Artanis #12: A wild founding team appears!
Helping companies build AI that actually works. Previous updates at https://artanis.ai
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👩💼 A Wild Founding Team Appears! 🧑🔬
Pleased to announce that we filled out our founding team in March:
Laura Rosenberger became COO of Naked Wines, a public company doing ~£100m ARR, by age 28. She then founded and ran a venture-backed wine business, Laylo, for four years. She recently decided to transition into AI and will lead GTM/strategy/ops at Artanis. Lastly, she has an MPhys in Physics from Oxford!
Olly Styles has an AI PhD from the University of Warwick. He then co-founded Atlas AI, so longtime readers of these updates may be very familiar with his story already! Following the demise of Atlas, he joined a large edtech scaleup as their first ML hire. We’re very glad he’s decided to have another crack at a startup.
Andrew Manderson has an AI PhD from Cambridge. He spent several years at the Alan Turing Institute, where he met Sam. After his PhD, he led data science at a climate-tech scaleup. He quickly became “business critical”, which is unheard of for a data scientist, so we’ll be waiting until June for him to join.
The team now includes four AI PhDs AND someone who knows how to run a business. We’re unlikely to hire more in the next few months, and feel very lucky with how this has happened so quickly!
📉 Progress in March - capacity improving 📈
Our metrics from March are:
North Star: 7 customers (+1)
Monthly Revenue: £61.5k (+£9k)
Team Size (proxy for cost): 4 (+2)
We’ve been able to onboard new customers, due to recent hiring. We’re now at all-time highs for both customers and revenue, which is a great feeling. We now need to manage the transition from consulting to SaaS, while still maintaining a premium service.
🏹 Goal for April - start transition to SaaS 🏹
The problem we’ve unearthed from our consulting is people don’t get the outputs they want from their AI because they’re inconsistent with how they define what they want. We’ve solved this by making them define their Policy, which is the missing core of the AI stack.
We’re now building a platform where customers write Policy (i.e. what they want their AI to do) and label their data. We then provide model development and deployment as a wrap-around service. This is a much more scalable model than pure services, which involved labelling customer data ourselves. However, there’s risk around whether we can build a platform that meets this goal.
Our next major milestone is one customer consistently using our platform to write Policy/label data successfully, which means without our intervention. Therefore, customers on our SaaS platform (currently 0) is our new primary metric. We will continue to track total customers, revenue & team size.
🙏 Shout-outs 🙏
Special thanks for March go to:
Ed S - for saying nice things about us
Greta A - for the many opportunities to speak at Balderton
Sivesh - for believing in us so early
Fergus B - for giving first
Brad H - for critical short-notice legal help
Kari & Rachid - for being understanding
Laura & Srecko - for teaming up against Sam on legal risk
Vini C - for a very helpful reference and a fun chat
Sam C - for sage advice about the limits of transparency
Hannah G - for an intense-but-hopefully-productive afternoon
En Taro Tassadar,
Artanis Team