Startup Spotlight #67: Symbl.ai

Symbl is the API platform for businesses looking to deploy conversational intelligence at scale.

Dec 23, 2020

Author’s Note: This will be the last case study for the year. I’ll be taking the next two weeks off for vacation to rest, recharge, and make adjustments to Founder to Founder to ensure I can deliver the Startup Spotlight articles on a routine basis. I’ll have more to say on January 4th, 2021, when I will resume publishing the Startup Spotlights. Happy Holidays to you and your loved ones.

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I got the chance to speak with Surbhi Rathore, co-founder and CEO of Symbl.ai, about what she’s working on at her startup, and any advice she has for emerging entrepreneurs.

Symbl is bringing to life her vision for a programmable platform that empowers developers and businesses to build unique conversational experiences without the hassle of upfront training or building their in-house data science expertise. She co-founded Symbl (previously Rammer.ai) almost 2 years ago and was a part of the Alexa Next Stage program by Techstars 2020. Symbl has raised a total $6.5M in early-stage venture funding and deployed capital to grow a team of tech enthusiasts to 32 people primarily distributed between India and Seattle.

She comes with experience from technical and customer-obsessed roles in both startups and enterprises such as Nevis Networks and Amdocs. Before co-founding Symbl, she worked in the Conversational AI space with a focus on delivering value to Telecommunication users. She is an advocate for Women in AI with a personal mission to inspire more women to work in Data Science. In her free time, she loves to travel and spend time with her remote and distributed family across continents.

Startup Spotlight: Symbl.ai

Symbli.ai cofounder and CEO Surbhi Rathore.

Problem: The complexity of building and maintaining conversation understanding systems for human to human conversations at scale.

Market: The total addressable market (TAM) includes the market size of voice and messaging components of the CPaaS platforms like Twilio, Agora, etc, that are scaling massively and are at a value of approximately $8.2 billion.

Solution: Symbl.ai is a developer platform to analyze voice, text, video conversations in any domain - without the need for upfront training or building custom classifiers - enabling businesses to deploy conversational intelligence at scale.

Team: Engineers and Data scientists with expertise in Video Communications and AI. Founders with diverse functional experience across business and engineering, x-Amdocs, and worked on Conversational AI in Telco space with a background in Enterprise-grade APIs.

Recent Success:

Rathore: I have always been extremely proud to have gathered like-minded tech visionaries who are equally passionate to solve problems in the conversation understanding domain. In the early stages of the company - there is always a tradeoff you have to make on the team due to the limited cash. We operated with a team in India and Seattle to make sure we are operationally effective and yet can run a double velocity as a company. Additionally, choosing your early customers pretty much defines the kind of product you will build, and we were pretty lucky to have true believers surround us that can deliver impact with emerging technologies.

Recent Struggle:

Rathore: Over the past 2 years we have built so much knowledge and learning that is just sitting on our internal confluence and we have not been able to get it out to the developers and product managers at scale who are actually solving similar problems. As a result, we only solved for the customers that came in direct contact with us and could not build the right early brand awareness amongst developers.

Founder Advice:

Rathore: Heavily depends on the stage, but generally I think being able to manage your own emotions becomes a key skill. I remember going into customer meetings after a bad investor call. It is difficult to not let your feelings from one instance overpower your actions throughout the day. I still have not figured it out, but I try new things everyday to be emotionally stable while being fully invested in the idea and company.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Rathore: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Dr. Joan Palmiter Bajorek, Founder of Women In Voice: International empowerment for women and minority genders in voice technology.
Diego Oppenheimer, Founder of Algorithmia: Algorithmia is a single solution for all stages of the ML operations (MLOps) and management lifecycle.
Julian Alvarez, Founder of Logixboard: Logixboard is a customer engagement software for the freight industry.

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