The following interview is a conversation we had with Inna Sela, CEO of illumex, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $13M Raised to Power the Future of Enterprise LLM Deployments
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the frontlines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with the visionary Founder who is building a new category, or reimagining an existing one. We’ll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I’m your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s dive right into today’s episode. Hey everyone and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Ina Sella, CEO and Founder of Illumex, a generative semantic fabric platform that’s raised 13 million in funding. Ina, how are you?
Inna Sela
Great, Brett, thank you for having me over.
Brett
No problem. Super, super excited to have you here and appreciate you taking this so late on a Thursday your time. So to jump in, let’s talk about what you’re building today.
Inna Sela
Yeah. So Enum X is a self service access for data analytics for every employee. And big companies think about banks, insurance, pharma companies and when you start using this experience, which is chatgpt like on your databases, you want it to be hallucination free, governed and fast. This is exactly what Illumex provides to our customers.
Brett
Take us back to the founding of the company. What was it about this idea, this product, this problem that made you say, yep, that’s it, I’m going to go build.
Inna Sela
Oh, I’m a enterprise veteran, so I have spent around 12 years at SAP and then around 2 years at CISENSE as with artificial intelligence. And I saw big companies really struggling to provide this self service access to data. And even without every data interaction always involves human being. So I thought it’s a good idea to automate some redundant and tedious tasks which are also repetitive and allowed us as humans to interact with data freely. This is what datamax is about.
Brett
What did the first, let’s say six months look like for you?
Inna Sela
Okay, so the first six months were really exhilarating. It was this total freedom of making your own decisions without tedious processes to adhere to. And what this was also beautiful about is building team fundraising and telling the story to so many people who got excited and onboarded our journey. I think were already 10 people after first two months of our incorporation.
Brett
And what was the focus initially in terms of segments of the market? Was it always enterprise that you were targeting or what was that decision making in terms of the focus on the market segment?
Inna Sela
Oh, it’s such a sad story. So we started Our commercial go to market, firstly, paid engagement in 2022. And the idea was to go after unicorns like software unicorns, SaaS, B2B companies and sell the solution to them. But you know what happened in 2022, right? So the market turned down and especially those companies broadened their budget. I said, okay, so it’s not going to be as easy. And we changed our strategy to sell to enterprise and we started to go after enterprises. And of course it was a uphill battle. We started with paid PoCs and then our first deals. And you think about big chip manufacturers, pharma companies, big retail corporations. Those are elephants that we hunted in our first go to market year.
Brett
What about the market category? So I had introduced you as a generative semantic fabric platform. Is that the market category or what is the market category?
Inna Sela
Another uphill battle. So we’re actually creating category which is called generative semantic fabric. Right now it does not exist. And this category speaks about the ability of companies to translate that technical data to humanly understandable business language. Right? So this is exactly what elements does and it actually combines plethora of existing solutions and just automates all of them. Think about cataloging, think about ontologies, think about chatbots or gentech analytics and combination of them is actually generative semantic fabric.
Brett
Did you know on day one that it was going to be a category creation play or at what point did you realize that?
Inna Sela
Yeah, I was aware it’s category creation. So I realized from day one it’s category creation journey. But for the sake of saying fundraising, I had to bring those parallels. So I was explaining, you know what we are catalog but automated and we are like this conversational tools, but you don’t need to model it to your data. So I was trying to bring this parallels to exist, tools for investors to understand where we are. But it wasn’t easy. I would say only the last year with generative AI adoption and ChatGPT and all of those tools really brought a wider understanding what elements is doing.
Brett
How long did it Take for you to figure out that term generative semantic fabric. You know, was that a process to get there? Were there other names that were considered or how’d you end up there?
Inna Sela
Yes, generative semantic fabric is combination of different terms and I would not say totally final category name for us because it’s mouthful generative because we automate these processes and we use generative AI from day one. The company was incorporated in 2021 and we always say that takes generative AI to become generative AI ready. So generative was our buzzword from day one. A semantic is something that we understood that two years ago. No one actually understood this term. Right. What’s semantic? Right now everyone speaks business terminology, semantic language model, semantic AI and so on, so forth. So semantic was chosen during last year. And fabric is also worth which I personally like, you don’t need to speak about your data as monolithic components. Your SAP system, your CRM, your database, your data lake. It’s a fabric of all available data.
Inna Sela
You don’t really need to care what’s underneath. So yeah, parts of this naming really archaeologic in the startup timeline and part of them are new.
Brett
So from the founding of the company until you had your first paying customer, how long did that take?
Inna Sela
It took us almost 18 months.
Brett
Yeah, what did that first customer see in you? Or how’d you get that first paying customer across the line? That’s obviously typically the hardest deal to make happen.
Inna Sela
We had this demo and it was actually interesting story. I didn’t know that this conversation will end up with a sales process. Of course it was intention. Right. So it was newly hired manager and he was looking for a tool to basically perform that job that I was hired for. And I demoed the solution and then he asked okay, so how do we proceed? And it’s like, okay, you pay X dollars and now when you could connect to your metadata, it will require like security clearance. Xyz. So I really explain it like I know what I’m doing and it worked. It surprisingly worked and we surprisingly delivered. Well, it was not surprisingly delivered. I really felt ready, but it was not certainty. This process is going to convert so.
Brett
Fast at that 18 month mark. Was that clear to you then that it was going to be viable or at what point did you start to say like okay, we’ve really got something here, this is going to work.
Inna Sela
I was ignorant in the sense, you know this all the clean startup mvp, like what’s you know, the small valuable or small lovable product that you build. So I was Ignorant enough to say, okay, we build this small pieces of functionality and interface and we’ll try to sell them. The thing is, for the offering that we provide to companies like the augmented data management and access, you really need to have small Swiss panel. So it’s not enough to have just one fork or one component of the Swiss knife, you really have to have full offering which is minimal. Right. Of course we extended the significance event, but you have to have this platform of features. So till we build this minimum valuable product, we couldn’t sell it, you know, by features.
Inna Sela
Especially in data management, it’s mature industry, you have to have a full cycle. Yeah.
Brett
What about your marketing strategy? How would you describe the marketing strategy that you began with and then how has it evolved and what’s it look like today?
Inna Sela
I would say something which is probably very unusual on this podcast. We still have not started our paid social right. So so far all we have done is product marketing, speaking sessions, going to webinars, reaching out, publishing ebooks, everything that can actually contribute to community, contributing knowledge. And also when I started pitching gilmax it was very non orthodox approach. So what we say is basically your business people need to access your data. So you need to manage your data by business principles and business semantics. And back then was not really clearly understood by the market. Market was all covered by solutions which cater to technical people and provide technical data management and technical generative AI. So it was like why would I even care about business people in the context of data?
Inna Sela
So I would say my content was controversial and it actually appealed to certain people and those certain people became our first adopters and ambassadors and now it’s pretty much mainstream. Everyone understand that data does not exist for data people. Data exists to serve business. It’s kind of a no ground shoes. But it wasn’t very evident when I started promoting Illumex.
Brett
Was that hard to put your ideas out there like that, you knowing that it was going to go against what others believe and what was commonly held beliefs in the industry.
Inna Sela
I actually thought it’s a benefit to have controversial opinions and to some extent differentiate product because this is how you make change, this is how you make difference. I do not believe incremental improvements, especially when you have generative AI. So generative AI is with us since 2017. To me it was evident that we are going to go through major shifts as an industry and incremental improvements will not cut. So many people actually say that elements built a surfboard before the generative AI came. So were like six months on the market before ChatGPT hit and everyone got excited. So to me it was evident that we might be a little bit early with our messaging, but it will serve us long term.
Brett
As you reflect on the go to market journey so far, what would you say has been the most important decision that you’ve made to date? And take us behind the scenes on how that decision was made and what the impact was.
Inna Sela
I used to work with external agencies hiring internally for a marketing position just made such a shift to what we do. So Alex is amazing and he joined elements like this may and the change in our marketing, you know, the new level of conversation that we have in accessibility of our content and scale, it’s just amazing. We are reaching so much. Many people like our scale and our reach out has improved tremendously. Even you know, again we are still not spending on the paid social we’re going to start that. Even those conditions, it’s amazing what we have been able to achieve in the last six months. So hiring marketing experts in house, this is what helped.
Brett
It’s a good takeaway and definitely something that I think a lot of founders struggle with. What about fundraising lessons? So as I mentioned there in the intro, 13 million raised to date. What have you learned about fundraising so far in this journey?
Inna Sela
So we did this 30 million in two seats, one seed round in 2021 and the second seed this year 2024. So what I learned from the fundraising is the following. You really need to have a blend of investors with different appetite and different business acumen so it can serve you on hiring, on reach out on different aspects of investors value add and of course look for investors who besides check and also take it further. You know each investor has different values. Some of them are actually with separation background. So it’s also very instrumental in our recent round it was led by Amdocs Ventures and Samsung Ventures are both corporate with this and this conversation started from internal interest.
Inna Sela
So basically interest from the internal teams and then it grew into this investment engagement and to me this is wealth of confidence that Illumex is not only capable of direct sales to enterprise but it’s also a channel and OEM play which means we have leverage of being embedded in big companies solutions so think about the leverage which a corporate can bring a startup when your solution is incorporating this enterprise solution and sold to thousands of customers.
Brett
So we’re depressingly almost through 2024 and I’m sure 2025 plans have begun. What’s the top priority or top priority is going to be for 2025?
Inna Sela
Our top priority is to increase number of logos. And in our case again we have after financial services and pharma and retail companies and we see that we form those clusters and those clusters form customer advisory boards. It’s amazing to see how different professionals, they collaborate with each other and enrich each other. So it’s not only about elements, it’s community which is built around elements. So we offer these logos to join our community and enrich it. This is our biggest priority. And of course I understand that technology advantage that we have at the moment might be temporal, you know, and technology is just a way to catch up. And we probably have two to three years of technology advantage in this time we should target as much awareness as we can do, right?
Inna Sela
So be associated with generative AI adoption and enterprise as a house brand is our top priority.
Brett
Final question for you. Let’s zoom out three to five years into the future. What’s the big picture vision look like?
Inna Sela
Oh Brett, this is my favorite question. We didn’t discuss that but it’s like absolutely favorite question. I’m a person who lives in the future, right? So to me the biggest business excitement to me, you know, waking up every morning of doing my best work is application free future. Application free future in your workspace means you have to book a travel in your workspace like your work environment. You don’t need to manage prepaid for your booking planning expensify to make the expenses. You just type in or talk to whatever software launcher you have and everything is happening on the background. So basically agents and data and workflows are meeting each other autonomously. You don’t need to pre model that or have like the tedious workload that we have right now in the moment. It’s called application free future.
Inna Sela
And Illumex is going to be instrumental for this future in a sense because we already built this playground where humans can interact with data, where machines can interact with data and where machines can interact with machines. This is where we are today and I believe it’s going to be a tremendous support for application for the future in three to five years.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and I really love this conversation. We’re up on time so we’re going to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with you, where should we send them? Where should they go?
Inna Sela
I love LinkedIn for socializing in world context, so just look for me on LinkedIn. It’s Ina Tokarev Sela. I know it’s complicated. I was born in Ukraine. So bear with me and I will be happy to answer your following questions.
Brett
Amazing. You know, thank you so much for taking the time. Really appreciate it.
Inna Sela
Thank you so much.
Brett
Brett this episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io Podcast and for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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