Introduction To Guest

Slater Victoroff is the Founder and CTO of Indico, an enterprise AI solution for unstructured content that emphasizes document understanding. Slater has been building machine learning solutions for startups, governments, and Fortune 100 companies for the past seven years and is a frequent speaker at AI conferences. Indico’s framework requires 1000x less data than traditional machine learning techniques, and they regularly beat the likes of AWS, Google, Microsoft, and IBM in head-to-head bake-offs. Indico recently announced a $22 million Series B raise.

Coming Up with The Idea

Slater and his friend began doing Kaggle competitions for about six months in 2012. Slater was involved in more traditional techniques, while his friend was into deep learning. Together they soon realized the impact that machine/deep learning had in solving problems was huge. Slater and his friend began shipping their deep learning techniques into production, which was something that very few people knew how to do in 2012. More and more people started to reach out asking to do projects with Slater, which was essentially the birthing of Indico. Slater realized there was a massive gap in what was possible in academia with what was possible in the industry. Slater and his friend took this incredible machine learning technology to see how they could make it practical, tractable, and useful to people in the industry. After a lot of research, they realized you can get the accuracy of deep learning models with 1/1000 the amount of data that you would previously require. Slater then realized that they could build a whole company around the idea of transfer learning, while making this technology more accessible.

Indico first decided to bring their idea to developers to build developer-facing products, a series of API’s that were usable. Back in 2014-2015 there were very few offerings like this sort of alchemy API. This was the first time that these models were radically accessible. Since then, Indico made some significant advances in the usability of that particular API that provided user traction. browse page: verified creator collection

While the users were into it and Indico got very good at designing API’s, they found that ultimately it was a very bad business model for the kind of technology that they were taking to market. The principal reason was that unstructured data isn’t something that people have been able to work with effectively before. Unstructured data has been too difficult to deal with in traditional software. When you add deep learning into the mix, you change the game in a fundamental way. You can get after a lot of unstructured reasoning tasks that you couldn’t have tackled before. What Slater found was the technical side and the business side have to come together to create a solution that makes both parties successful. This was the gap that needed to be bridged.

The Product

The most updated version of the Indico product came three years ago. It is a platform that allows people to create their own models and gives them full transparency into the model that they are building. Indico 2.0 still has the APIs of the last generation, but Slater and his team added more to the product. But first and foremost, this product faces the non-technical subject: document extraction API’s, email classification models, object detection, etc. with the goal of giving that non-technical user the very clear intuitive interface to train the model, control it, and understand exactly what it’s doing. For the non-technical users, it’s a no-code experience. However, even though there’s not a code used to build, you still must plug two API’s in on the backend. There’s still that rich API which means it will usually be a low code integration downstream.

Business Model

Indico has two main modes that they’re licensing. One is a managed service. They have a private cluster for the customer that Indico manages on AWS that scales up and down, where the client pays for the hardware that it’s hosted on. There is also a rate card for the capacity that they’re pumping through the application. Indico also supports a fully on-prem version. For some customers, they want to manage the platform themselves. About 80% of customers have a managed service while 20% run on premise.

Working with Fortune 100 Clients

Indico credits its clients from grit, and determination. What people don’t realize is that once you go into an enterprise sales cycle you must recognize that 12 months is a good case scenario in the cycle. You cannot put all your eggs in one basket, you must recognize that it may take two or three years to go from a prospect to a signed deal. MetLife, for instance, is one of Indico’s top clients. It took Indico two and half years from their first meeting with MetLife to their final deal. You must possess a mature product and know how to document things. It’s imperative that you understand the complicated engine that is the enterprise. There could be eight different stakeholders that have to sign off on what you’re doing. Any single one of the stakeholders can say no. It’s tough and it’s a grind to acquire Fortune 100 clients. You must get the right conversation started and go from there.

Future Endeavors

Indico has recently evolved past this document centric positioning into the unstructured data platform. This is a big piece of the company’s three-to-five-year vision. Indico has built explainability and transparency into their foundation and products. This will become more important over time. Slater believes that people are going to think about models in terms of lineages. We’re already starting to see a lot more of these techniques that fuse image and text information, and audio and image information. This is where we start to talk about the future of unstructured data. Indico hopes to create more impactful applications in three to five years.

Advice For Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Something more entrepreneurs in the AI space need to hear is do not be afraid to chase the frontier of technology. It can be very intimidating to see all these massive organizations going after the field of AI and making these incredible advances. Many entrepreneurs become intimidated and do not even try to start their business. Go out there and give it a shot. Do not leave a big opportunity on the table out of fear. Stand up for what you believe and go after your dreams.

https://indico.io/