How EDGENeural AI Pvt Ltd CEO Sarvesh Devi grew EDGENeural AI Pvt Ltd to $200K revenue with a 2 person team in 2023.

hey folks my guest today is sarvesh devi he's the co-founder cto of edge neural dot ai a software engineer designer and architect he obtained a master's degree in computer engineering from syracuse university in new york his experience spanning over 12 years in designing complex products and developed more than a hundred aji models in technological areas like driverless cars robots and filed six plus patents in the field of autonomous vehicles service are you ready to take us to the top sure yeah i'm up for it all right so the url the website if you want to follow along is edgeneural.ai what are you building and who's buying it who are you selling to uh we are uh building a platform software defined platform uh uh which basically works uh for facilitating development on ai models on edge and our customers are more or less developers and enterprise customers or users who are going to use this platform to build ai models for edge devices can you give us an example can you name any of your maybe enterprise customers who are paying you today uh i mean we have many of them uh i wouldn't name them but basically they are some of the customers which are ai companies who are building models for cloud cloud these days or cloud solutions these days uh and they would want to deploy or put their models ai models uh on edge and they're these are our customers they'll be using our platform to hold those models got it and and what are customers paying you on average to use this technology um so we have a different way uh to to cost uh in terms of pricing uh the customer uh we charge a license base uh to use this platform and we also charge uh uh uh per model per device uh basis uh when they when the model actually gets deployed on the edge hardware so that i understand the model the question though i'm trying to understand are you doing like smb work mid marker enterprise what's the average customer paying per month on this per license per model per per device uh so typically for licensing uh they they would pay around six hundred dollars a month okay uh for to use this platform per user uh and uh to deploy the models on actual hardware uh it's a ten dollar per month per device oh interesting and can you give my audience a sense of like what that device might be can you name some that they might be familiar with uh so the name name could be like uh uh as small as raspberry pi or uh jetson nano or jetson xavier's uh intel mobids uh intel mobilistics uh xilinx devices qualcomm devices and so on so all okay robotics rb5 platforms so 600 per seat to just use the technology and then 10 per installed device is that 10 per device one time are occurring recording recurring okay interesting so if someone uses it to put to deploy a raspberry pi and they want to keep using that raspberry pi and the tech that they built with your tool they have to keep paying that every month okay very cool give us more of a background here when did you launch the business uh as neural is started uh around uh like early 2020 uh we officially formed the company in late 2019 um but we started in 2020 and that's when the would hit us so uh uh we started uh uh probably like uh around one and a half year ago uh the platform idea that we started developing was uh kind of uh got out of our previous experiences so far and it started a year back i understand okay and who is we how many founders we are two founders two founders did you guys just split equity 50 50 at the start oh yes you're a nice guy huh yeah um what is the other who what's your partner do so uh i am a cto and he's a business uh he's looking into the business so he's a ceo or cbo who could call it as uh he he looks after the business part of it and i'm looking after the technology police officer do you remember how you guys got your first customer i i guess that was maybe last year uh yeah i mean i think currently our customers are all reference based uh we are either getting it through our previous connections or our reference connections uh the connections which we uh whom we are referring uh got referring to and that's how we are getting our customer and did you guys did you bootstrap the business or have you decided to raise capital so we we did bootstrap for first year uh but uh this year we closed our first round first c round uh in june 2021 okay and how much did you decide to raise uh i mean right now the amount we have kept it undisclosed oh is this just recent yeah just recent what's the advantage to keeping a number like that undisclosed i mean don't you want to put out headlines to attract better talent better customers etc um i mean we would want to uh i mean we have specifically uh made it undisclosed uh we would want i mean we have uh i mean to be very honest we we raised a small round uh just to launch our product but now like like under like under a million surveillance yes i see okay so it's like an angel friends and family around couple hundred thousand yeah okay so and then we are soon going to launch our next round within next four to six months um and how much do you plan to raise there uh we plan to raise between five to ten million and why is that the right amount what will five to ten million help you do uh basically we would want to uh what we are trying to build is a is a niche problem and complex uh ai problem so we would want to have our product mature uh we are not just building a product but we are also partnering with various companies so we would want to have our sales team grow we are also trying to switch our india office uh to us so uh that is where we that's that's the step that we are taking in so that is why would want to raise uh our next round uh like a big amount then than what we had previously and how much revenue do you think you have to do to be able to go raise five to 10 million bucks um see currently we have pre-revenue we would expect to go some revenue this year again like just with the beta customers and not with like just a referential customers i would say but uh in uh two to three years down the line i would see a revenue of uh around five million dollars well yeah but what do you want to go raise five to ten million like fairly soon what do you think you have to get revenue to before you go raise that round um i mean that revenue is going to be very small we we would expect for a year or so will be like a very small revenue of fifty thousand dollars so what story are you going to tell in that seed deck to go raise five to ten million basically with no revenue uh see uh as i said right we are a developer ecosystem or eco centric company uh we build uh utilities or tools for developers to utilize uh so it's a highly deep tech product the the ecosystem that we are in is also niche it's not uh mature so right now uh even today right now we have to uh much uh like uh make sure our customers learn why the product is needed so we have to kind of how do you measure that though i mean the ultimate measuring stick of that is do they pay for it is it so valuable they're willing to pay for it no one's paying for it yet so how do you guys have confidence you're building the right thing what metric are you tracking to build that confidence we are working with the with a bunch of customers uh with the poc so for few of the customers uh that we had to run uh the pocs we had to uh improve their performance in terms of model and efficiency uh and we had to prove that their model could perform better if we if they use as near as in-app studio platform are those paid pocs uh some of them are partial paid plc's i see how did you structure i mean obviously every founder like you know starts with pocs how did you structure the the contract value on those pocs uh based upon how much time we are going to spend on that that's the only value that we added uh earlier the pocs where we're free i mean we were we wanted to prove the value of platform and that's where we kind of made the poc understood the timelines that we we would spend uh to make this poc happen and after that once that is then we would basically use that time and to charge our next customers for poc are any of the paid pocs paying you more than ten thousand dollars to prove out the concept no okay interesting so so how do you you said earlier that you're gonna charge six hundred dollars per seat and then ten dollars per device how do you know that pricing is going to work if no one's paying it yet um so we are currently in talks with few of the customers they are not paying customers but they are going to soon going to be converted to paid customers and that is a plan that we have kind of put in front of them and uh and that is how we are uh evolving in terms of our business plan and how what price structure is good uh to number at so you showed this to them and they said yes i'm willing to pay you just haven't captured their credit card yet and actually move them to paid i see okay what's a team like today how many people so we are nine nine member team uh and split between uh...