How Jiva.ai CEO Manish Patel grew Jiva.ai to $5M revenue with a 22 person team in 2024.

hey folks my guest today is manish patel he's trained in the biological dark arts of genetics bioinformatics and systems biology before spending some dark years in algorithmic trading teams and investment banks and hedge funds now he saw the light he's co-founded a hospitality software business a serial cto and then took the dive recently into jiva.ai where he's creating multimodal ai systems manisha are you ready to take us to the top absolutely all right multiple multi-modal ai systems for what niche basically we want to um target healthcare fast right so the the the problem with multiple with multimodal ai is that actually its application is everywhere wherever you look wherever you're applying deep learning technologies to learn about complex things complex and complex things inherently are difficult to understand difficult to get patterns uh recognized and so we built this company in recognition of the fact that when you want to do some machine learning um you don't have to have over application of occam's razor and and you know get down to the every every sort of little vertical and learn about each little vertical you can learn about all of them and put them all together and that is what we call multimodal ai so explain to me how a healthcare provider may pay you to use your tool to do things like you know live monitoring real speed of execution you know alerts for medical staff things like that sure so there are a couple of ways we we provide this service so first of all our platform is a general purpose machine learning platform so in the same way that you pick up microsoft word to to write a document my vision is that clinicians will pick up jiva to to create an ai technology an ai solution for whatever whatever they want to do so whether you're a respiratory um a respiratory clinician who wants to learn about copd or covid from ct scans or you are a urologist who wants to learn about prostate cancer from mri scans you pick up jiva you plunk your data in it tries to figure out the best model for you and you can then use that and commercialize that get it all clinically validated and all that jazz we when i first presented this idea this was a really difficult thing for clinicians and investors to get their head around and so we we had to kind of be our own customers we created our own diagnostics products we've got a prostate cancer diagnostic we've got our liver disease diagnostic uh we've previously created bone fracture diagnostics as well um that is just in the diagnostic fields but you know we concentrate on that because that was that was the hot areas at the time um but you know so the two things that we're doing there obviously then are subscription for the platform and then subscription for many issues what are folks what are folks paying uh on average for subscription to the platform so platform can be highly variable if you're talking to academics r d that's hundreds of pounds a month if you're talking to corporates that's thousands of pounds a month because their requirements are just just so what's your sweet spot though right now if i forced you into an average would you say two thousand bucks a month isn't a good average more three to four thousand would be three to four okay interesting um and and now tell me give me the back story here when did you write the first line of code for the platform what year 2001. oh wow you've been at this for a while okay have you been full time since 2001 no no no no so um the seed of the idea of jiva was actually when i did my phd that's when i first wrote my first line of code and actually i wasn't even a coder i was learning on the fly and we recognized that we had to get better ways to to simulate complexes and simulate tumors and that's when we started and the ideas that we built from that project the idea that you can merge different models together to create more representative predictors um uh came from there and that's what was been rewritten rehashing when did you go all in what's the all-in day 29 so okay 2019 technically um but we were thinking about it from 2014 onwards i actually went part-time on my in my roles at banks and hedge funds um around 2014 2015. um and so that was when i was like now i need to go and do something more creative and then i i went headfirst into it in 2019 much to my wife's consternation because i didn't have any salary for a while you have any savings yeah yeah i mean we had we had some savings and and luckily luckily i was lucky enough to work in two major banks although one of them was newman brothers yeah i hear they say big bonuses so if you're operating in dark pools and hedge funds shaving milliseconds off a trade and are doing some arbitrage i bet you had some savings there was yeah there was a significant upside to those jobs to that job in that respect for sure all right so 2019 you get going and are you the sole founder are you 100 no we're three founders uh a friend of mine of 25 years actually a friend from university uh and another friend uh who is our ceo all three of us are three home vendors did you guys just be nice and split 33 33 33 at the beginning or no no so technically me and chet so we were 50 50 to begin with and sarah we bought in because we realized we were just administratively really rubbish uh and then she she stole a nice chunk what's a nice chunk like 10 to 20 yeah okay now what about investors how do you guys bootstrap or did you raise we bootstrapped to begin with we we went to friends and fools and family um uh to to get our first 250-ish thousand pounds that was 2019. and uh shortly after we incorporated we cooperated february 2019 six months later our funding won around 400 000 pounds in grant funding so as you know the uk has a really great funding program from the government um which is non-equity raising and then just recently closed a 1.3 million round with with uh institutional investors this year this year in may oh very cool what valuation did you raise out so that was around a four million pound valuation um free money or post post post point 3.2 something like that we had to yeah we had to yeah we had we had to skin it a little because it was uh yeah i mean it was the time during covert times that was a that was that was kind of the situation we found ourselves in um but we have i think i'm pleasantly i i'm pretty confident that next year is going to be uh yeah so you guys you guys saw about 20 of the business in that round twenty five percent something like that exactly what what cap was the precede at 250 k um so yeah it was 250k yeah precede and we didn't want to go any more than that because there are certain tax rules around the is seis funding so we kept at 250. um and that is going to be your most expensive round right your precedence are going to be your most expensive rounds so we didn't want to go crazy on a low level valuation and so we did just enough then enough to enough to get to where we want to go in this year what vibration was that a million valuations something like that that was a million yeah very money yeah okay so you've sold twenty five percent two to or twenty percent two times basically is the way to look at that yeah yeah yeah fair enough but you're off to the races now how many customers are you working with so uh god uh i i don't i don't have the number but at least a dozen that are um that are or will be paying soon uh it'll be honey you're actually paying manish come on you must know this number this is like the lifeblood of the business how many paying customers so zero right now okay next month three okay got it so you have you have 12 that are basically in pilot phase right what do you know that they need to do in pilot to convert to paid you got to show that you got value right the number one thing is you've got to show these guys that whatever you're introducing is actually having some value being driven out from from from from the introduction of this new technology so it's a slow burn in healthcare as it is so it's a little bit of a hard sell but when you get there and you show them what you can do and you can say well actually look you'll save a whole heap of all your cash over here and you make a whole heap of efficiencies over here why don't you do that and so we show them they pilot it and then they'll say yeah okay we'll buy and that's we're at that stage where we've got a number of customers saying yeah we'll buy but then we're just going through the cycles when you give me those average contract values earlier what were you basing those off of your pre-revenue today yeah okay you're just that's sort of what you think you're gonna charge once they convert okay so you must be very powerful at convincing investors because you raised 1.3 million at a 4.5 valuation pre-revenue right so what did your slides look like did you just use the pilots to show traction so first of all i'm a crappy salesperson i really am um i'm a reluctant ceo i i i didn't want to be ceo actually i was i was kind of my chairman and my the other founders kind of forced me into it um and but no i had to learn on the job and i have great people around me and one of the one of those people are or actually more than one of them is very very good at being critical about what i do uh in terms...