Global AI Internet Freedom Fund revenue, CEO Simon Gillett, team size, customer count, churn, and more in 2024.

hello everyone my guest today is simon gillett after careers in financial markets and academia he started to buy and build businesses and state has had an irr of 27 he built sustainable incomes in eight countries and is now living in virginia with his wife and daughter his england he's english with a dual us and british citizenship he's an alumni of the university college of london the university of edinburgh and the university of exeter along with the university of cambridge and is the past recipient of the engineering and physical sciences research council scholarship for artificial intelligence he's now building a company called gave g-a-i-i-f-f dot com simon you're ready to take us to the top let's do it nathan okay so what is dave doing what are you working on well gabe is short for the global ai internet freedom fund so really we're a micro private equity fund and we built an api in partnership with our with our cloud provider uh to allow amazon sellers to do demand forecasting to do pricing analytics and it's called atm actually is the product of of the global air internet freedom fund the fund is kind of a separate entity as you can imagine but we do use this sourcing intelligencing tool called atm to find out and grow our portfolio after investment okay but but to be clear uh are do you own the reporting analytics tool as well yeah yeah absolutely it's entirely proprietary yeah and just lead gen for your private equity but if you see someone killing the analytics you write a nice email and say we'd love to buy you yeah i mean the actual process does tend to be quite conversational i think yeah whether it's email or whether it's more inbound direct sort of sourcing but it is a it's a sourcing and diligencing tool and it uses the same technology as amazon.com so that uh that obviously tells you our partnership is pretty strong with that with the cloud provider and then we get this extremely warm leads into the into the fund [Music] now i understand the research side of things based off your background in history i don't understand the amazon side of things what got you turned on to sort of amazon businesses well you know i've been doing ai for about 20 years you mentioned the scholarship i got by the way it's edinburgh but you never ask an englishman to to correct a pronunciation to an american so forgive me for that but forgive me for getting it wrong you're good i yeah so so i've been doing it for a while but you know what's changed in the last in the period that i've been doing it is that the move to cloud so now instead of having these big boxes that we used to do ai and when i first started it's all shifted up to the cloud so the emphasis is more on the bandwidth rather than the compute like as long as you can you can write the algorithm you can shift the compute up to the cloud and it's way more efficient now so you can do it with any of the big cloud providers that we just happen to have chosen aws and so so what is the tool that an aws seller would plug into that you guys own like what's the url yeah it's so it's so it's actually on on the amazon sellercentral.com and you need to already have had an account with as a merchant with with amazon.com to be able to to sell there but the tool itself has been approved for any of the global marketplaces in which amazon operates i think it's something like 17 now you know and so like for example amazon.com obviously covers the united states marketplace and if you're a merchant in the united states marketplace you can use your login for that to access atm if you're if you're a canadian marketplace merchant then you can use your amazon.ca login to atm and to get your forecasting from atm with 18 is the name of your tool product demand financial planning resource planning but there's not a site for it you have to access it via amazon's back end via partnership portal or something yeah it's an api so we're built on the api and it it's a it's a partnership portal and you know you can also access it via our website at gafe.com yeah where is that i'm on the site right now i'm on the agency page i don't see like a sign up or it says for a free funding assessment register now is that the onboarding yep that's the way i see okay so once we'll connect here then you can start to give them reporting charts to do those three things you just mentioned product planning research etc yep and as you said nathan it's entirely free so you know we we don't charge for the forecasting it simply it was also a business analytics tool that is uh that is a warm lead gen for us i was going to say well you know what they say when anything is free you are the product uh which in this case let's talk about sort of how you're understanding and understanding the data right do you anonymize all this stuff when someone connects it how do you like how do you treat data that's connected to your platform yeah i mean think of it service based right so what what rather than productized i mean we don't charge sas subscriptions like time period time bound access payments for for atm but then we do we do enable the merchants to get greater analytic insight into the into the into the business so that helps with demand forecasting and you know whether it goes into a funding conversation down the road later is is is a later conversation but that ability to do financial planning and resource planning with the same forecast the same forecasting technique that amazon.com uses does attract quite sophisticated merchants who want to forecast their sales revenue they want to do their business owners manage expenses and understand the businesses performances and this is uh entirely free and delivered within one day the training period of the ai and the modeling that happens take place to spit the training data into into the models does take some period but we say that we can deliver that forecast within one day and simon how many merchants have connected i can't say entirely uh because we have we have do you have a partnership but i'll give you a range if you if you insist yeah i insist okay uh well it's somewhere between 50 and 500. okay got it so between 50 and 500 merchants connected is that a representative sample size for you to do some of this modeling you're talking about yeah well so that the modeling is unique by account right so what it the way that all these works these these these reports are entirely unique and customized to each different account there is no one model there's a model that's trained based on every single order history and that financial planning plan is unique to every single merchant there is no one-size-fits-all to what atm does okay and of the 50 to 500 merchants connected about how much gmv flows through your platform how much are you analyzing on a yearly basis again i can only give you a range but it's but it's in the nine figures okay got it so 100 million to a billion somewhere in that range talk to me about where you really make money which is the actual fund so much so that in your bio that's the number you chose to share which was the 27 percent ir when did you first put a dollar you know your first dollar behind an amazon business what year yeah so the the irr figure comes from track record it's not to do with the present fund the present fund is still in its in its deployment stage there is no irr from the fund what is the current fund and when did you raise it it closed at the end of last year december 31 2020 and it has a has a three year period the irr comes from track record uh from from a previous business that i exited as a franchise in the uh in the northern virginia area actually headquartered in the loudoun which i know you know well nathan my hometown their hometown what what what did so you closed a new fund in december how much did you close it for um i can't say because the lps uh that the fund is not something i can talk about at all unfortunately okay um in your bio what you talked about was an irr and irr is i mean your your the story you're telling is the story of the fund your sas product is free there's nothing to talk about there the whole model here is get behind and use the fund to get an amazon businesses so true or false you have not actually deployed any of the fund yet you are not behind and you have not purchased equity in any amazon business today oh we are yeah we do we we actually we monitor several hundred thousand skus for with uh with our with our cloud and we have deployed capital but the actual the history of the 27 percent irr comes from the business that i ran previously and ignore that i'm trying to understand how the fund's going to operate so when you say you're tracking millions of skus that doesn't mean anything in terms of you using your fund dollars that you just closed to get behind the business so what are you going to do with the fund what's the thesis it's two is to invest in in amazon merchants so we're able to use the forecasting to make better investment decisions that's what atm does for us that makes a lot of sense that makes a lot of sense there's a lot of analogies to circle up does this in the cpg space clear bank does this in the cpg space sas space you know we're doing as a founder path in the sas space so i totally understand that have you actually written any checks yet into amazon merchants yes okay got it how many different merchants have you invested in one okay one got it talk to me that's the biggest deal that's the hardest step to take right walk me through getting that deal done yeah i mean in terms of the actual acquisition process the sales and purchase is very plain vanilla you know it's a it goes the typical route that 95 of m a deals go you know there's a letter of intent there is uh you buy it i mean you buy it outright or you're buying like five percent of the business the one we bought is bought out right but actually what we're looking for is partnerships with merchants that want to grow and especially merchants that want to grow internationally [Music] yep that makes sense got it so you bought this one and then was there can you name the company yet is it public um there is a brand that's called territory t-a-t-e-r-a-t-e-e say that one time t-e-r-r t-e-w-r-a-t-r-w-e [Music] got it and how did was there was that a sector you like were you targeting like you know a specific kind of product on amazon or just you looked at the metrics you said this is a winner i want to get in yeah this is this is absolutely a winner it does have a lot of industrial supplies in terms of the category of what's being sold for that for that brand but you know we're actually category agnostic um just uh territory is in the base industrial supply sector planners like moleskine bakery boxes post but within you yes sort of deal right so it's economically focused or ecologically focused i should say sustainability yeah there isn't there is an element of that that is branding so what we do we have a team um offshore team that actually is constantly researching and developing what the best way to to increment margin growth or to grow incremental margins and how many are researchers we have we have really one researcher and we have one developer and we have a small operations team of two people and you're bootstrapping all this with your past exit money is that accurate well apart from the fund yeah yeah yeah well how do you make money on the fun are you are you charging two and 20 yep got it okay and when did um when did you write your first line of code for atm what year uh atm was written mostly q1 2020. okay young works you'll have to come back on in six months and tell us about all your other deals and you'll have the fund announced at that point and everything right the fund is announced and it's it's just yeah i mean the fund is no longer open to investment well i'm not that's not what i'm at but you you told me here you can't talk about the fund at all so now you're talking about i can't talk about the fund economics yeah well you just told me 2 and 20. so we touched it already did you announce the size of the fund the reason i'm asking is because there are eight there are amazon sellers listening right now that might think you're a great fit but if it's a million dollar fund it's gonna attract a different audience than if it's a 100 billion dollar fund yeah but i mean at this point it's it's a closed fund and like so the marketing for the fund is over no i'm not trying to get more people to invest in your funds simon i'm trying to understand how much you raised what was the total size of the fund well we have an agreement they'll piece that we didn't discuss that at this point don't you have to file i'll tell you we set out to raise 20 million okay and we close that easily okay so you broke 20 million got it so different folks if folks are listening that run an amazon brand like territory right and they're doing a million two million revenue they know that you have the potential if they connect the atm and you like their metrics actually do a deal with them that's that's what i was trying to get to trying to i'm trying to help you here absolutely you're a great guy and you do i love you i love your shows nathan the energy you bring is very oh you listen so you knew what to expect yeah good good good good good well hey listen we're rooting for you you're in a hot space obviously there's big companies like thracio and others playing in this amazon roll-up space but if you truly have unique proprietary algorithms on the reporting side maybe you can find gems where they don't see anything we've had the discussions you know we're aware of those and and uh absolutely the the ceo and uh of uh of uh of thoracio is a is a connection but yeah obviously we don't uh share our proprietary algorithm because of the the uh the the potential for profit that it brings us yeah no josh is a great guy and again if you have an algorithm and it works and i think you would define works by you have built years of history and the company do you think he's the ceo though is he he's a co-founder and co-ceo i believe yeah uh but but point point being is your algorithm is only invaluable if you can you know use it for five years and then say look we saw this early signal no one else saw it we acted on it we put money behind it and then we just sold it for a big multiple one hey lps you made a bunch of money so we'll track it closely simon come back on in six months and i appreciate you taking us to the top totally cool nathan it's great to chat 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 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