Vero AI is a company that developed a first-of-its-kind analytical engine built to help enterprises process and understand both numeric data and unstructured information such as text in a fully automated, scaled, easy manner. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Vero AI co-founder and CEO Eric Sydell, PhD to learn more about the company.
Eric Sydell’s Background
What is Eric Sydell’s background? Sydell said:
“I am an industrial-organizational psychologist (IOP), which is a fancy name for a psychologist who studies the world of work. I’ve always been interested in what makes people successful and how they can be more impactful and satisfied, so IOP was a great field for me. I spent the first two decades of my career in HR tech, helping companies to hire people using scientific selection methods. This gave me a deep understanding of how people make decisions about other people, and I realized we are really not very good at being objective! I decided that I wanted to go even deeper into how we as humans take in information and make decisions about that information, because bad and subjective decisions often lead to outcomes that are biased and ineffective.”
Formation Of Vero AI
How did the idea for the company come together? Sydell shared:
“On the heels of my career in HR tech, I wanted to create a way for people and companies to make better decisions. Working with co-founders technology sales veteran Kim Macdonald; data scientist Rachel King, Ph.D.; and product expert Mike Reeves, Ph.D., we quickly realized that we could use generative AI to help us with this. Only 20% of the information in the world is quantitative or numerical, and there are a lot of statistical methods to deal with that 20%. But what about the other 80% of information that is unstructured and messy, like all the text documents, web pages and images out there? There was no way to make sense of that vast amount of information at scale. But with genAI, we are actually able to process and study ALL information in an easy, scaled way that is also rigorous and scientific. This is a VERY exciting development and represents the leading edge of how AI can be applied to help increase our decision-making skills to superhuman levels.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Sydell’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Sydell reflected:
“Receiving positive customer feedback! As a startup founder, it’s extremely rewarding to put your heart and soul (and money!) into something that has never been done before, and then see it reach fruition. Initially, we were nervous to hear what prospective customers thought about our configured solutions but were gratified to get their positive and glowing feedback. That type of market feedback is incredibly valuable and motivating in a startup environment.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Sydell explained:
“Dedicated to empowering global enterprises in harnessing the full potential of AI technologies while minimizing risk, we built an analytical engine, which can ingest data and make sense of information. ANY information. This type of analytical platform or tool has long existed for numerical data, where you can upload numbers in a table and automatically create dashboards that have charts or graphs. But until now there has been no scaled, easy way to statistically analyze text or other unstructured information. This is the challenge we set out to solve, which seemed nonsensical at first. But what the Vero AI platform does, is it breaks down text into little pieces and then relates it to various criteria that we can specify. To do this, it uses genAI capabilities. Essentially, this means we can score text data on specific indicators OR we can evaluate it and provide detailed automated feedback on specific things.”
“For example, Vero AI is a powerful tool for helping global organizations across all sectors streamline their compliance efforts, by delivering faster and more accurate results. Leveraging the platform, organizations can quickly and meticulously analyze and evaluate a wide range of organizational documents to automatically determine a company’s compliance status for meeting regulatory standards including Sarbanes-Oxley, HITRUST, SOC 2, and more, helping them to stay ahead of upcoming legislation.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have Sydell and the team faced in building the company? Sydell acknowledged:
“The biggest challenge is the sheer pace of change in the AI world. New models and features are constantly being released, and while AI is massively powerful, there is also a ton of hype and confusion around whether and how well AI approaches really work. But that is also part of what makes this environment so exciting! There is constant change coming at us so quickly, and at times it can feel like we are riding a rollercoaster!”
Evolution Of Vero AI’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Sydell noted:
“When we first launched Vero AI, our primary goal was to enter the emerging market for algorithmic or AI auditing. With literally thousands of pieces of legislation being designed globally, there is a huge need for tools that can help organizations evaluate and understand whether their AI approaches are compliant and effective. However, we’ve found this market to be somewhat nascent, and while we believe it will grow over time, our focus now is on governance, risk, and compliance (GRC). We’ve found the GRC space to be our natural home, as Vero AI’s platform can be used to quickly, thoroughly, and objectively evaluate vast quantities of information for compliance and other metrics. So, over time we have tailored our tech and offerings for the GRC space.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Sydell cited:
“There are of course many variables that impact startup success, but one of the biggest is the team you build. We have been extremely fortunate to attract experienced people who are absolutely top notch technically AND are dedicated to our purpose. When you are attempting to birth an idea for which there are few analogs, you need a cohesive team that can brainstorm and evolve together. So, for me, this is our biggest milestone, but of course, the client feedback discussed above is also very exciting!”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Sydell about the company’s customer success stories, he highlighted:
“We are still early in our customer journey, but our customers have uniformly raved about our ability to simplify and improve their initiatives. For example, it can take six to twelve months to work through an organization’s documentation to evaluate whether they are ISO 27001 compliant or not, and this time is spent wading through complex technical documents in a quest to answer compliance questions that are often not black and white. But increasingly, this type of intellectual labor can be augmented with AI, and Vero AI can make quick work of it. Not only is a massive corpus of files crunched immediately, but it is done with much higher accuracy and objectivity than a human can handle. In our analyses, we have found that using our platform saves approximately 97% of the time required to complete a large compliance analysis.”
Funding
When asking Sydell about the company’s funding details, he revealed:
“At the time of this writing, Vero AI is entirely self-funded, by choice. However, we are exploring taking on some investment dollars to help us scale more quickly. We have spent a lot of time working out specific use cases and validating them with client data. Now that we have multiple strong examples of the value that Vero AI provides, we are building client relationships quickly.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Sydell assessed:
“The global compliance automation market is thought to be around $3 billion dollars today but is expected to grow to $13 billion dollars by 2024. Vero AI is targeting this growing space with our compliance offerings, but there is a much larger market for Vero AI in other domains too. In particular, Vero AI’s capability represents a cutting edge use of genAI and other tools, designed to solve specific business problems in scalable, enterprise-grade ways. Tools such as Vero AI’s have been called “cognitive architectures” that adapt base large language models (LLMs) to do more advanced analysis and reasoning. And there is almost no limit to applications here – investors at Sequoia recently described the TAM for this “cognitive architecture” market as in the trillions of dollars.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Sydell affirmed:
“AI tools created on top of LLM foundations are a recent development, so Vero AI is operating in a very greenfield environment. Other companies are working on similar ideas, but they tend to be heavily VC-backed, platform software plays. A benefit of working with Vero AI is that we are very consulting-oriented and work with our clients to configure solutions that meet their specific needs rather than just trying to sell them a software license for one-size-fits-all tools. Over time, as we build specific solutions, we will become more automated, but our work always starts with a very clear understanding of the client’s needs and success criteria.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Sydell concluded:
“We plan to continue building out specific, validated use cases of Vero AI like our GRC offering, and as we do that, make it easier for end users to create DIY use cases. Ultimately, our goal is to enable users to leverage the powerful analytics of Vero AI on their own, easily and intuitively. We want to make the scientific method accessible for all, and help the world become a more objective place! As I wrote recently in Fast Company, organizational ‘dark data’ is everywhere, and AI offers revolutionary ways to access and make sense of it!”
