The following interview is a conversation we had with Amy Brown, CEO and Founder of Authenticx, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $28 Million Raised to Build the Future of Listening AI
Brett
Hey founders, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Amy Brown, CEO and Founder of Authenticx, a listening AI platform that’s raised over 28 million in funding. Amy, thanks for chatting with me today.
Amy Brown
Thank you.
Brett
It’s great to be here, Brett, not a problem. Super excited for the conversation. I’d love to begin with just a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Amy Brown
Yeah, so I am a first time tech Founder, founded Authenticx in 2018 after spending about 20 years navigating my career through the business of healthcare. Started in state government in a policy role within state of Indiana Medicaid, and then went into the private sector working for various managed care companies, Medicare, Medicaid, commercial organizations, and at the peak of my career was the chief operating officer for a global travel medical insurance company. And I had just hit a stage in my life. I don’t know if it was because I had four kids by that point, if I had surpassed the 40 year mark in my age, or I had just had enough career experience to really see the problem that I was most passionate about solving.
Amy Brown
But it was at that point in my life where I said that I just couldn’t die happy if I didn’t start this business. And so I went for it in late 2018 and started Authenticx.
Brett
Did you have that master plan in the back of your head that maybe someday you would launch a company, or did it really just come out of.
Amy Brown
Nowhere, something in the middle? It was kind of like this growing evolution of a seed that was planted at one point in my career, and over the course of a few years, it just continued to be nurtured. And it was like this inner voice that started as a whisper and then was so strong within a few years that I couldn’t unhear it anymore. And I just got this really strong feeling in 2018 that this was the time. The time was now. There were enough, like market factors, business factors, and just life factors that led into me choosing the time to actually launch. But it was a growing wave, I.
Brett
Would say a couple of other questions we like to ask, and the goal here is really just to better understand what makes you tick. First one, what Founder has really inspired you along the way?
Amy Brown
One that I’ve enjoyed learning the most about is a gentleman named Don Brown. We are not related, even though we have the same last name, but he was a physician who started in tech, dabbled in a variety of different types of tech, ended up founding a company called Interactive Intelligence here indianapolis, where I’m based, and sold that business to genesis for 1.4 billion in 2016. And I’ve had a chance to meet him and learn about kind of his humble beginnings in Kentucky and learned about his risk taking, his inventiveness. And I’ve just really respected and admired that, and it’s been fun to watch.
Brett
What about books that have had a major impact on shaping you, not just as a Founder, but as a person?
Amy Brown
Yeah. So there are two in particular that have really kind of shook me. The first is a book called falling upward by Richard Rohr. And it talks about the two halves of life. And those halves of life are not dependent on your age. It really has to do with crossing over. That happens maybe at a deeper level within you. And I feel like that’s what I was starting to experience when I decided to start Authenticx. And so first half of life is when you’re building, building, figuring out who you are, building your career. And then second half of life is when you kind of have this moment of reflection and kind of figure out who you really are. And it just has been a book that’s really helped me a lot in navigating my own internal transitions in life.
Amy Brown
And then the second book I would love to mention is a book called how to listen by Oscar Chamboli. I have just found that book to be really applicable in the everyday, I think, in our world of distraction and micro moments and sound bites and memes. It’s just so refreshing to kind of dive into a different part of our brains where we’re really connecting with our own voice internally and also listening to others. And it’s been a really useful book to me.
Brett
Now, to switch gears a little bit, I’d love to dive deeper into the company. So how we like to begin this part of the interview is really focusing on the problem. So what problem do you solve?
Amy Brown
So the problem is that there’s about a billion customer service conversations that happen across the US every day. And those inbound customer service conversations are coming from the voice of consumers who are in desperate need of help and assistance. And in the healthcare sector, the type of assistance those individuals need include getting access to care, getting through the insurance or scheduling process. They’re waiting for lab results, they’re waiting to get approved for care that they need. And the administrative burden of our healthcare system in this country is just that. The weight is at an all time high of that. And the US healthcare system is the poorest. Performing from an administrative cost perspective in the world costs the most, and it’s a contributing factor to our also not great healthcare outcomes.
Amy Brown
And so the business problem that we’re trying to solve is leveraging customer service conversations, specifically those that are flowing in and out of the healthcare industry every single day. We leverage those recorded conversations as unstructured data. We utilize proprietary AI machine learning models to listen intently for what the signals are through all of that noise to help healthcare leaders understand the problems in their business that they have control over fixing but aren’t aware of without this technology.
Brett
Trey, take us back to 2018. What was it about this problem that made you say, yep, that’s it. I’m going to go build a business around this?
Amy Brown
Well, it was the problem that I was living every day as the COo, and part of my job responsibility was managing our various call centers. And I had the C suite always asking, how do we get our call volume down? How can we lower our headcount in customer service? That’s our cost center of the business. And I kind of started to develop a chip on my shoulder as the COo because I started really listening to these conversations that my call center agents were taking. And I realized, wow, there’s value in these conversations that could actually help our C suite, our strategy officer, our head of sales, head of marketing, and this data is being stored in our cloud, and we’re not really leveraging it as a whole. So I just saw the need and the massive gap.
Amy Brown
Meanwhile, we had our marketing and sales team scrambling to put together an NP’s survey program, scrambling to figure out, like, how do we get into the heads and minds of our customers so we can retain and attract new ones? And I was like, guys, the keys to the kingdom are in this conversation data. It’s right here. And clearly, it’s hard to access, it’s hard to wrangle because it’s unstructured data. So I just became super passionate about solving that problem. I knew that I would need tech to help solve for that problem. So one of the very first things I did was find a tech partner and my chief technology officer, Michael Armstrong, who helped me build out the platform and the AI models that became our.
Brett
Product, take us back to the first paying customers that you were able to land. What was that like, and what did you learn from that process of landing those first paying customers?
Amy Brown
Oh, my gosh. It was in the early days where I’m totally bootstrapped. I had never raised capital before. I wasn’t even thinking about raising capital. The first thing I was trying to do is prove to myself that someone would actually buy the idea of what I was trying to build. So it was a few months into me free falling that I finally landed a couple of those early clients. And I will tell you, the first sizeable contract was at the very end of 2018. It was in December. And I took the call from the prospective client right around dinner time. And I have four children and a husband, all who were depending on me because I was the only source of income when I started this business. And so it was a big risk for my entire family.
Amy Brown
And when I got that call and the client said that they were going to buy my company, my idea, I went downstairs to the dinner table and I was in tears, and I was high fiving my kids. I remember saying, like, mommy’s going to make it, you guys. You can count on me. We’re going to make this happen. So, I mean, it was a real act of surrender to whatever the universe would respond with when I was making the call of putting this product idea out there. And it was an incredible, serendipitous moment for me, and it really was. That particular client has just grown 100 times over since that time, and it’s been a huge story of our success.
Brett
When it comes to your marketing philosophy, how would you define it or describe it?
Amy Brown
Gosh, our marketing philosophy is really about being the adult in the room, particularly in this AI hype cycle that we’re in. We were an AI company before it began, and no one knew what were talking about. Now we have to maintain a voice that is responsible, that is level headed. We have an incredible marketing team that is really focused on ensuring that we’re delivering very clear messaging around our ROI, and we know that the AI that’s going to win and still be standing at the end of all this is AI that actually brings meaningful value to the world around us. We’ve been very intentional about the markets we’re marketing to. We’ve been very honest about what we say our capabilities are, and that’s just an important part of being a Founder and being able to sleep at night for me.
Amy Brown
So our messaging, our content, how we put it, how we show up in the world is very important to me and something that I stand behind, and if I didn’t, I wouldn’t be able to sleep at night.
Brett
Some of the other founders that are building in the AI space have told me that before Chat GPT came out last November, it was all about trying to desperately rate demand. And then all of a sudden when it came out, it was all about trying to capture demand and they just saw a lot more competition and a lot more people talking about AI and using that in their messaging. Has it been something similar for you?
Amy Brown
Yes, I’d say that resonates really well. I felt like before Chad JBG came out, we fell into the business buyer, not so much the tech buyer in the enterprises we sell to. And so we had to use different language to describe AI and AI capabilities. We needed to use analogies, we needed to use other language that could help connect really to the use case and what the business leader was looking to get out of AI. When Cha GBT came out, my sense from our clients was suddenly their executive teams were saying to our buyers, like, go find AI solutions. Now we need to optimize our business and AI is going to help us.
Amy Brown
And while the market has been getting educated over time, it was a really big challenge for us to try to maintain what I said earlier, kind of that level headedness in a market that seemed like it was kind of drunk, honestly, on all this information out there. And I think a lot of misconception about AI companies is suddenly life is easy for us because there’s so much demand. But actually I think the challenge is still here. It’s just a different challenge, and that is making sure that you’re educating your buyer, that you’re staying true to yourself, that you’re taking a consultative approach when a client approaches you and they are asking for a, and you think that there may need to be some revisions or some thoughts around how they get to the business outcome they’re really looking for.
Amy Brown
I mean, it’s a really challenging space, but also a super exciting one to be in. And I’m proud to be a thought leader in this space because we need that right now.
Brett
What have you done to really build up thought leadership?
Amy Brown
Yeah, well, I spend time talking to awesome folks like you. I definitely spend myself and our other senior leaders working on putting forth content, whether it’s blogs or pr activities, to make sure that we’re communicating our message. I engage directly with our clients, c suites to make sure that they feel that they have resources in me and my executive team. There’s a lot of misinformation out there, and so we try to be extremely accessible, both putting things out into the universe and also being very responsive to the need. So that’s one answer. I think the other answer is just really looking internally first and saying, hey, what is the message that you’re trying to send, and what does the market need to hear right now?
Amy Brown
And just being really intentional about not just putting stuff out there for the sake of putting it out there, but putting out a message that you feel is worthy of being one of the voices in the space right now.
Brett
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Brett
How do you identify those topics to know, okay, this is something that’s going to add value to the market. It’s something that we want to invest in, talking about and writing about.
Amy Brown
Yeah, I mean, I try first to start by listening. Like I was just out at the JP Morgan conference, really big, attended a conference in San Francisco, and I listened to dozens of investors, bankers talk about fears, concerns, the promise of AI, the hesitation of AI, the question and skepticism around use, case and risks, rewards, all of that. And through listening, I can hear what the big questions are, where the fear is rooted, where the hopes are rooted. And I tend to weigh in on the things that I have a passion about that I feel might help bridge a gap or add some value to the conversation. And I really try to start by listening to what the audience that I’m engaging with is really pondering.
Brett
What do you think has been the most pivotal decision you’ve made in the company’s history?
Amy Brown
Oh goodness. There have been several fork in the road moments. The earliest one was deciding to raise capital and go for a true AI platform, because in the early days, I started with myself, a laptop and my car, and I had an idea of what I wanted to do with conversation data. But I didn’t have any AI models that I was leveraging at that point in time. When I got those early contracts, were manually listening using myself and a few contractors and manually, like tagging and labeling what were hearing in these conversations. And once I had a few reps underneath me and was ready to move on, I really had to hit a fork in the road.
Amy Brown
Moment of do I want to be in the consulting business that helps enterprises think through these types of opportunities and leverage different technology solutions out there, or do I want to build the SaaS solution in the AI myself? And that was a real soul searching time. And ultimately I decided that the market needed something that would be ready sooner than later, that I needed to move with speed. And so it was at that moment of decision making that I said, okay, I need to raise capital, and I need to find a CTO that I trust that can help me build out the foundation of an AI company. And so that was probably the biggest decision I made early on.
Brett
Something that I see a lot is that being a startup Founder is often glamorized. But from what I’ve learned from my conversations with other founders and experience myself is that’s not always the case. There’s definitely some low points in the journey. What would you say has been the lowest point of the journey so far? And how’d you navigate that low point?
Amy Brown
Oh my goodness, yes. You’re so right. It is over glamour ties, if that’s the word, glamorized. I don’t know. You’re so right. It is absolutely a challenging journey to be that of a Founder. Some of the hardest times have been when I have to recognize my own lack of control over a situation. Right. As founders, if you’re crazy enough to be a startup Founder, then you obviously have a lot of determination. You probably know how to get stuff done. You probably have a lot of energy. You like kind of command and control of your own destiny. And so you move with speed and with action, and you’re usually pretty decisive, but that can only go so far. The universe and clients in the market has to respond, right?
Amy Brown
And as a control freak who’s trying to recover from being a control freak, you have to just sometimes put it out there and wait. And that’s really freaking hard. And so I have many memories of kind of just being literally in the fetal position on the floor of my office, just kind of waiting for a contract to sign or waiting for a term sheet that I really wanted to get from a particular firm. And there have been moments where it didn’t come, and then there have been moments where it did. Right? And just trusting that process is a sacrifice. It feels painful, and it’s also worth it.
Brett
Trey, what about your market category? I introduced you as a conversational intelligence platform.
Brett
Is that the right category, or what is the category?
Amy Brown
You know what? That’s such a great question, because, yes, that’s the category that we’re often placed in. But I kind of want to start a new category called listening AI, because conversational AI, when you google it, when you think about it, most people are thinking about generating conversation through chat bots or automated assistance, et cetera. And while that’s absolutely a part of conversational AI, what we’re really about is listening to all of that conversation based data.
Amy Brown
So whether it’s generated by a chat bot or it’s generated by a human, when something speaks in written form or in verbal form, that is unstructured data that comes out, and what we’re all about is collecting it, harnessing it, analyzing it, finding signals, structuring that unstructured data, and helping us all, as human beings, make sense of it all so that we can make better decisions going forward. So, yes, we’re leveraging conversations, but we’re leveraging it for the sake of listening and responding to what we hear. And so I don’t know if you’ll help me with this, Brett, but I’d like to start a category called listening AI.
Brett
I definitely like the category name and makes sense how you define that as well, or how you just described that, because, yeah, when I hear conversational intelligence, I almost think, like chatbots. I think that’s, like, the association that most folks have, too. Properly.
Amy Brown
Right, exactly. People, yeah, chatbots. Exactly. So, when we talk to Gartner, Forrester, others are placed in the conversational AI bucket. But we have to do a lot of education, then, around how we’re different, because we’re not building a chatbot. Right. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have gen AI models. We do. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have all kinds of machine learning models that help interpret and understand the conversation we do. But our goal is really not to replace the human element of conversations, even though that’s a fine use case. Our goal is to understand what’s going on in the conversation and use that knowledge and that insight to inform leaders. And that insight helps drive business decisions, that can improve health outcomes, that can improve efficiency, and can also help drive revenue for the organization.
Amy Brown
Conversation data is the unsung hero, if you will, of data, in that it is so rich with intel for business enterprises if it can only be tapped. And that’s what we are all about.
Brett
I had Godard Abel, the CEO and Founder of G two, on the show, and he was talking about category creation. I was asking him a bunch of questions about that. Then his number one piece of advice is to go out and partner with your competitors and make the case to the analyst firms, then eventually to customers that you need a new category to exist. So for you, do you see other competitors who would fit in that listening AI category?
Amy Brown
Absolutely. There are companies out there that are speech analytics companies, right? That are listening for sentiment, that are trying to help businesses know how to intervene in a conversation when a customer is escalating or they’re frustrated to help that agent or that contact center do better. And in a sense, we’re using AI and technology to listen to conversations. I think where we’re different is the outcome and what we’re trying to do with it. We like to take a very macro lens to solve big problems with this data. We are less focused in changing that individual, singular conversation between a contact center agent and that customer. But I think the advice was spot on. I think we could absolutely partner with our competitors and go for a different category.
Brett
It’s definitely a scary feeling. I think when you hear that advice, like it makes sense. But then the idea, I think, of partnering with competitors is always a bit scary, at least to me, when I hear that advice.
Amy Brown
Yeah, it is. Along with so many other parts of the journey.
Brett
Yeah, it’s very true. Now, as I mentioned there in the intro, you’ve raised over 28 million to date. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey?
Amy Brown
Oh, my goodness, so much. I’ve learned how to show up authentically. I think that was a journey. When you’re starting out and you feel like you, and you’re serious seed, where you’ve got nothing, no revenue, no traction, and just an idea, but you need the money in order to continue to survive. That feeling can cause you to do unnatural things, right? Things that don’t feel authentic in terms of your presentation and things that you agree to that years down the road, you’re like, oh, why did I agree to that? And, you know, you live in your learn. And I feel very fortunate that I made it to series A and then series B, because with each round I was wiser. We were in a better shape because we had grown and had a great track record. I had choice, I had optionality.
Amy Brown
And all of that has afforded me the ability to be true to myself, authentic show up. That means I get to decide yes or no. As much of a dating process for me as it is for the investor, and I don’t take that for granted. I know I’m lucky and fortunate that I’ve been able to get into that position of having that type of choice. And I would just encourage other founders who are in the early stages of raising to just really listen to your inner voice on things. It’s really easy to be clouded by all the advice you’re getting. Advice is great, but at the end of the day, it has to resonate with you. And that’s a lesson that I’ve learned along the way.
Brett
On the topic of advice, let’s imagine that you were starting the company again today from scratch. What would be the number one piece of go to market advice that you’d give to yourself based on everything you’ve learned so far?
Amy Brown
First of all, thinking of starting from scratch again scares the crap out of me. I don’t know if I could survive. I really don’t. Oh, gosh. Because yesterday I was talking to my husband and I was just like, oh, this is so hard, this is so hard. And I just kept saying, like, the stage rat is so challenging. But there’s never not been a time where I wasn’t saying that. So I think I would speak to my younger self about staying focused in the early days again. Like, you’re kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall. And in the early days, I didn’t know that I was going to really double down on healthcare, because at the beginning, you’re just like trying to get revenue, right. You just need revenue, you just need some reps.
Amy Brown
And I think that’s true, and I’m glad I did not limit myself in attaining revenue. However, it’s very easy to lose focus and you can start to build out too many use cases for your product, and you kind of have to reckon with that later down the road. And so I would advise to just try to keep your scope impactful, has to be impactful and relevant. But don’t try to boil the ocean. Just focus in on a particular use case, one that the market demands. Get some reps under your belt and then keep moving and expand from there.
Brett
Final question for you. Before we’re up on time here, let’s zoom out three to five years into the future, what’s the big picture vision that you’re building?
Amy Brown
Three to five years, every corporation in the United States will be bringing the voice of their customer into the boardroom, and they’ll be able to do that in a very scalable and real way. Because they will have figured out how to access their conversational data in a way that is accessible, easy. When that happens, when the voice of the customer is truly in the boardrooms, the decision making will be smarter, will be much better informed, and I believe will impact the consumer experience of our healthcare system.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision. All right, Amy, we are up on time, so we’re going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there’s any founders that are listening in that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Amy Brown
Yeah, you can check me out, first of all on our website, authenticx.com, and then you can also hit me up on LinkedIn. Amy Brown and I’d love to chat.
Brett
Amazing. Amy, thanks so much for taking the time. It’s been a lot of fun.
Amy Brown
Thank you. Appreciate the time.
Brett
All right, no problem. Keep in touch.
Amy Brown
Thanks.
Brett
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Brett
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Brett
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