Why I Invested In a Conversational AI Company, PassageAI?
Array was one of the earliest investors in Passage AI and participated in its seed round back in October 2016. Passage is a conversational AI company that currently sells to retail, telecommunications, automotive and education industries.
In September 2016, I was introduced to Passage AI by Deep Nishar (Passage was called RupertBot at that time). Deep has a simple philosophy he only refers and invests in people he’s known and worked with in the past. He had worked with Mitul Tiwari, one of Passage AI’s co-founder, at LinkedIn.
I met the team at a small coffee shop in Bernal Heights. In my previous engineering days, I have spent a few years working on messaging platforms trying to rethink conversations online. The space was already looking crowded and I was skeptical. Usually before the initial in-person meeting, I try to have a Q&A over email with the founders. Often founders do not like to engage in the back and forth conversation before the meeting but the Passage team engaged with me and dug deeper. It was clear I was going to like the team.
The day comes when we plan on meeting in-person. The deal was moving fast so I was impressed when all 3 founders, Ravi Raj, Mitul Tiwari, and Madhu Mathihalli had showed up for the meeting. That made it easier for me to get to know them and to understand their team dynamics.
I asked some difficult questions and the team continued to engage. They were clearly passionate about the category and had the right industry experience in retail and AI. I remember Ravi was so excited about their initial demo they had prepared for a customer that he was showing me every functionality that was uniquely created…even his team members had to tell him to stop the demo! Real team work at play :) We dug into their implementation, go-to-market and differentiation. I wanted to know how they will get customers and why they will win those customers. Chatbot space was very crowded at that time and I wanted to know why they would succeed over other companies in the space. They had really good way to address all of my concerns and I decided to invest.
Passage AI, most recently raised a $7.3 million Series A from Bruce Taragin at Blumberg Capital who I’ve known since 2011. They have made good progress building out customers and revenue in a very short period since the launch of their platform. They have done a phenomenal job of integrating across many platform such as Alexa, Slack, Messenger, Google Home, WeChat, and many more. They recently won the prestigious TiE50 award (out of over 7500 applications!), which is TiE’s list of top 50 startups in the world.
When I’m looking to invest in companies, I am always looking for ways I can be helpful. For PassageAI, I was able to make potential customer introductions right away. I am excited to be able to continue to work with a hardworking, humble, and high-quality tech team to take the company to the next level.
