The potential for intelligent automation — and why we’re (re)investing in Jaid
Jaid helps large institutions to intelligently automate important but mundane tasks, like resolving customer post-trade queries or updating CRM systems for changes in deal statuses. The system makes everything look simple — but it’s an engineering feat that is opening up a market opportunity worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
Marketing services drive deal flow
We first met Dan Kramer, Jaid CEO, thanks to a referral. Someone we’d worked with in the past had told Dan that aperture could raise his company’s profile in the US. When we explained to Dan our model — which is to provide a full-stack marketing execution platform — Dan realized we could do much more. He could see that overnight we could turbocharge demand generation across key markets — while also massively raising the company’s profile. So, he was sold and wanted to sign us up. However, through those early discussions, meeting the team, and seeing the product, we had also become convinced about their value proposition. And so, we worked hard to persuade Dan to let us invest in their seed round in the summer — to ensure all our interests were aligned.
A system of intelligence
Why did we like Jaid?
First of all, because it was self-evident that the solution could be applied to a multitude of use cases, across a multitude of industries (finance, healthcare, government, etc). We’d lived many of the use cases (name one marketing person who doesn’t have a hard time getting salespeople to update the CRM?). We’ve also observed through consulting work how many people are employed in organizations doing exactly these kinds of tasks today. This underpinned our confidence in the size of the opportunity.
Second, we liked the team. Down-to-earth, and pragmatic, the core team has scaled several successful start-ups before, so they know what they’re doing, and can leverage a massive network of contacts and advisors to help them get there.
Third, they are extremely progressive in their attitude to scaling the business. Echoing thoughts we’ve articulated before, the team is super focused on the areas where they have a demonstrable competitive advantage (especially technology) and happy to outsource critical functions (such as marketing) to partners they perceived also to have a sustainable competitive advantage.
Fourth, demand for the solution isn’t cyclical. It will of course sell well when times are good and budgets are brimming, but it will also sell well — maybe even better — in difficult times. For a single use case, the solution can be implemented in a few weeks. And the effects are dramatic — one client realized a 95% reduction in staff processing time of inquiries. And that combination of quick implementation plus large impact leads to extremely quick time to value — costs savings that can be materialized in a quarter or half year — which are the holy grail in a downturn.
Fifthly, and most importantly, the solution is a system of intelligence and architected as such.
The Jaid system specializes in use cases where it needs to interpret human, natural language commands (such as an email asking about a missing payment). It then queries other systems to retrieve the right answer and presents that answer back, also in natural language (e.g. an email explaining and resolving the problem), while also updating the CRM system with logs of what has happened.
Most companies that try to tackle these types of problems tend to do it in one of two ways. They either observe how a human deals with a specific query and then seek to automate the same response, so that it can be done without the humans and at scale. However, the problem is that each process needs to be automated separately, which takes time and doesn’t allow for flexibility. The second approach is to try to build intelligence into channels or into systems of record. The challenge here is that it’s necessary to mediate between the two, interpreting inquiries received via any channel and resolving them by querying any and all relevant record-keeping systems — therefore it requires a separate platform.
Jaid is built as an independent system of intelligence. It means that clients can add more channels and more use cases over time, without additional development cycles. It also means that the solution gets better over time. With more training data, the accuracy gets better, so that the solution can resolve more inquiries without having to involve a human in the workflow. All of which massively boost value-add and return on investment for clients.
Inside-out due diligence
We have been working with Jaid since July. In that time, operating side-by-side with the team, we have seen how the value proposition is being received by prospective customers, we have seen how the pipeline has grown (27 enterprise-level SQLs have been created in less than 5 months), we have seen the strong team dynamics, we have seen how deployments are managed, and we have seen the satisfaction and ROI of live clients. In short, our conviction levels, strong from the start, have multiplied and we stand ready to make a much bigger investment into the Series+ round, being led by Sure Valley Ventures.
To learn more about Jaid and its system of intelligence, visit www.jaid.io
To learn more about aperture, visit www.aperture.co
Thanks to Allison Chapman and Carla Venter, who also contributed to this post.
