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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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 had about uh 50 data engineers data scientists helping all kinds of like enterprises in automotive industry in uh you know airlines uh airports uh healthcare we've helped a lot of different companies deal with some of these scale challenges that are mentioning and building their data platforms before that you were lead software engineer at liquidnet before that you're a ceo and co-founder at mocus.io which looks like a dev shop right is that what that was that i o was uh was an automated dev shop so we had like well we built like a 300 engineers network and when we built an algorithm that can build teams uh for the task at hand for releases uh so so that was a cool cool one actually we made about a million dollars in revenue in the first year of operations so that's you know that's one of the values what happened to it how much did you do in in 2017 or was million your best year uh we saw what was it in 2017 yeah so like we first you know first there was like pre-launch activities obviously so preparations and then as soon as we launched with uh we got to like the million dollars in revenue about by the end of the year so say like we reached those year around like 100k i wasn't saying and just to be clear though when you say 100k mrr that's project volume right you have to pay out a large chunk of that 60 70 to the engineers right correct yeah yes yeah it was getting optimized over time though so like it would go you know it would start like 70 percent and then goes down to like 60 percent but eventually we're reinvesting everything we're making back in the business so what happened did you sell it uh so marcus happened at the time when so i'm a syrian founder so i come from syria and it happened at the time when the syrian war was at its peak and i had to change country lucky for me uh mopes i built it when um uh you know without venture backing so i built it all uh by myself so i didn't have to uh you know deal with complexities of uh closing down shop i had to close it down because i needed to change country i see yeah okay and then taking back one time before that so you had you had a county before that called nabish i believe right for almost three years enough marketplace freelance marketplace yeah so uh and so this was in maine house of middle east and north africa so that is a um uh you know it's a very large and complex region uh to you know from a population density perspective and you know geopolitical scenarios and the issue there is like you have a lot of talented people who don't have access to opportunities or the other way around like employers who can't find a talent because of lack of infrastructure so we wanted to build like the first infrastructure that enables that talent access um we did really well we became really famous at the time with our work you know um what was what year was your highest revenue a year so nabbish uh i would say like last year uh before le was was reaching its uh highest you know revenue but i would say i think we were like getting to like 200 000 uh users if i remember well um what was revenue in 2015 do you remember i don't i'm sorry but it wasn't uh i wouldn't say it was more than like a 50 60k um um mrr mrr okay so the reason i ask those questions is your ability to raise a million on 10 for this idea you know you've had companies before you've grown them in revenue you fled a war i mean this is like you're an incredible individual so you were able to point to a lot of this history so i guess let's let's let's flip it back to these first 10 customers you're working with now let's say that the test period ends um what's the success metric how do you know if they're going to pay or not let me let me share with you like where uh where are my ability today's funding comes from um if i look at what we're building and the massive opportunities that we have right now is basically where this came from there are a lot of companies building for facilitating for customers to benefit from their own data sets it's very hard to find a way to you know optimize your customer experience with your own data set if you have blind spots and the potential we're providing is based on the ability to pull data from different companies and build it you know build that network effect and that technology is is really hard to build and like i said it was an accidental discovery for me and having like multiple patent spending that's where all that you know the potential came from and that's what i see but remo we have we have about two minutes left here so like let's say you're testing with a dating app detect fake profiles right so you're effective how are you identifying that fake profile so your other customers can know not to you know understand that that is a fake profile if they if that person tries to sign up for their account right or their their business yeah so the way we do is like we uh we build like mathematical representations of each person and their activities in an application so that we don't have to share data between applications and when that mathematical mathematical representation appears in a different application they know like oh that looks fake um using our algorithms so you're a collection of patterns really dna fake dna basically technological fake dna correct yeah very interesting so what do you think you'll charge for this like i mean is this something where you come out of the gate you're closing a hundred thousand dollar a year deal or is it gonna be like you know plg product like growth motion 10 bucks a month sort of deal i mean the more users you have the more users you connect with uh the more value you create so the way we think of it is like if i can charge a penny per device we're still you know our customers benefiting with benefiting so that's what you think your model will be per device penny per device something like that yeah that's our most educated guest right now uh we provide like you know a commitment discount um volume discount how many devices are you testing on right now across the 10 test accounts 10 customers about uh the last test we ran this morning was about a million and a million and a half users with 20 million interact 200 million interactions or 200 million interactions so 1.5 million users is one user correlated to one device it's a one to one correct yeah okay interesting okay i love this i'm curious what happens once you launch your first page plan we'll see what happens in the meantime though here reema let's wrap up with the famous five number one favorite business book favorite business book um i want to say like i'm gonna go a little uh you know uh be an outlier like i think uh i love philosophy so like i do some philosophy so i'm gonna say my favorite business books come from like the vedas which is like the the eastern philosophy of like how you know how to think holistically of uh the world i love that number two is there a ceo you're following or studying yeah a lot of them um today i want to say i'm really impressed by a ceo who's a canadian ceo for um his name is uh ali fatih he's the ceo of a fintech company in canada very cool number three favorite online tool for building begin favorite online tools for building began um we're using hubspot a lot fair enough number four how many hours of sleep to get every night well i tried to hit six seven hours if i could but reality is we're looking at six maximum and remo what's your situation married single kids i'm married four months old oh congratulations very cool thank you and can i ask how old you are i'm 33 33 last question something you wish you knew when you were 20. oh boy [Music] um you know like i feel very lucky because i learned what does it look like to have an executive board in my early 20s so i think that was really helpful for me um but what i learned the hard way and i wish i learned the first day is that every technology is centered about people around people so like you have to build a technology person first and that's why everything we're thinking about like business model technology product is all like user first guys begin.ai will help apps understand what's a fake account she's building basically technological dna and if that dna or pattern matches across her different customers they all benefit from learning from each other and still in an anonymized way no data issues there she raised a million bucks pre-seat on a 10 million pre-money evaluation she was able to raise that valuation because she has successful companies in the past growing one of them to over a million dollars in revenue she's also a sole founder owning a hundred percent at start as she looks to scale really betting on herself rima we're rooting for you thanks for taking us to the top thank you nathan 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 expenses their revenue arpu cac ltv you name it they share it and the buyers try and make a deal live it is fun to watch every thursday 1pm central additionally remember these recorded founder interviews go live we release them here on youtube every day at 2pm central to make sure you don't miss any of that make sure you click the subscribe button below here on youtube the big red button and then click the little bell notification to make sure you get notifications when we do go live i wouldn't want you 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