Manish Patel
- CEO and Co-Founder at Jiva.ai
GetLatka interview
How Jiva.ai Raised a £1.3M Seed at a £4M Valuation With Zero Paying Customers and 12 Pilots in Progress (Interview with CEO Manish Patel)
Manish Patel (CEO and Co-Founder of Jiva.ai) spoke to Nathan Latka on November 4, 2021.
Jiva.ai figures from the interview
- Seed Round Raised (2021)
- £1.3M
- Post-Money Valuation (2021)
- £4M
- Full-Time Team (2021)
- 6
- Paying Customers (2021)
- 0
- Monthly Net Burn (2021)
- £50K
“Our monthly burn is really low. So look, we're 50 ks monthly burn at the moment.”
“So there are six people full time, six more that are part time. Some of those are actually consultants and or who actually sit on our board. And as an early stage business, think that was a really important decision to get experience rather than junior people at the beginning.”
“We bootstrapped to begin with. We went to friends and fools and family to get our first 250 ish thousand pounds. That was 2019 … won around £400,000 in grant funding, so as you know, The UK has a really great funding program from the government, which is non equity raising, and then just recently closed a 1,300,000 round with institutional investors.”
Bio
Trained in the biological dark arts of genetics, bioinformatics and systems biology before spending some more dark years in algorithmic trading teams at investment banks and hedge funds. Eventually saw the light, cofounded a hospitality software business, serial CTO’d, and then took the dive into Jiva.