How Begin AI CEO Rima Al grew Begin AI to $440K revenue with a 4 person team in 2025.

hey folks my guest today is rima al-sheikh she's a three-time founder and engineer who has a proven track record in bringing her technology to market she's helped companies of all sizes startups and scale-ups and along with fortune 100 companies research build and ship ai and software to production serving millions of consumers per day rima you ready to take us to the top yeah let's go so just to be clear you mentioned all those customers you work with did you start this with an agency i began no begin is a platform from the get-go so it's still pre-launched um at the moment we're still you know testing with a select customer group yeah so walk me through that how many customers are you testing with today we're testing that then uh 10 small like uh groups group selected group of customers just to test you know the platform viability and feasibility before negotiating yeah and so how did you find these folks is this cold outreach or friends of yours or what well um you know through the years through like 10 years i've had uh i've had the luxury of working a lot of different uh companies in the tech space so uh so it wasn't very hard for me to kind of like select the best uh customers who are tech enabled to test and provide feedback yeah um what's the can you talk about any of these customers and how they're using you in this testing phase yeah for sure so we have uh you know we worked initially with a dating app who was testing our product to uh detect fake uh fake profiles so i mean begin ai is really useful for uh customers who are scaling their products so that they can you know as customers scale they hit scale challenges so they're like we have a lot of customers using our product we need to find a way to personalize the experience to them or detect you know fraudulent interactions and large you know large players found a way to make these scale challenges uh meaningful to them and turn them to their advantage like you know amazon recommend the revenues really large chunk of their revenue or you can look at um you know some some dating companies like detect fake profiles and and maintain them in a particular contained environment and so on so what we do is we provide these solutions to um scale ups without having to build their own in-house expertise or our data platforms or higher machine learning engineers which take a long time so yeah so that's the kind of like testing we've been working on you know uh detection of fake content and recommendations do you make these 10 customers pay for the test or is it free at the moment it's free because for us you know we're building a very challenging uh platform so for us really it was about improving the viability of the technology first and now we're we're getting to the point where like we're getting ready to launch and then um as we launch uh i'm confident that some of these customers will turn into paying customers and rima you keep saying we how many folks are on the team today great question uh what about 10 between part-time and full-time uh six is scoring full-time six full-time and are you the sole founder i am the sole founder yeah oh i love that very cool you know everyone says you have to have a co-founder like you go find a co-founder why'd you decide to be why'd you say to go out this yourself well to be honest with you like i started this as a because i was trying to solve a very small problem and um and thinking through the problem i found a very general purpose solution and um and i was like holy moly this could be huge you know uh because i found a way to connect to get companies work together to enrich their data sets in a private way without you know without compromising the security and and they're not like a data lake something that another data lake or something yeah exactly well like think of it as like an ecosystem of players who are working together like to fight scam or you know build you know build the customer experiences across devices like cars watchers etc so when i when i found this you know when i found this process to do this solution i thought this could be huge but i need to talk to someone like to figure out if i'm like am i living in my head so i started calling potential customers and i wanted to try to find a co-founder but i was moving i was already flying on at a high speed and trying to catch up someone to where you know where this is going felt like more of a distraction than actually um you know positive value so rima are you rich how are you paying six people full time with with no revenue yet we have uh we raised the precede round so 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 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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 founderpath.com and hover over products click on get your valuation 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 okay so how much did you raise in the precede a million dollars okay so now the story is making more sense so pre-seed when did you raise that uh it was december last year so december 2021 yeah 2021 okay so you raise a million uh precede now most folks preceded sort of like a million on a 5 million cap was 5 million year evaluation something like that uh no it was 10 free okay so you're a great negotiator well the technology we're building is really hard i mean it's a if you look at what we're doing you might think it's a crowded space everybody's trying to simplify workflow and machine learning but we're really taking at a whole new you know level by by doing all the processing on devices and that basically eliminates a year from the timeline of production for companies so that's that's really significant and it can i think this company can be really huge rima i love how you're betting on yourself you know you've done two things where most everyone else this is the most two dilutive events in a company's history your co-founder and your seed round you're doing it 100 yourself and most people sell 20 25 their seed round you only sold a little under 10 so i just love that you're betting on yourself going all in this is just fantastic now people are gonna be listening going wait like what did her deck look like how did she get a million on ten is she an exited founder like why did investors believe her tell me more about that well i mean what i am building is something that i know inside out i can talk about it for like years so i've you know for the last 10 years i've been dealing with scale challenges so i've helped companies of all sizes to like go from having a few hundred thousand users to dealing with like those million customers hitting their databases at scale what are some of those companies can you name a couple of them do we know them um sure uh so in uh i'm sorry i'm just like rolling through all the ndas in my head but hold on there might be a better way to do this i can just i can go to your linkedin right and read off some of your historic right so lixar fueled by bdo you were the data nir practice lead right yeah so we had uh we...