discussing the agreements right now uh mostly people are focusing on buying like from 40 to 100 drones to install the software and to play very cool okay how are you funding the business to date are you bootstrapped or have you raised uh originally we met with my investor and it was just a small talk and he eventually like okay if you do the product i will invest in you and i build the proof of concept the video is on our website you can see it and he's like okay i like it let's work let's collaborate and he invests in us like...