Evan beat me to it :)
Evan is our Lead Engineer, and I'm the CEO.
We believe vertical integrated SaaS focused on prediction will reshape a lot of industries.
Evan is our Lead Engineer, and I'm the CEO.
We believe vertical integrated SaaS focused on prediction will reshape a lot of industries.
Though it does seem like you guys have found a niche - quality automation in general is booming right now, and ML predictive models can be very helpful in certain industries like food and beverage. I'm guessing you guys probably work with smaller/younger companies that don't have the kinds of problems your Kraft/P&G/J&J do - there's certainly plenty of opportunity there.
"Prediction" in general can be hard - the biggest problem can be getting good data in the first place, and fixing a company's data gathering problems is out of scope of any sane software shop. But it's right in the wheelhouse of an IT consulting shop, which is where I'm seeing a lot of ML guys end up.
We work across the industry in alcohol production, so small craft to giant global sized companies.
A lot of what we do is implement better data acquisition from sensory, production, distribution, and demographics during our implementation phase, before our prediction or optimization models have a good enough baseline to run - we are definitely not a sane software shop!
ERPs are a threat but not direct competition to us - we're hardcore "best of breed" software, and it will be interesting to see how those large companies respond to us in the future...
Consulting models aren't bad (indeed - they can be very profitable); but they don't hockey-stick like people think software does. This makes them unattractive to VCs, but they're a good space for bootstrapped startups (aka "small businesses").
The implementation work is part of our Professional Services, which is standard in Enterprise contracts - that could be viewed as consulting, but its targeted for getting our product into and across the large enterprise.