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There’s an overwhelming explosion of AI products and APIs these days for so many audio-visual content tasks — be it voice recognition, transcription, translation, facial detection, etc etc.
If you’re a company trying to use as much AI in your company as possible, you could either build these yourself, or buy ALL these tools separately, OR…. the most convenient would be to just use one API+tool that combines them all under the hood, which is what we’re going to talk about today!
My guest was Eugen Gross, CEO of aiconix. They act as a single platform for as many state-of-the-art ML models and APIs (offered by all the top providers from Google to Baidu), so that you only have to deal with one company for all your ML needs.
What I really like about their product is that it can intelligently combine the results from different providers (say for real-time translation) and give you the most accurate result. They’ve even been used to transcribe Angela Merkel’s speech on live TV in Germany.
But building such a company means you’re almost offering hundreds of products and services from the start, so I was curious how Eugen’s team went about their business development journey.
As always, I bring you the most thorough and insightful discussion on the topic than anywhere on the internet:
0:30 — An easy tool for AI-enhanced digital content
6:30 — How Aiconix encapsulates both 3rd party and proprietary AI models
15:00 — Aiconix’s business structure: billing and services
19:30 — Sales strategy learnings: Work directly with end customers or sell to software developers first?
24:57 — Turning away customers and refusing to build certain things
27:51 — Journey of the company and accidental pivot during Covid
32:45 – Aiconix’s unique fundraising journey with both public and private money
41:21 – Standing out in a crowded market of AI tools
43:15 – Being a sales-driven or product-driven company?
(Ethics Policy: These opinions are 100% my own as an independent observer and educator. I don’t own stock in guests’ companies or their competitors, nor do I get paid by them in any form for any reason at the time of publishing, unless specifically stated. Episodes are also not intended to be an automatic endorsement of any company or its products and services.)
