The following interview is a conversation we had with Dimitrios Skaltsas, CEO & Co-Founder of Intelligencia AI, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $15.5 Million Raised to Build the Future of Drug Development
Brett
Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders who are on the front lines building it. In each episode, we’ll speak with a visionary Founder who’s 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 Dimitrios, CEO and Co-Founder of Intelligencia AI, an AI drug development platform that’s raised 15 and a half million in funding. Dimitrios, how are you doing?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Well, thanks for coming, Brett.
Brett
No problem. We were just joking there. In the pre interview, your last name is a bit hard to say, and I didn’t want to insult you to kick things off with our conversation. So could you go in to say your first name and last name just so we know how it’s properly said?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Absolutely. It’s Dimitrios Skaltsas. You know, I’ve been living in the states the last 1012 years, but I grew up in Greece and that comes sometimes with hard names. Yeah, I Co-Founder and CEO to Intelligencia AI. We’re a pharma tech company, pharma being pharmaceuticals, not agriculture. Leaving New York, spending a lot of time in Greece, where we have our major R and D hub, also around Europe with new customers. Have lived actually in four continents in the US, Europe, where I grew up, a field in Africa, working in the social sector, and I’ve lived also in Singapore and the Middle east.
Brett
And did you start your career as a lawyer? I think I saw that on LinkedIn.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
I did, yeah. I started as a lawyer. So I have a nonlinear career path and often I joke that I’m the least scientific person in our team. So I started law. I started my career as a lawyer. I’ve done a bit of engineering, so I dropped out for the engineering school. Then I joined the consulting world with McKinsey. I did my MBA at INSead, and that’s the year in Singapore. And I went back, actually, I went to Africa to do some social sector work. Then I went back consulting. I worked for a couple of years around Europe, the UK, Switzerland, Germany, the Middle east. And then I moved to the US.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
And it’s an interesting story, actually, how I moved to the US, because at the time I had co found another company that was exporting spinach pies and cheese pies to New York, Dallas greek traditional pies. And I had a Co-Founder who was fully based in New York, another one was based in Europe. And I was a part time. And I got myself a project with McKinsey somewhere in Pennsylvania. And I would spend my weekdays outside Phil in King of Prussia, and then my weekends in New York knocking on the doors of Delhi’s and try to convince people to give it a try with our greek traditional price.
Brett
Talk to me about the early days of the company. Understand it was founded in 2017. Take us back to 2017.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
2017. There’s a bit of what people say, you know, it’s all about timing. So I was with McKinsey. McKinsey was experimenting with big data and AI, and they had what they call new ventures. And at some point, I did not want to do consulting anymore. And I was offered the opportunity to move into ventures and actually build the vertical for pharmaceutical RD, both track discovery and track development. And that was kind of a wow moment. It was early days AI, that was 20 1516. And I was building a team of data scientists and software engineers, and we’re out there discussing with the industry and collecting ideas on what could be done better with AI. And yeah, one of those ideas actually came the core of what we do at Intelligencia AI McKinsey. We didn’t have institutional patients or risk appetite work on this.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
And that was a bridge Tacoma. So, summer to fall 2017, I left McKinsey and with my Co-Founder, we started licensing AI. And, yeah. Happy to share more of the early days stories.
Brett
Yeah, what were those early days like for you? Or maybe let’s narrow it down to, you know, the first six months. What were the first six months like?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
No, sometimes I make the metaphor of it’s like being in love, like falling in love where everything is rosy and you’re very optimistic, and somehow you have a big disregard for risk, which helps a lot. Very creative days and, you know, also challenging days or very scrappy days, I would say our sheriff, data science, who was the first person to join the company beyond me, and my Co-Founder. She literally used to sleep on my sofa in a shoebox apartment in New York. So, you know, in SF, where you are, people talk about working out the garage, and that’s how they started. The company in New York is working out of your sofa bed. So it was very scrappy.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
It was very kind of butterflies in the stomach type of feeling, like everything is possible and, you know, let’s create something, let’s append the world it was also tight. You know, we didn’t have any source of income as a company. We were literally bootstrapping the whole thing. And I was digging into my savings. I never looked back. So I think we did the right thing. I would love to relieve those days. And sometimes I hear from other founders that they relish those early days of falling in love. Yeah. What I often do is I try to relive it by maintaining some of the elements, some of these early day elements and culture in the company.
Brett
I think there’s something so magical about the early days of adventure, that sense of urgency and the fun. Everything’s fun in those early days as you’re first building something and you’re so excited and things just move so fast. I feel like going from zero to one really is the most enjoyable part of the journey. For many founders.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
It was. It was in many ways, still. What I’ve come to appreciate is the evolution. You have to reinvent yourself, which means it never gets boring. The shift is that, again, back to the metaphor of falling in love. At some point it feels like, okay, now, you delivered the baby, and suddenly you have responsibilities, and you know that the baby stays up at night and poops and gets sick, and you have to take care of it. So what changes over time for me is the sense of responsibility, and that’s limiting in many ways, but it helps people mature, and that’s a good thing.
Brett
The baby analogy is very personal. I just had our first baby, or my wife had our first baby last week. So.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Congrats and best of luck. Thank you.
Brett
Thank you. How did you land your first paying customer? That’s something else that every Founder struggles with. You have an idea. It’s innovative, it’s exciting, it’s cool. But getting someone to actually give you money for it is not easy to do when you’re a startup. So how did you pull that off? And what stage in the journey was it? Was that six months after launching? Was it twelve months? Was it 24 months? When did you start landing that? Paying customers.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Yeah. So started fall 2017, and we built on MVP. Right? I mean, many people come up with an idea and they start sharing with the world and trying to secure a contract, and it works quite often. Then they build. We started product first, and for many years, actually, we have retained that money, but we built something. We had the first results in sometime late spring 2018. And I was like, wow, we solved the problem, right? We keep pushing the boundaries every day since then, but that was the moment where we started really reaching out to people in our network, in life sciences, and it took us actually a few months. We raised money back then, and then it took us a few months, and we really signed the first customer early 2018. And it was kind of a bit of a moneyball moment.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
I don’t know if you’ve watched the movie. Yeah, exactly. So I was often watching it in the early days, like, literally with my Co-Founder, data scientists, like, sitting and watching the movie and then going to the customers was reliving, because you’re this, in many ways, you’re this toppy young guy who, you know, speaks a different language, and people are not sure they get it right. I mean, early days of AI and the pharma is not as risk prone as our industries or the innovation propensity. You know, it’s very specific to creating tracks, but when it comes to technology, it’s unfortunately a bit backwards. You would go and knock on people’s stores and say, you know, this data driven decision making has been taking place in other industries for years now, and, you know, sports and finance and so on, so forth.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
It was not the case in pharma. So we had to knock on a lot of doors and ultimately a major pharmaceutical company, trust us, because they had a knee, they were building this external innovation function where it’s a function where they look for new drugs from smaller companies, from biotech, and by default, they were building something that was forward looking and they want to embed. Innovate elements were the perfect match for them and the two core technology, and they help us actually expand on it. And that’s the story of Intelligencia AI. In the early days, not just the first customer, but the first several customers. We learned a lot.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
We listened, we embedded feedback into our product, and that’s how created what I think is an industry leading solution now, but synthesized, you know, it took some time and took a lot of faith on our, and ultimately also on our customers. That’s a conservative industry, for all good reason.
Brett
Yeah, it’s one of those industries where I hope it’s conservative. I think there’s some industries where you think it’s conservative and slow, but I think in this industry, you want it to be conservative.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Exactly. It’s highly regulated for all the right reasons. And yeah, people are highly sophisticated and very careful on how they do things for all the good reasons.
Brett
How did the conversation around AI change for you? Post chat GPT. So chat GPT really came out into the world in what, November 2022? What were conversations like before that? And then what were conversations like after? And the reason that I ask is a lot of AI founders that I’ve had on or AI builders that I’ve had on. They say that was a critical moment that really did change things. Was that something similar for you?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
No, Craig, the water said moment in our space in pharma was Covid. When it comes to, you know, pending the part time of how people do drug development and drug discovery, it’s a space where on average it takes about ten years for a drug that is in clinical trials eventually to make it to the patients, make it to market. And during COVID it was shown that whoa, can be done much faster. You can accelerate many parts of the process. So that’s where the whole industry moved actually its attention to AI and digital and start investing in the space. That’s also where funds investors starting spending money on the space now with chaotic. What happened is that it turbocharged all these, it kind of accelerated something that already started being in motion during COVID And self dept is not necessarily always a positive impact, right?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
In the sense that there’s a lot of promise. There is a lot also of noise. So there are pharmaceutical companies actually are kind of shutting down or shutting out subject from their organizations because they’re like, okay, we cannot trust it yet, so don’t use it literally. They have guidelines, there are people not to use sad CPT. And sometimes this flows also into the perception of other AI solution. So always you get the question, okay, why should we trust you? Yes, AI is promised. Yes, we see the potential, but is it mature? And maybe that’s for another question later on. But that’s, I think, how we stand out also in this space.
Brett
And from your perspective, how would you summarize kind of the sentiment around AI right now, everyone, you’re convinced that it’s going to be big in the future. It’s just not ready yet. What’s the general perception that they do have in the market?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
I was talking to someone these days and they said, oh, that’ll be another.com, maybe it’s very exaggerated. Right. My sentiment is the world is changing. There will be more and more AI embedded in the workflows of pharmaceutical companies in our industry and more broadly across industries. As with any probably new technology, you know, it will go through its waves and it has been going through its waves for the last, I guess, 25, 30 years. AI is not a new thing. It has experienced its waves. I think, yeah, it will at some point will mature. The challenge is for to get the right use cases and convince people for each one of those use cases the technology is mature enough, don’t see it as a magic wand. And definitely their use case with some maturity, and there are many others with much less mature.
Brett
You know, another thing that AI founders have told me is that now in the last year or so, last two years, theres just a lot more competition, theres a lot more people who are trying to bring AI solutions to market. What are you doing to rise above all that noise thats out there and really capture the attention of the market?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
You know, when we start, we’re the first AI company in our space, and then we’ve seen more showing up. And usually there were larger organizations who overlaid an AI, or in some case advanced analytics layer into their offerings over time. What I have observed is that again and again, people who use both or multiple solutions, you know, they turn, tell us, okay, you’re not real competitors, because you do. Actually, I go deep where some of the cases, it’s a touch AI. So I think people, there’s a lot of branding and marketing about AI, and people start getting more and more savvy on, you know, what is actual AI that goes deep and what is not, and what is high quality AI and what is not.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
In our case, I guess most industries, high quality AI is the one that relies on high quality data, which is not a given. That’s usually the toughest challenge to do some decent AI. And in our case, again, in our industry, explainability is, goes a long way. People appreciate it. They dislike black boxes. These are highly sophisticated users who want to understand and actually embed AI into their own pattern recognition, into their own decision making. So yes, there is some overabundance of AI and people have to cut through the noise. And that applies to customers, that applies to investors as well. Ultimately, it increases the burden of proving that you are the better solution, but that makes you stronger and has made us, for instance, stronger. We have definitely more nuanced and more mature messaging now in the market.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Another implication of what you’re saying is that a lot of money flow flew into the space and at some point likely there will be some consolidation. So there are companies out there who cannot necessarily continue as standalone companies because they haven’t necessarily found the appropriate go to market emotion and don’t generate enough revenue. I think that will be another byproduct of all this AI momentum.
Brett
What about the market category that you’re in? Is it a drug development platform, a clinical development platform? How do you think about your market category?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Now, let me discuss a bit what we do and why. So we’re in drug development, and drug development on average takes about ten years for any new therapy with road to patients. So go through all the clinical trials that are required, and it costs a lot of money in the hardest of millions, if not billions. And what people are often don’t realize is that most therapists don’t make the mark. The clinical trials fail, like 85 90% of the drugs of the programs fail. Now, there is a lot of risk in the space. That’s the elephant in the room. And the way the industry has been historically, traditionally approaching that risk is quite suboptimal, which is shocking because it’s an industry where science is very sophisticated and people are very sophisticated. So you have this paradox where science is trade season making.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Science is suboptimal, it’s not evolved enough. So how people approach risk, traditionally they look at benchmarks. Breast cancer, phase two, clinical development, 15%. That’s our baseline. They have calls with experts, the pros call expert elastication, and they collate the opinions. And if you’re a large pharma, you have fantastic internal data, you have trade data science teams. These days, it’s a limited few. It’s a tunnel vision. Intelligencia was the first company actually to apply AI machine learning into better assessing the probability of success for new therapy. And again, the idea here is, you know, there’s this elephant in the room and someone has to go after that. The risk is at the core of track development. If you can understand it better, then you can actually mitigate it better.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
And that means you can bring therapies faster to market, you can make better decisions on accelerating, as well as potentially accelerating for things and spending your funds more mindfully. And there are cases like there are fantastic life saving therapies in the market. At some point we’re safe, and people often don’t realize this, but some of the major blockbuster trucks, at some point someone had deprioritized them. We help people make better decisions, how qualified, track, how to understand the risk associated with track development, ultimately make better decision. We’re the first company who actually took a bit AI. A data driven approach could work in the space.
Brett
From a go to market perspective, what’s the most important lesson that you’ve learned?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Listen to your customer again and again when we start the need and we hope that AI could apply. And that’s a bit of art. Like, you embed a lot of information and then you create something. And these were the very creative and we came up with an approach that is not necessarily the one that, you know, was used in the space, actually was very different and much more effective. But a great solution is not enough. Ultimately, any company wants to have impact, right? You won’t have customers, you won’t have users. You want to move the needle in your space and obviously that’s only possible if people use you. Yeah. One of the key learnings has been, again, you know, you build something great, that’s the core.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Then you need to find how to embed it in the workflow of users, how to build the right functionalities around this, how to, you know, move yourself a bit from being a purist, if you will, to what the users exactly need, how they work nowadays, and that’s how you ensure a higher adoption. And that’s what we have done. Intelligencia, AI, listening to our partners, our users, to our customers, learning from them and evolving our technology accordingly.
Brett
What about fundraising? As I mentioned in the intro, 15 and a half million to date. What’s that journey been like for you? And most importantly, what have you learned?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
A lot of learnings. Sometimes I joke funds is our track in a good way. It’s something you need survive, especially in the early days, especially if you build technology as we did. We have a patent on our technology that’s pretty unique for an AI company in our space. It’s a pattern methodology. For that you need investment to build the right data investment. So I’m very grateful we had the opportunity to raise money. At the same time, I call it a drug because you can also become dependent on this. You can get into a cycle where you always need more money, not only to grow and build more fantastic functionalities and add more bb people to your team. So that you take your product, more customers, but sometimes also to stay afloat.
Brett
Right.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
And let’s face it, most of the companies that go into this vc funding cycle, eventually, to some extent, they become dependent. You learn to operate an environment where there always tends to be more money than you need and then, you know, when you start getting praised, then you go raise more money. I think that I love about Intelligencia these days is that getting the cash flow positive state while we retain high growth and yeah, from my point of view that’s a very nice and maybe, yeah, maybe more shelf environment property. Most likely we’ll raise money again in the future when we need the money. Right now, to some extent, R and D is funded by our customers. The commercial go to market. You know, motion and all these is still maturing. We keep fine tuning things and learning.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
I don’t feel like if we had a lot more money to throw into the commercial lens and would necessarily get better results. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Like if you haven’t fully cracked out some things, then start spending money in, you know, the wrong process, the wrong direction. Yeah, I guess I synthesize this money. Vc or external money is required for most companies that want building technology. It’s fantastic that this money is available. You have to be very careful with your partners in the sense that it’s not just funds those people bring in. Actually it’s a marriage. Our investors are on our board and it’s great that we have those people on our board and we’re aligned on sentence and direction. But again, that’s not a given. Or you bring a business partner into the company or fundraising.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Also, as with any partnership in life, be personal, professional. You have to know on a lot of doors, you have to look at many potential candidates and understand their goals, understand their values and make sure there is some alignment. Again, it’s not just raising money. The successful relationships are based on common value system and on some common direction. That’s, that’s important. What else? It’s hard. Takes time. Ideally you have people in the company who can support you, at least with some of those aspects. Takes preparation. Similarly, as you go sell the product, the platform, to customers, you sell the company to some investors. Yeah, that’s my main learnings. Like, don’t be overly dependent. People spend a lot of time and energy on this and be selective on the partners that you want in the company, on the board.
Brett
Super useful and super actionable advice there. And a lot of founders are fundraising now and finding it to be very challenging. So that’s definitely helpful insights. Now, final question, since we’re over on time, and I know it’s late there in Greece, so I don’t want to keep you too late on a Friday. Let’s end with a question here on the vision. Can you paint a picture for us of the high level vision for the next three to five years? What is the company going to look like and what’s your impact going to be?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
That’s a great question. You know, I’ll start with the impact on the space rather than the company, because a major reason why we start the company is to advantage, you know, have some impact and help drive better outcomes for patients worldwide. So my vision is track development, landscape gets more effective, more productive. It has been on historical low when it comes to IRR on R and D, it’s historical low. It’s not sustainable. So I do hope that with our technology, we can help bring better therapies, patients faster, help increase the productivity in the space, as discussed earlier, help prioritize some of the great drugs that are being shelled right now. And they come back. So to get there, the company, the way I see, benefit a lot by being recognized as the gold starter in our space. Again, we have been pioneering in space.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
We having the first mover is not easy in many ways. It comes with strong challenges. But I think increasingly gets recognized as, you know, the compass out there. When people think risk, they start thinking more and more of Intelligencia. We see increasing our user actually footprint from large pharmaceuticals, mid cap and smaller pharma, as well as the financial markets. So people on the sell side and the buy side, people who write reports like do the research, as well as people who allocate beds in the space in three to five years. I would love to be broadly recognized as game changer. As this reference point. The goals are in the space. I would love to have full therapeutic area coverage in what we do. I started in narrow start with oncology, cancer therapies. And we have been expanding immunology, inflammation, neurology and so forth.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
You know, in the time horizon you offered, I would love to have full coverage. I would love to expand also in Asia, where increasingly there’s very interesting activity, especially in China, but also Japan and South Korea, traditionally keep learning from our customers, keep building adjacent functionalities and ultimately have an impact in our space. Not about 100 people, strong company, interdisciplinary, probably will keep growing and probably that means good returns also for our shareholders, investors, management team. But ultimately, you don’t sweat over building a company. I’m really for this. I know it’s often a commonplace saying, you know, it’s a vision driven company, an impact driven company. There’s a lot of truth behind that. Being a company is a sole renting experience in many ways. You have to dedicate a lot, you have to sacrifice a lot. There are easier ways to make a living.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
What I see in our companies, you know, most of us have gone through either directly oriented, some healthcare related event in our lives, I have, and many people. But we are fighting, if you will, for better outcomes for patients out there. And that would be my vision three to five years from now.
Brett
Amazing. I love the vision and I’ve really loved this conversation. I’ve definitely learned a lot. I know the audience is going to learn a lot from you as well. Before we wrap up here, if there’s any founders that are listening in, that want to follow along with your journey, where should they go?
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Connect on LinkedIn. Visit our website intelligencia.ai. Yeah, shoot me a no. I always love connecting with like minded people, sharing experiences, learning from others.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thank you again for taking the time.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Great. Thank you for hosting me. Loved our discussion and congrats on the baby.
Brett
Thank you.
Dimitrios Skaltsas
Thank you. Bye.
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 visioners on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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