Rish Gupta, founder of Spot AI, discusses his journey of raising $93 million from top-tier investors like Redpoint Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners.
Rish Gupta, founder of Spot AI, discusses his journey of raising $93 million from top-tier investors like Redpoint Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners to provide companies with AI camera systems. He built and exited previous companies before successfully securing Series B+ funding for Spot AI.
imagine you're asking chat GPD questions or things to do but it has eyes it can actually be looking at your world and you could just be like hey I want you to look at this Factory and tell me 10 ways I can improve my safety I took it as a challenge to go and run this marathon and as I was going through the last 6 miles everything was hurting it was about close to 95° in the last 6 miles I was like if I can push myself to do this I'm going to tomorrow just go and start this company all righty hello everyone and welcome to the deal maker show so today we have a really awesome founder you know founder that you know has done it you know a couple of times you know now he's writing this incredible momentum and a hype you know in the artificial intelligence world you know agis you know we're going to be talking about all of that good stuff you know we're going to be talking about also moving to
the US you know thinking about building your network when coming here I'm sure that there's a lot of you guys outside of the wondering what happens when you get here and how how you can make it happen and again all of that stuff the building the scaling you know you name it and without further Ado let's welcome our guest today R Gupta welcome to the show thanks alandro thank you for having me super excited so originally born in Delhi in India so give us a walk through Memory Lane how was life growing up for you life's you know there's a there's a movie version of Delhi that or or India that people you guys to see in Slum Dog Millionaire and then there's a whole reality to it uh so so uh I mean it was like growing up probably in any other part of the world you know uh where I grew up we uh yeah at a great childhood I was very very lucky that one of the best sporting facilities in the city
was walking distance from my house and it was like a massive sporting facility from everything from hor riding to swimming to tennis to squash to you name it so most of my childhood was spent between going to our school coming back home being walked to the sporting facility and having just one hour of tennis training one hour of swimming training one hour of like heart riding like everything every sport Under the Sun so that was most of my childhood um apart from like I was I was a math geek so did a bunch of math olympiads and yeah stuff like that how did you get into the um you know because it sounds like me you did your your undergrad you know your your schooling there but it sounds like the entrepreneurial bug hit you you know while you were in college and you did a couple of things on side Hustle so what happened there that really pushed you into the Venture world I don't know how
and when and I think a lot of people who become entrepreneurial cannot really pinpoint a date so from a very young age I was very enamored by people who had build their own things whether and it could be individuals who had build their own scientific theorems to people who had built companies to people who were in the late 90s really famous like Bill Gates or you know uh uh Richard Branson and stuff you read about those books and Howard Huges from the US and Henry Ford and and you'll get really excited and enamored by them so there was this I don't know why there was always this this sense of excitement about how these people lived their lives and what they did so in college I did the most obvious business that I think anybody who's entrepreneurial kinds of starts at least once in college which is you think about oh if I can gather all the cool things happening in around college and make
it into a newsletter then local businesses will advertise on it and I can make money on it uh so we tried doing that wasn't as easy I think we published two editions didn't really distribute it much like yeah was not successful the other business we were watching a movie one day with a friend of mine whose dad owned a very large network of buses which went into rural parts of the country now this was also the point in time this was early 2000s when or mid 2000s when big American and European companies were making especially consumer product goods so think about all your Pepsis Cokes uh hindes uh unil liver all all these companies were making a big inroads into India and they needed Last Mile distribution marketing Etc this parents father had a large bus Network and we were watching a movie the movie was based in New York I forget the movie's name but we saw a bus Roll by in the movie
with a with a banner ad on the side and we're like wait we don't see banner ads on these buses we have a whole bus Network that we can leverage which sells goes to all the interior parts of the country so as 19-year-old kids we decided to go talk to his dad actually get a carpinter put up some banners on side of three buses took some pictures went back to got meetings with some of the biggest largest uh consumer product companies and pitched them the idea of advertising on these buses and they were sold and we built a radio St like not a radio station but a basically a casset recorded uh thing on the bus speaker so that they can again have audio ads playing on them in between music uh yeah that was just a profitable business it was not a super scalable business or you know we didn't really know how to do advertising but we had an asset which we could go advertis and we were able to go
and sell it to companies and companies bought it we I think we made a couple of million rupees within the first six months or something that was a good H push then you know and and obviously that was a ultimately what led you into getting started with let's intern.com which ended up getting you know a nice outcome you know thing in entrepreneurship is listen like find problems around you and then think about how to solve them so one of the problems when we were in college even though even the best of colleges in India do not have a culture of inter ship or did not have a culture of internships 15 years ago so which meant people went to undergrad graduated all of their undergrad Education Without ever having worked with a company so the real world and the textbook world is very very desperate desperate so we started um because I was doing these side hustles I was looking for internships
while I was in college we ended up working and doing lots of random stuff while in college and all our friends would be like this is really cool how do we get access to it I think I was lucky to have a really good friend Network Plus my parents had a lot of good access which we were able to leverage to get a lot of these opportunities for ourselves so that we like we were like everybody we know in college wants to do these things and there is not a single platform to do it so we started basically building a platform which we thought our friends could use and then we kept building it and you know uh it was a lot of fun it is it is a classic I think everybody in the company was between 20 and 25 year old we just nobody knew how to do anything we were all in a first jobs figuring out anything from sales marketing Etc by ourselves had to do a lot of side hustles to kind of get that business
off the ground and one thing that is interesting is that you started you know the idea of the whole company was saying when you were also thinking about doing a marathon you know that's quite to do in parallel no yeah so so basically I was very very you know the I wanted to start this company but I was very nervous because yeah you you're very young and you're like all your friends are going and getting consulting jobs and banking jobs and earning good money and you're like I have no experience my parents were not didn't have their own businesses so I was like how do I can I really go and create a full-time job of running my own business rather than just a side hustle and I didn't have the confidence and I had I had um and a person I knew who was 20 years older than me was about somewhere in his 40s at that point and he was running a marathon and he told me he's running a marathon I'm
like what is that he's said oh it's 26 miles and I'm I'm like okay I want to do it and it was it was four weeks away and I was not a runner in school I was a soccer player and I was very active so I took it as a challenge to go and run this marathon and as you can imagine in four weeks of training who somebody who's not a runner it was very very painful on the day off and as I was going through the last six miles everything was hurting I it was torturous it was a hot day in Bombay I'd ran this marathon in Bombay it was about close to 95 degrees when we were running and in the last Smiles as like if I can push myself to do this I'm going to tomorrow just go and start this company like if I can find the courage to do this it was just I don't know what it was but in those last six torturous miles which took about an hour to run there was a decision made that if I can finish this I'm going
to…