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 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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 500 000 euros and this is the only our proceed investor right now he's a living one but we are flexible with investments coming from the other side and right now we have the plug and play accelerator we have a potential collaboration with them but they're waiting for the mvp to have some more potential contacts with us and other people want to invest but we're not accepting like every people because we need to have a strong collaboration we're looking for the strong partnership was going to be really useful for us not just some guys with the money understood so you started coding this last year in 2021 you raised five hundred thousand dollars pre-seed from this one guy uh this is uh not one guy it's just the autonomous solutions fund they are building uh their investments but you raised 500 000 total last year yeah okay and did you do that most people these days pre-seat around you're doing it like a 5 million cap something like that uh i don't think i can discuss it but we just incorporated have split the shares and that's it right now uh well i mean it's your company you can discuss whatever you want i'm just asking did you do basically a standard sort of precedent investment which was a note or a cap or an uncapped safe how did you structure the first deal ah we just paid the shares like i gave him the specific percentage of the company of to the funding oh so it's not in convertible note you actually have a valuation and you sold them a number of shares for five months okay i see i see okay i guess then the right question is most folks are doing these pre-seat rounds at like a five to ten million dollar evaluation were you sort of in that range um no slightly less than five million okay fair enough fair enough and then i guess why let this person in was he very strategic or what's the story well originally i met him when i was uh tim linton at my previous company and it was like okay hello i'm just traveling to barcelona let's have a talk and we've been talking a lot and he told me stories about the startups and he was started mentoring me how to do this things in a proper way and for me it was less okay it's so cool and we made a good connection and i saw him that he has a lot of companies and the companies are specific interest in drone and computer reading and ai and we're like okay let's do this way i will help you out you'll build the technology so it was like a mentorship at first with whom i have the wrong connection and right now it's like okay he's my investor we're basically collaborating okay that makes sense and how many folks are full-time on the team today right now it's uh me my co-founder um a free person work full time but uh they're not an official in the state because we are now i'm not trying to relocate them here because of the situation in russia right now some people in georgie some people in turkey but they're working full-time so it's five of us and we have my sister there's five full-time yeah yeah and there's my cto and advisor he works like from 20 to 30 to 40 hours a week depending on the needs and so what do you believe you're running this first test with this first company right now on 20 to 25 of their drones when do you think you'll be able to release a sas product and what do you think you'll release in terms of the pricing uh right now we're having the mvp preparing in the simulation and we're expecting within a month to buy at least five to six different drones and then have a installation there to provide some kind of real world test but we're aiming for the full better version of the products who's going to be at least stable enough to fly and uh with a real drone by the end of this year in december and what i mean this is a competitive space there's a lot of folks sort of selling software for drones right now some of them are obviously safety focused right drone deploy is a good example here right so so what is your what's your use case like what's your wedge here where you're going to steal market share from them uh well i guess our most advantage unique value proposition that we are having already experienced and my co-founder has a decade of experience in drone technology and safety ai technology for the navigation and we're basically providing the algorithms that are suitable enough for the people to use it uh instead of our collaboration and right now we're mostly focused on the safety but we are willing to accept the feature pack and gonna be way more useful than the traditional approach hardware approach so basically we're trying to use more ai software stuff than the hardware stuff related to the like gps navigation or any anything anything related to hardware centric so uh 100 centric approach and and what's your goal this year what do you hope to drive monthly recurring revenue to by december by december we i'm not right now sure that we'll be like uh have a positive cash flow because it's not easier to deliver the task immediately not cash flow i asked about revenue what do you think revenue will be well at least we'll well maybe have at least uh hundred thousand years for sure per month total by the end of the year in total total and then and then what do you think you have to go revenue to to go raise a competitive sort of seed round uh i think we'll provide the technology we'll test it and we'll just go for another round and uh we have a lot of potential collaborations that i mentioned before with the government public structures and i think we'll just provide the technology for them and this next round is going to be depends on the needs if we have enough money as a revenue so maybe we will not raise and maybe we'll extend our features on the another market share like in europe right now maybe we'll go to the united states but it's for me just a little bit um in the roadmap but it's changing every day so sounds good igor on that now let's wrap up here with the famous five number one what's your favorite book uh i would say finding lectures on physics and thinking grow rich by napoleon hill that's cool those are two very different books i like the diversity uh number number two uh is there a ceo you're following or studying i wouldn't mention some specific name i would like to say that i have a perfect vision of myself in the future from the autobiographies i've been reading a lot like from henry ford to elon musk of course and alexander the great like a lot of people and trying to make the best of the version of myself from reading all the burger all the books of them number three what's your favorite online tool for building audio uh i guess mirobors sounds really cool mural boards yep yep number four how many hours of sleep do you get every night that's also not constant value sometimes it's five sometimes it's seven sometimes you don't sleep for a few nights in a row fair enough and what's your situation married single kids uh i would say mentally married uh but that's not not officially and no kids no kids and how old are you i'm 24. 24. last question what's something you wish you knew when you were 20 uh i think i would suggest to myself like be more courageous and be more flexible and adaptive to the world and your ideas in your mind don't stick to specific one goal just be flexible guys there you have it artiel dot co lunch last year 500 000 pre-seed raised maybe a little less than a 5 million valuation team of five trying to help folks do things like inspect skyscrapers or inspect power lines or inspect hardware you know treatment plants or facilities without the drones running into things right so they sell basic safety package software into these drones working with their first customer now with the potential deployment across 20 or 25 drones live in operation today as they work to continue to scale we'll see what happens next igor thanks for taking us to the top thank you thank you and goodbye one more thing before you go we have a brand new show every thursday at 1 pm central it's called shark tank for sas we call it deal or bust one founder comes on three hungry buyers they try and do a deal live and the founder shares back end dashboards their 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