Artanis #10: The missing core of the AI stack
Conviction, pitching, and to VC or not to VC?
Artanis: Helping companies build AI they can actually trust. Previous updates at https://artanis.ai
🙋 Ways You Can Help - Balderton Demo Day 🙋
Balderton Capital is running a demo day for our incubator cohort in Kings Cross. This is good timing, as we've built a ton of conviction recently in our vision and will pitch Artanis to the public for the first time! Sign up here if you'd like to attend demo day on the evening of Tuesday 4 March.
🧐 Special Edition - Big Decision Coming Up 🧐
We've got a big decision coming up. We need to grow the team, as we've had to turn down several customers recently. We've also solidified our thesis on the AI space (see below) and have a product vision we'd like to start building. We'll take a call soon on whether to keep bootstrapping, or fundraise to build our vision faster. To VC, or not to VC...?
🎯 We've found the missing core of the AI stack - Policy 🎯
Our thesis finally clicked for us in January. The reason people can't trust their AI products, and only human-in-the-loop use cases are being deployed, is they can't control the output. And they can't control the output because they've been ambiguous in the instructions they give the AI. We've solved this problem with Policy: The Missing Core of the AI stack. For more info, read our 5-minute thesis on Substack.
📉 Progress in January - demand growing, team turbulence 📈
Our consulting metrics from January are:
Primary metric: 4 customers (unchanged)
Secondary metric - revenue: £40k (-£10k)
Secondary metric - team size: 2 (-1)
The metrics above are slightly misleading because we've been turning down work recently. This has been a mixture of i) inbound leads and ii) existing customers wanting bigger contracts. As we're a new business, we've had a hard line around needing to prioritise quality over quantity. But we're optimistic about capacity going forward, given recent progress on our thesis and product vision.
We also decided that Jerome is best placed as an advisor, rather than a co-founder, as we wanted to build different businesses. We're still retaining him, as he's accelerated us a lot already, but it means Yousef and Sam are back to being an army of 2! And if you need some extra technical/commercial firepower for your startup, reach out to jeromeminney@gmail.com.
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks for January go to:
Sivesh S - for teaching us the dark arts
Christine F - for the great connection to Jonny
Harry D - for an inspiring offsite
Zahid M - for fundraising advice
Bertie V - for being a "good sport" and boosting our vision
Laura R - for the intro to Ben S
Jonny DMM - for the exciting new project (+ "base of data" anecdote)
Rod F - for support behind the scenes
Al R & Marcus S - for being serial founder role models
Sophia, Ben, Dom, and Haseeb - for the extremely kind words about us
Ed S & Ryo H - for first ticket enthusiasm
Jerome M - for handling it all very well
Callum NF - for an exciting opportunity
Srecko D - you know why
Henry M - for being an intro superstar
Pascual & Jeppe - for playing it straight
Imran R - for organising our PyData talk
Sorry if we missed anyone off the list, January was a biggie!
Cheers,
Yousef & Sam