Andy Nurumov

Author: Andy Nurumov

Among the last 30 deals executed by Sequoia Capital, there are 6 B2B deals: Quilt, Atlan, Orbital Materials, Siera, EDXM, and Harvey.

Let’s dive into each of these opportunities in the following weeks. The analysis below will be useful for the companies themselves, VC investors, as well as new founders who are seeking to solve real business problems using the latest technologies.

Sequoia 1 – Quilt: “One knowledge assistant for your entire team”. 2 ideas and 3 open questions.

I. Description:

San Francisco-based Quilt operates in the automation & workflow software vertical, providing an AI assistant to answer on-demand questions related to questionnaires in security or due diligence. When the product performs, it combines different sources of communication (Slack and different databases). The solution includes Knowledge management, Questionnaire Assistant, and Meeting Assistant.

II. Targeted clients & Business model:

Quilt would try to target solution and sales organizations. Inside these clients, they consider Sales Engineering representatives as relevant customers for their solution.

IDEA 1: Questionnaires in procurement are also important, particularly in specifications for services procurement. Moreover, questionnaires play an important part in onboarding clients in Private Wealth Management. Founders could add these 2 customer segments as additional hypotheses.

III. Business case & Differentiation:

Founders reasonably focus on security, technically describing details such as full encryption based on the latest best practices, control of saving documents on servers, and independence of your data across different organizations.

Main Open Question 1: The question that arises is: is there really a business case for using this product for customers? Does it really save time like Calendly, a product in the same vertical? I am pretty sure that the founders are aware of this flaw. And I am sure that investors in the next round, Series-A, would expect the right answer to this question from the company, supported by data.

Main Open Question 2: Do you really need AI to solve the issue that the company targets? Maybe just a smart way to work with databases will be enough.

Main Open Question 3: Moreover, even though there could be data synergy among clients to train the model, the question is: how can the startup leverage this exposure? The company could potentially lose to a competitor’s product if they do not find a way to leverage this question.

IV. Unicorn idea:

During the analysis of the startup, one idea came to my mind that could use similar technology but address a clear business case for B2B clients:

IDEA 2: AI User Guide. An AI assistant that helps create descriptions for any digital product to deliver user guides as well as to navigate customers in real-time via AI assistant. Moreover, based on constant changes of platforms/products, the solution will allow to change guides deliverables in real-time. By doing this, the product will save time that employees spend in organizations to create and then change user guides. Concrete business case for B2B clients with the saving of workforce wage costs.

If you are interested in what type of data is needed to train the AI model for that business, feel free to reach out to me.

Thank you for reading! Hope you enjoyed. Stay tuned to read the following articles later on.

Copyright: Citation and paraphrasing usage are welcome with a hyperlink to the original article.

About the author: Andy Nurumov specializes in Enterprise Tech and Marketplaces. He is a Founder and ex-CEO of an 8-figure B2B E-Commerce marketplace for Enterprise clients, which he scaled to a team of 20+ people and positive cash flow.