Why did we invest in Alltius?
Alltius is a generative AI company with the mission of making companies across the world more efficient through its innovative offerings. Their flagship product — KNO is an innovative ask-anything assistant that can ingest content in any form to provide intent-based relevant answers.
They raised a $2 million round in 2022 which featured participation from Stellaris Venture Partners and Blume Ventures alongside us
The following reasons inspired confidence in Alltius and the solution that they are building.
1) The Dawn of Generative A.I.
GPT-3 was released in 2020, and since then the market has been abuzz with excitement. Whilst the turn of the millennium has brought about a multitude of technological innovations, few have captured the world’s fancy as comprehensively as generative A.I.
The origination of the term ‘Artificial Intelligence’ can be traced back to 1956, however the concept in itself had been mulled over for centuries prior. GPT-3’s launch marked the culmination of a centuries-long fascination with making technology seem sentient. It being trained on an impressive 175 billion parameters was pivotal for generative A.I as a whole as that made it the largest neural network produced till then, and a great statement for the feasibility of the technology.
As the immense customer fascination about the generative A.I. technologies become apparent, the investor interest in the area also piqued considerably. Over $2.6 billion venture capital was dispensed towards the generative A.I. industry in 2022. This marked an over 70% increase in funding received from 2021. Similarly, the number of deals executed also increased across this period.
When we all imagine the nature of utility that generative A.I. is expected to bring, a lot of it is centred on customer-centric causes like content generation, or hastening the delivery of search queries. This is why over 30% of professionals in a recent survey by Fishbowl admitted to using Chat GPT. While the responders pertained to a plethora of different domains like marketing, software development, accounting, etc., they were united by the fact that they had their productivity enhanced by using Chat GPT. GPT-3’s ability to create anything that has a linguistic structure was a very important breakthrough to facilitate this.
As the spectrum of generative A.I. increases, we expect more solutions that can facilitate the same for businesses across the world. As the technology quotient has become increasingly complex over the past few years, we see a lot of businesses becoming confounded when using modern tools in their processes. This hampers their productivity considerably and makes them inefficient.
Therefore, as the technology powering generative A.I. evolves, we see a clear use for language models based tools in simplifying actions and operations for not just professionals, but businesses as a whole.
2) Complex Products with Large Manuals
The Indian B2B SaaS industry is as vibrant as they come. With over 2,000 SaaS-based companies operating in India right now, modern companies are specifically well-equipped with all the tools they need to serve their customers well.
However, despite booming growth for the industry, there is still a huge problem statement that undermines the promise of enhanced efficiency it makes — onboarding. As businesses become incrementally complex, so do the SaaS tools designed to help them. This makes them harder to comprehend for a user. The fact that an average large company uses over 250 tools only adds to the problem. As a result of this issue, employees take a long time to get accustomed to these applications, which only decreases company-wide efficiency.
Moreover, problems in onboarding can even hamper the companies making the SaaS tools. To be successful, SaaS companies must hire knowledgeable staff to build their brand, sell their offering, and solve user issues as they arise. This only serves to amplify the kind of costs they outlay on customer service.
Therefore, the problem of onboarding has a twofold nature. It hinders the ability of companies to quickly adapt to new technology and use that to optimise their operations, while also turning the process of making a sale and providing customer service to their users into a cumbersome one.
3) Strong Team with Extensive AI Capability
To build a product that can solve for this lucidly, the founding team should not only be extremely well-versed in the nature of technology that they are dealing with, but should also be extremely clear about the kind of problem statement that they are solving for. As a function of how strict these constraints are, the number of companies and founding teams that furnish them are few and far between. This is precisely why we were extremely glad to come across the team behind Alltius — Vibhanshu and Siddhant, and what they bring to the table.
Vibhanshu brings with himself an esteemed educational pedigree. An IIT Kanpur alumnus, he completed his AM in statistics from The Wharton School, before completing his Ph.D. from there. Over the course of his educational expedition, he attained a great deal of familiarity with the emerging AI/NLP infrastructure. He has also acted as an advisor for Sequoia Capital and McKinsey amongst others. He has served in leadership positions at numerous startups which have cumulatively raised $500 million. Due to his considerable experience in AI/NLP models, Vibhanshu has been able to develop proprietary research that forms the backbone of Alltius.
Siddhant is an IIT Guwahati alumnus, who pursued his higher education from IIM Bangalore. He is a 2x founder who is extremely at-ease building from the ground up, and scaling startups with impressive velocity. He has served in eminent positions at ClearTax India, Rivigo, Boston Consulting Group, and Cap Gemini. Through these, he was able to attain a diverse set of experience that will surely come handy as Alltius expand.
In addition to impressive educational and professional pedigrees, Siddhant and Vibhanshu also show the promise of being capable leaders who can empower build and empower amazing teams.
4) A Multi-faceted Product
To resolve the product enablement hassle for businesses, it is imperative to present the solution in the most intuitive form possible. As people prefer to seek answers through conversations, be it with peers or specialists, language models are a profoundly natural way to helping people become more familiar with the tools that they are using. This is where KNO comes into the picture.
KNO is a smart generative AI-based ask-anything assistant with a mission to foster product learning, and enablement across business. It is capable of giving quick, bite-sized, and precise answers based on the information ingested into it. While their peers suffer from limitations pertaining to data collection, KNO can draw real-time answers to all the problems being faced by an individual. This gives it an edge over its peers. Moreover, businesses can also customise the kind of information that they wish to impart to KNO so that it can act as a one-stop solution for any answers they might need on a software or a document.
As highlighted in a previous section, product enablement is a time-consuming process. Since KNO can be as much as 300 times faster than traditional methods, one can find answers to their problems in seconds as the software can go through the tool’s code at light speed. This can save 10–20 hours for the user which makes a massive difference for every party involved.
Companies can also clone KNO to personalise their multiple assistants, and allocating them a specific department or assignment to further amplify their efficiency.
Moreover, due to how flexible the underlying technology is, KNO can be adopted across multiple use cases pertaining to the domains of education, human resources, healthcare, just to name a few. This flexibility combined with the ease and sheer customisability with which one can train KNO makes it an integral tool for any company to possess.
Conclusion
Post the launch of GPT-3, the generative A.I. market is undergoing a rather bullish phase. Due to the underlying technology’s ability to process and produce materials with a linguistic nature, it emerged as a boon for professionals across sectors. Due to this, people are able to interact with tech in a much more interactive manner that has given birth to deeper use cases. This increasing user fascination with generative A.I. was only matched with the investor interest in the space. As the world starts to become more comfortable with the technology, we foresee a world where generative A.I. not only helps professionals become more optimised, but also businesses in becoming more streamlined and efficient so that they can prosper.
The recent innovations in generative A.I. only highlight how technologically complex our world is becoming. However, with this increasing technology quotient, there is a new problem for businesses — onboarding. An average company uses over 250 SaaS apps to optimise their operations. However, as the number of such applications and their complexity increases, employees tend to feel alienated from them for a while. This reduces the company’s efficiency and also forces the SaaS company to invest heavily in customer service. Thus, we need a solutions that simplifies onboarding and makes it more intuitive.
Vibhanshu and Siddhant bring with them an immense treasure trove of subject master mastery and professional experience. They possess impeccable educational pedigrees that rouse confidence in their ability to understand the space lucidly, and professional accomplishments that talk about their ability as leaders. This makes them the perfect team for the task.
Alltius’ flagship product — KNO is the perfect solution for the onboarding woe. It is a powerful language model that can answer all queries pertaining to its knowledge base easily and quickly. It can assimilate new material in textual form, auditory form, and even as a video. Such customisability is truly peerless Moreover, due to how customisable it can be, it serves as the perfect tool for companies of all sizes and sectors, which makes it the perfect horizontal platform.
