In Depth

How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (Co-founder & CEO at Reducto)


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Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. They just announced a $24M Series A. Before Reducto, Adit was a Product Manager at Google, working on Ads and Search, and conducted machine learning research at MIT's Media Lab.

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In today’s episode, we discuss:

  • How listening to customers revealed an opportunity to pivot
  • The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough
  • Landing a Fortune 10 customer
  • A technical founder's guide to sales
  • Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey
  • Advice for founders: “You’re going to fail”
  • Much more
  • ---

    Referenced:

    • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
    • Chetan Puttagunta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/
    • Diana Hu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdianahu/
    • Liz Wessel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethwessel/
    • Raunak Chowdhuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauhaarda/
    • Reducto: https://reducto.ai/
    • Scale AI: https://scale.com/
    • Stripe: https://stripe.com/
    • Textract: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/
    • Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/
    • ---

      Where to find Adit:

      • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham/
      • ---

        Where to find Brett:

        • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
        • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
        • ---

          Where to find First Round Capital:

          • Website: https://firstround.com/
          • First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
          • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
          • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
          • This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
          • ---

            Timestamps:

            (00:00) Hackathons, YC, and an unexpected pivot

            (05:23) The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough

            (09:11) How customer signal led to PDF processing

            (14:46) Landing a Fortune 10 customer

            (22:42) Building “transferable features”

            (25:58) How caring beats sales skills in startup growth

            (30:28) The strategy behind Reducto's horizontal expansion

            (36:18) Hire slow, go-to-market fast

            (41:45) A technical founder's guide to sales

            (43:45) “You’re going to fail”

            (46:27) Why startups win

            (48:30) Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey

            (51:43) Less structure, more impact

            (55:00) How frustrations shaped Reducto’s culture

            (57:35) The question you should always ask in meetings

            ...more
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