The season 2 finale of AI Unveiled features our guest host Lak Ananth, Global Managing Partner at Next47, and Igor Marinelli, Co-Founder and CEO of Next47-backed Tractian. They chat about how Tractian is leveraging AI to transform industrial maintenance, the nuances of a co-founder relationship, and how founders must evolve as their companies scale.

Igor shares his unconventional entrepreneurial journey—from cold emailing factories at 13 to building Tractian, a leading maintenance intelligence platform. He dives into how AI enables predictive maintenance, using machine learning and signal processing to detect equipment failures before they happen.

The discussion covers the challenges of bringing AI into legacy industries, where downtime can mean millions in lost revenue. And how Tractian’s technology turns raw machine data into actionable insights, helping manufacturers optimize uptime, reduce costs, and improve reliability.

Their discussion then veers into the challenges facing founders today. From how to identify a scalable problem, being customer-first, why the co-founder relationship is similar to a marriage, and how to create a company of speed and accountability.

We hope you enjoy this episode!

Timestamps: 

* 01:07 - Why building a company around a pain point close to your heart yields success

* 15:57 - Using AI to predict, and fix industrial maintenance issues

* 25:40 - How to build a co-founder relationship that lasts

* 29:02 - Strategies for managing managers in your growth-stage company

* 32:44 - Do co-founders need to be friends?

* 38:57 - Your customer support is your product

At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

In this episode, I speak with Swapnil Jain, Founder & CEO of Observe.AI, an AI-powered platform focused on automating customer service and contact centers. Observe.AI helps enterprises enhance efficiency by leveraging AI-powered automation to evaluate customer interactions, support agents and sellers in real time, and boost customer satisfaction.

The episode explores the evolution of AI in customer support and how enterprises are adapting to an AI-first world. Swapnil dives into the future of contact centers, predicting that within five years, over 50% of support calls will be fully automated by AI. He discusses the challenges traditional BPOs face, why many will struggle to survive without an AI-first strategy, and how businesses can leverage AI to shift customer service from a cost center to a revenue-generating function.

We discuss the convergence of voice, chat, and AI agents in customer support and why agentic AI is a game-changer for real-time automation. Swapnil shares his own leadership evolution, reflecting on the intensity required to build a category-defining company in AI. He also offers insights into the shifting landscape of enterprise AI adoption, the role of small vs. large language models, and how AI is reshaping human-computer interactions. Enjoy!

Timestamps: 

* 2:40 - Starting an AI company pre-LLM

* 9:06 - AI’s impact on human heavy services and industries

* 17:38 - Agentic AI breakdown

* 31:48 - How to measure the accuracy of your AI agents

* 37:40 - Leadership lessons for managing an international workforce

At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

In this episode of AI Unveiled, I speak with Dimitris Nikolaou, Co-Founder and CEO of Wondercraft, an AI-powered platform enabling creators to effortlessly produce podcasts, audiobooks, ads, and more using synthetic voices.

The episode explores the founding journey of Wondercraft, from Dimitris’s experience at Palantir to the decision to build a company before having a specific idea in mind. Dimitris shares how Wondercraft started as a simple experiment and grew into a leading platform empowering creators with user-friendly tools and hyper-realistic voice technology.

Dimitris explains how Wondercraft leverages foundational models like OpenAI, Google, and ElevenLabs while developing proprietary tech to offer advanced customization for voice content. With features like emotion adjustments, accent changes, and "director mode," Wondercraft has unlocked new possibilities for creators to deliver impactful and engaging audio content.

The conversation dives into AI’s transformative role in creative media, covering topics like how AI simplifies podcast production, enabling niche creators to engage their audiences through audio. We also cover the growing demand for personalized audio ads and Wondercraft’s ability to produce hundreds of tailored variations efficiently. He also dives into some innovative use cases, like AI-powered meditations and revision podcasts for students, as well as how they capitalized on the momentum of  NotebookLM voice overview by offering additional controls. 

Dimitris also offers insights into Wondercraft’s growth strategy, from leveraging SEO to building a thriving user community. He discusses the company’s 2025 roadmap, which includes groundbreaking features like video creation, collaborative tools inspired by Canva and Notion, and celebrity voice integrations.

Finally, Dimitris shares his perspective on building a mission-driven company, highlighting the importance of empowering human creativity while leveraging AI’s potential.

I hope you enjoy this episode!

Timestamps: 

*04:40 - The founders journey from Palantir to Wondercraft

*09:20 - AI’s influence on traditional media and entertainment

*15:35 - Shifting podcasts from human hosts to AI ones

*19:17 - Personalization in AI audio

*37:27 - Scaling to over 200,000 users

At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

In this episode of AI Unveiled, I sit down with Jean-Louis Quéguiner, Founder and CEO of Gladia, a cutting-edge audio infrastructure platform powering voice-first applications. Gladia’s mission? To make voice the ultimate interface for human and machine interactions, starting with state-of-the-art transcription.

Jean-Louis shares his journey from leading AI and big data infrastructure at OVHcloud to launching Gladia, and how the company pivoted from offering 500 APIs to focusing exclusively on voice solutions. He dives into the challenges of building and maintaining real-time voice infrastructure and tackling hallucinations in speech-to-text.

Gladia doesn’t do pre-training and instead fine-tunes foundational models. We discuss risk of commoditization as multimodal models mature and how Gladia is able to differentiate by ingesting and modeling their customer’s specific business context and data.

The conversation explores AI's impact on industries like healthcare, education, and law, as well as the future of real-time transcription and multimodal AI. Jean-Louis also provides insights into the importance of customer intimacy, how Gladia competes with hyperscalers, and why a long-term focus on real-world business problems is more important than chasing hype.

Tune in to learn how Gladia is redefining voice as the interface of the future and what it takes to build a high-impact AI infrastructure company.

Enjoy!

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Timestamps: 

*5:03 - What should come first: product or customer development?

*9:37 - Industries that will be most impacted by voice AI

*14:08 - Tackling hallucination 

* 39:36 - The impact of multimodal AI

* 44:30- How AI founders can stay ahead of trends

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At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

In this episode, I sit down with Alex Levin, Co-Founder and CEO of Regal, a platform that is disrupting the contact center industry with AI-powered agents. 

Our conversation unpacks the transformative potential of AI agents in reshaping how businesses interact with their customers. Alex explains why traditional models of minimizing customer interactions are failing and how Regal enables companies to drive growth by offering scalable, high-touch experiences. He shares his bold prediction that 90% of customer interactions will be handled by AI agents in the near future, so we discuss implications for the global workforce and why he doesn't think there'll be destruction of jobs overall. He talks about the growing importance of the evolving role of "prompt engineers" and the new skill sets necessary for a world increasingly powered by generative AI.

I asked Alex how Regal ensures that the customer experience that AI agents provide is good enough. Of course, AI agents are non-deterministic and make errors, but so do human agents. So whether it is reviewing calls, training agents, or determining logic to handoff to level-2 support, many techniques for managing the quality of AI Agents are similar to managing the quality of support by human agents. 

 Finally, we examine why mid-market companies are adopting AI agents more rapidly than enterprises and how Regal is positioned to address their unique needs. Alex shares his perspective on how businesses can navigate this transition successfully, emphasizing the importance of embracing AI to remain competitive in an evolving landscape.

I hope you enjoy this episode!

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Timestamps: 

*07:00 - In the near future, 90% of contact center calls will be with AI 

*15:10 - The importance of omnichannel 

* 19:55 - How to stand out in the competitive AI agent industry

* 33:40 - How to assess the quality of your AI agents

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At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

In this episode, guest host Kate Reznykova, Partner at Next47, speaks with Ulrik Hansen, Co-Founder of Encord, a data development platform that helps companies manage, curate, and label multimodal data such as image, video, audio, document, text, and DICOM files. 

The episode explores the origin story of Encord and the challenges Ulrik and his co-founder Eric faced in building scalable data infrastructure for AI. Ulrik explains how their platform simplifies data creation, annotation, and model evaluation, enabling companies to unlock the potential of their data for applications like diagnosing medical conditions or improving autonomous vehicles. By focusing on the critical steps of streamlining and cleaning data, Encord has positioned itself as a key player in helping organizations build more accurate and effective AI models.

Ulrik also shares insights into scaling a mission-driven startup, from early days coding prototypes at Eric’s dining room table to fundraising and growing a team of nearly 80 people. He discusses the transition from founder-led sales and product development to building a scalable business model and hiring specialized teams. He attributes much of Encord’s success to staying adaptable, learning quickly, and iterating based on customer needs.

The discussion dives into the future of AI, including the rise of multimodal systems, advancements in reasoning, and the potential of AI agents. Ulrik highlights how these are reshaping industries and shares how Encord is preparing for this future.

Enjoy!

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Timestamps: 

* 05:05 - The technical hurdles of building a scalable platform for massive datasets 

* 15:20 - The evolution from hands-on founder to leader, sharing insights into hiring, scaling sales, and transitioning responsibilities

* 27:25 - What it takes to grow from Series A to Series B

* 36:00 - What trends are shaping AI’s next phase, including multimodal systems, advanced reasoning, and intelligent agents

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At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

In this episode, I speak with EJ Cho, Co-Founder and CEO of Tofu, an innovative AI platform revolutionizing B2B marketing by enabling teams to personalize and scale their content creation efforts. We start our chat diving into EJ’s journey from engineering leadership roles at Google and Meta to founding Tofu.

EJ explains how Tofu empowers teams to fully automate top-of-funnel campaigns, repurpose content across channels, and deliver hyper-personalized experiences at scale. He shares insights into the challenges of creating high-quality, on-brand content with AI and how Tofu bridges the gap between automation and human touch.

EJ also highlights the shifting dynamics of marketing teams in an AI-driven world, discussing how roles and structures are evolving to focus on efficiency, relevance, and strategic creativity. We discuss the future of personalization in B2B marketing, from tailoring every element of a landing page to predicting the perfect timing for outreach, and how companies are navigating the balance between automation and control.

Tune in to learn how AI is reshaping the marketing landscape, enabling teams to do more with less, and creating new opportunities for innovation and growth.

I hope you enjoy this episode!

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Timestamps: 

* 03:12 - Using AI to make personalized marketing content

* 08:40 - The future of AI in B2B marketing

* 16:54 - Can AI content compare to human content?

* 26:37 - How to approach pricing your AI product

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At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

In this episode, I speak with Gabriel Hubert, Co-Founder and CEO of Dust, a cutting-edge platform that enables companies to design, deploy, and maintain AI assistants tailored to their internal workflows. We dive into Gabriel’s journey building Dust, the transformative potential of AI in knowledge work, and the principles behind creating tools that teams truly adopt and rely on.

Our conversation centers around the adoption and impact of AI assistants in the workplace. Gabriel shares how Dust is helping companies embed AI into day-to-day workflows, from drafting personalized communication and summarizing internal data to automating candidate feedback and streamlining decision-making processes. We also chat about the challenges of balancing ubiquity, intelligence, and agency to create AI tools that are both powerful and intuitive.

Gabriel discusses how Dust approaches user adoption, focusing on empowering teams to create their own assistants while maintaining centralized oversight for key workflows. He emphasizes the importance of trust, accessibility, and showing tangible value to drive widespread usage of AI tools.

Tune in to learn how AI is transforming the way we work, the practicalities of scaling AI adoption, and how to build tools that teams love.

Enjoy!

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Timestamps: 

* 09:53 - AI’s impact on knowledge work

* 13:15 - Software as we know it is being challenged

* 22:37 - How AI Assistants will impact hiring

* 37:06 - Dust’s approach to customer feedback and accuracy

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At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

Next47 Partner Vivian Cheng guest hosts this episode of AI Unveiled and speaks with Erez Druk, the Co-Founder and CEO of Freed, a rocket ship AI startup dedicated to transforming the lives of healthcare professionals. Freed has grown at breakneck speed, reaching $10 million in ARR in its first year. Its mission is to free clinicians from the burden of manually managing electronic health records (EHR), allowing them to focus on patient care rather than paperwork.

Erez was inspired to found Freed after watching his wife, a clinician, struggle with seemingly endless hours needed to keep up with administrative tasks. Burnout is rampant in the healthcare industry, so Erez saw Freed as the way to give physicians their time (and lives) back. Erez is a second-time founder and learned quickly that having a deep connection to the pain point he’s working to resolve has made all the difference in building a company. 

A key theme of this conversation is how to scale a mission-driven company quickly and effectively. In just a year, this startup reached $10 million in ARR and serves over 10,000 clinicians. We discuss the importance of obsessing over user needs, building a simple and effective product, how to hire the right people, and timing your entry into the market. 

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Timestamps: 

* 8:19 - Finding product-market-fit

* 11:13 - How Freed’s AI scribe stands out in a highly competitive space

* 17:27 - Who you hire can make or break your company 

* 21:12 - Lessons learned as a second-time founder

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At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com

Welcome to Season 2 of AI Unveiled! I’m excited for you to hear from some exceptional founders and dive into business building, advice for founders, and, of course, AI. 

In this episode, I speak with Deepanshu Arora, Co-Founder and CEO of Toddle, an AI-powered teaching and learning platform for progressive K-12 schools. We cover Deepanshu’s journey of building a global SaaS platform from India, his impact on education, and how AI is transforming the way teachers and students interact in the classroom.

Before founding Toddle, Deepanshu worked as a consultant at McKinsey and ran preschools in India. His personal experience managing a K-12 school led him to start Toddle. What began as a passion project aimed at improving workflow for his own teachers soon scaled into a global SaaS platform. Today, Toddle supports over 150,000 teachers and more than 1.5 million students worldwide. 

The main focus of this conversation is AI’s role in education and how it can ease the workload of teachers so they can focus more on what truly matters—engaging with their students and inspiring curiosity. Deepanshu also discusses how AI is helping us get closer to 1:1 personalization, which is considered to be this holy grail in education where you are able to meet each child where they are in terms of their interest, passions, and learning abilities. 

We also cover the challenges of running a global SaaS platform from India and how Toddle scaled to over 100 countries, with 70% of their users based outside of India. Toddle’s global appeal is grounded in a deep understanding of teacher workflows, which are remarkably similar across the world. By maintaining a “teachers-first” culture—where every non-engineering and design role, from customer success to marketing, is filled by former educators—Toddle has built an empathetic and highly specialized team that truly understands the needs of its users.

I hope you enjoy this episode!

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Timestamps: 

* 3:08 - How to build a niche, global community

* 11:45 - Can AI solve the biggest challenges teachers face?

* 19:48 - Toddle’s approach to personalization

* 35:26 - Building a global SaaS company from India

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At Next47, we partner with founders boldly building products that power the world. Learn more at Next47.com