AJAY BAM - CEO & Co-Founder at Vyrill

Welcome to another Founder Wisdom Podcast. We have Jay Bam with us. I think it's the second time we speak now. He's the CEO and co-founder at Vyral, the SF Bay Area. It's a cool app. He's currently raising slash successfully raised so far and he's having traction. So Jay, welcome to the pod again. Tell us a bit more about yourself and what's new since we last spoke.

Yeah, absolutely. So hey everyone and Charles, thanks for having me on the podcast. So a quick intro on myself. I'm CEO and co-founder of a company called Vyrul, and by background I've been in e-commerce for about 18 years now. Previously built and sold a mobile shopping app company out of Boston called Motive Media. So fast forward, started Vyrul about 3 years ago now, and really the premise behind starting Vyrul is very simple. 85% of video content today in the world is not fully searchable, it's not useful, and it's not AI ready. So I'll give you an example. Let's say you're looking for your— you're in the looking for to buy a new EV car and you're on the Tesla website or you're on any other dealership or marketplace and you're looking for a car that gives a mileage of 200 miles and that has leather seats and you're looking for seats of particular color, if there are 100 videos on the Tesla website or any of these marketplaces, how do you know which video is talking about what? Or if you asked a question in ChatGPT, hey, show me a car with leather seats that's red in color, that's an EV that drives 200 miles, you know, today ChatGPT cannot really surface an answer with the video clip. So these are the problems that we're going after at Wiral. So essentially our superpower is video search. We make video content searchable in 20 dimensions. We analyze the audio, text, and imagery to index everything inside the video, and our video search is what powers our platform. So today, most product before Wiral is was invisible, now we make it visible. So essentially, uh, the problem is not content creation. There's plenty of video and there's plenty of people watching videos as well, right? Um, so, but the problem is, uh, how do you surface, uh, the key moments inside a video that is going to drive the next purchase decision and the purchase and revenue for brands and customers? So essentially, uh, Viral offers an— Viral offers a platform to help D2C brands and retailers capture all video, understand video, and leverage video on their site with the next-gen shopping experience. So video tends to be very unstructured data, so we actually make it structured by indexing and analyzing all the video. And then we have— we help distribute that content across online channel, your in-store channel, your AI search, AEO, SEO, or it could even be connected TV or your kiosk. So that's really the business we're in.

Interesting. So yeah, the AEO components of videos, tell me a bit more about it. For example, my podcast, right? I have so many videos. How would you help me index these in a better way?

Yeah, so that's a great question, right? So first of all, podcast tends to be anywhere between 20 minutes to maybe an hour long, depends on the podcast recording. And the most precious time for anybody watching a podcast is really time, right? So if you had 100 podcasts on your website or on the— or today you have them probably on Spotify or other channels, and I land on your site, your website, and I have a very particular targeted question about, you know, how did the founders who are on your podcast raise their seed round of funding? Right. So first of all, I don't have time to read 100 titles and descriptions. I don't even have time, like maybe, you know, in that 20-minute podcast, you're only discussing your seed round funding in maybe the 18th, the 15th minute of the podcast for 2 minutes. I don't have time to watch the video and figure out what that portion of the video is. And then finally, so essentially today, most video content, including your podcast, is probably not machine readable. So this is where Varl comes in. We will make your podcast, we'll index everything inside the video. So for example, we will index who the person is, the title, description, the demographic of who's in the video. We will generate all the topics that have been discussed in the video. We even generate a list of questions that the founder has been answering in your video as well. And we get this video data ready for maybe online site search on your site. So I could just ask a question. And what we do is we, if you asked a question, we're fully, it's really an agentic solution. You can ask a question, it responds back with a summary, and it will respond back with all the clips. So you can see the portions of the video that answers the question about seed round funding. And more importantly, it's not only just for your website. We then generate all the metadata that is required to enable your podcast search on ChatGPT or search, right? So on ChatGPT, you might ask a question, hey, can you recommend what— can you give me an insight about what founders are saying about seed round of funding? And so if you are a customer, we wanna be able to make sure we surface your podcast in the ChatGPT results with the clip. And then from the clip, someone might want to subscribe to your podcast because they're like, oh, this host is very interesting. He has some amazing people on the podcast. So in the process, we can help you generate more leads for your podcast to help you more signups. And hopefully in the process, you're getting more sponsorships and you're also, you know, and you're getting more business out of it. So again, you know, our goal is to really maximize the ROI on your podcast that you're generating. Uh, which, you know, in many cases people just give up when they see like 100 podcasts and they're like an hour long, right?

But how would you make them more discoverable? Is this like a couple of words in the description or—

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah, great question.

I was gonna just answer that now. So, uh, we generate the metadata around the video, on each podcast, which is, uh, this transcript summary. We generate about 200 to 300 under tags or what's inside the video. It could be keywords, topic, demographic, making sure that it doesn't apply to podcast brand safety concerns, profanity, or letting you know that there's profanity, minors, or such. And then in the example of podcasts, we also generate a list of questions that the video answers. And all of this is generated as a structured meta tag behind the podcast. Which then becomes readable when ChatGPTs of the world are crawling the web and they're, they're building their own sitemap for each of the websites that they're crawling as well. So essentially what happens is when you ask that question, hey, show me a founder raising a seed round, can you tell me, give me some insights? It does that matching with the, with the Q&A that we're generating. So it's sort of a video sitemap, if you will, on top of the video. And so it will generate the clip and we give the timestamp. So that clip with the timestamp with the answer can instantly be surfaced in ChatGPT. So it needs all this, all this data together to, and context.

Interesting. And what would be the difference between this and me like asking my agent to do it for my videos? Because I have like 5,000, right? So what would be the difference in cost, right? I saw on your website you have like various plans, right? So that falls under enterprise plans.

Yeah, essentially we've built our own AI models as well to do some of these tasks. And so we've already pre-trained models as well to understand video in our context with what we do. So we are much cheaper than what you would get with ChatGPT. So we're able to analyze, for example, we analyze a 12-minute video Uh, in, uh, about a— in for 18, uh, for, uh, 18 cents. If you did the same on ChatGPT, it's going to cost you a lot, lot more dollars. So that's one. The second is the system has a compounding loop. As people start— as, as we begin learning what people are searching, what people are asking on top of your videos, uh, we also— the system can also start offering auto-search. For example, you can then list a list of questions that the video answers based on what people are asking for about the podcast, about the topic of podcasts and more. So the system is learning as well quite a bit on what's doing well. So we have a— we essentially, we capture all your video, we understand that video, we help you distribute that content across all your— syndicate that video content across all your channels, which probably if you're doing it, you probably have to manually do the uploads. Downloads. And then, you know, some of the platform might not be ready with— they might not have the metadata as well that they, that they need. And then of course, importantly, the system is learning as well. And we're also measuring as well what people are searching, what videos are performing as well, and what that audience side audience looks like. So all of that, it's like one-stop shop.

And you had traction recently. You raised Some round, the round's not fully done. Tell me a bit more about the latest news in the company.

Yeah, absolutely. So it's crazy. I'll tell you what's happened in the last 4 months is we added 140 customers, brands, and retailers on the platform. And what's changed in the industry is twofold. One is, you know, everyone is looking to get their data AI ready. And of course, brands are spending millions of dollars on producing video content. But the ROI is very poor, and it's more visible now because TikTok is now in the play. And TikTok Shop did, for example, did $15 billion in revenue last quarter, $6 billion of which is in US. And so they're starting to take market share away from my customers, my prospect customers. So essentially, we have some big retailers, we have D2C brands coming to us and saying, hey guys, we We lack a video experience on your site. Our video data is not AI ready. Can you help us catch up with TikTok? Because otherwise we're going to lose our market share. I mean, TikTok already owns 17% of the beauty market share, by the way, in US. It's crazy. In 3 years, right? They'll be the 3rd largest online retailer after Amazon and Walmart. So short is there's a big gap in the marketplace right now to help brands and retailers catch up with video with TikTok and Amazon. And that is the gap that we're going after. So I have customers now, I get 3 to 4 leads every week now from DTC brands and retailers saying, hey, can you help us catch up with TikTok? So that's really what's happening right now is that's the impetus is, you know, when your revenue starts to hurt, it starts to matter, right? And what's happening is the other problem is brands are only capturing 15 cents on every dollar that they spend on video marketing. Again, because the problem is the video— they create all this content, it sits on social media, and the video is never on their e-commerce channel. It's not— they can't bring that video in store. It's not AI search ready for ChatGPT. So they're missing out on 10 to 40% additional revenue and engagement. And that's really the problem that we're going after. So we're raising right now a $3 million round, and $1.5 million is already committed. We have another $1.5 million left right now, and we have some amazing investors. Head of Shopping at Google has invested in Vyral, uh, Kleiner Perkins, Scout Fund, uh, Nomis VC, Spark Labs VC in Silicon Valley. So we have some amazing— and most recently, uh, the Chief Merchandising Officer at, uh, ex-Chief Merchandising Officer at Walmart, uh, has just joined the team on the board. So, and again, I don't have to explain video anymore to anyone. You know, they get it. And I just came back actually yesterday from Walmart headquarters in Bentonville. So NRF, which is the National Retail Federation, and Dun& Humby, which is a big e-commerce solutions provider, they had selected us as one of the 8 startups to present to 200 retail execs in Bentonville. So it was an amazing event. And again, you know, the questions weren't about whether video is useful. The questions were, hey, How quickly can we integrate? How does the system learn? You know, is your—

is—

do you offer compliance, right? All these questions that enterprise mid-market customers need. We're fully compliant. We are data— your data stays private on the platform. It is also compliant for ADA and stuff with the— when it comes— and we're building next-gen shopping experiences. So it's a whole new way to do shopping with video like never before.

Right. And you had a $30 million exit prior to that?

That's right, yeah. So just by way of background, I've been in the e-commerce space. Previously built and sold a company. We had built an in-store retail media network. So as you walked around the store inside a supermarket, we would send you promos. So for example, if you pass the Coke aisle, you know, buy 2 Cokes, get 1 free. So in the process, we increased the basket size and we cut the lines. So I've been in the commerce space for 18 years now, then went to work at Nokia India, the phone company, where I ended up launching the App Store in about 35 countries around the world. So I study online and offline shopping behaviors. And so what happened was I moved from Boston to Berkeley, and, uh, and again, it was an observation that I saw everywhere. Like, you know, most young people, especially Gen Zs, uh, they're spending 9— about— they're spending 2 hours every day on their phones watching video, right? And so that was what the videos, and really that realization that video is very sticky was honestly the reason behind founding Vahlel.

Interesting. What kind of GTM traction do you have right now? I think you target head of commerce. How do you get a hold of them, and how many users do you have right now?

Yeah, absolutely. Like, we have, you know, on average, a brand usually has— so we target head of e-commerce or digital marketing or the person responsible for digital transformation inside of a mid-market or enterprise brand or retailer. And essentially, we have about, like I said, we have about 200 brand retailer customers on the platform. On average, you know, they have about 4 users on average who log into the dashboard and to our platform and do what they need to do. And what we are doing is we're actually automating all the workflows to capture, understand, and leverage video at scale. Like, our goal is how do we get millions of videos for millions of SKUs up and running with— on your site with search and with search personalization, SEO, AEO, recommendation activation and measurement, right? Like, that's really the end goal is scalability with video. And at the heart of it, the problem is moderation. So that's the problem we have solved is You know, for example, if I'm Target, I might not— I want to make sure that the videos don't have profanity, children, nudity, doesn't mention the word Amazon in the video, or there is no unlicensed music in the background, and so on, right? So we're targeting— the user of our dashboard is usually the e-commerce team, e-commerce managers, and the brand managers, and the customer success teams that are looking Looking at, you know, how, you know, can we reduce our tickets? Can our videos answer product questions so it becomes self-serve? And by the way, this, we increase on average, we increase conversion 5 to 28%. We increase average order value 5 to 15%, and we increase, we reduce 95% of your time, manual hours that the teams would take to manually watch a video and put the video up on their site. So we're We're automating all the commerce, e-commerce workflows.

Interesting. And what are the top goals for this year? Finish the round of fundraising? Are you leading new GTM initiatives? What's on your radar?

Yeah, absolutely. So on the go-to-market side, you know, we are looking for— there's sort of 3 ways we're looking to do this. The first is LinkedIn campaigns, outbound campaigns with our target ICP. And that's working really well, to be honest with you. Like, we are getting a lot of traction with our LinkedIn campaigns. The second is partnerships. So we have recently signed 4 agency partnerships that will bring in about $15 million ARR in pipeline for us, prospect pipeline for us. And these agencies generally are ecommerce agencies or marketing agencies or ecommerce system integrators. I mean, there's a lot of companies that help big retailers with integrating different solutions and modules on their platforms. So this brings— these partnerships also bring significant revenue for these partners as well, because a lot of these customers, you know, they need help with actually doing the integration work, or they need help with the video strategy, or even with helping them with content creation strategy as well, and all of that. So it's a win-win for both, for us and the partners. And then the third is we landed a partnership with TikTok Shop to syndicate video reviews for 500,000 TikTok merchants. So we actually have an app on the App Store, on TikTok App Store. So any merchant that can, they can download the app and we can enable syndicating, capturing and syndicating video reviews, which is UGC as we call them. In the world of e-commerce. We can help them syndicate that content. Now, why did TikTok select us is really the more important question here, is because of our content moderation capabilities. We have 150 filters, right? TikTok wants to make sure the length of the video is less than 2 minutes, doesn't mention the word Amazon. You know, there's certain requirements, right, when a video goes up on their site. Because if you look at the business of video, right, Again and time and again, all these social media platforms, they've been hammered with fines. I mean, Facebook just settled a $22 billion fine 2 weeks ago. YouTube settled a $537 million fine as well. And all because wrong video is being targeted to the wrong audience. Children were seeing videos that they were not supposed to. Right. So this content moderation is very expensive. It can be extremely expensive for your business, and it can actually even shut down your business in some cases, right? So that's really the holy grail of what we're solving. So for TikTok, we are the first line of sort of moderation, right? And then of course TikTok has a second line of moderation as well. But because we're able to moderate content programmatically with AI, we're able to scale rapidly for all our customers.

There you go. You have a CTO, right, that's in charge of programming. What does your day-to-day look like as the Oh, as a CEO, you mean?

As what does my—

Yeah, your day-to-day.

Oh, I mean, pretty much I would say, you know, 65% is just sales, right? I mean, right now my goal is to really, I mean, ideally, you know, we want to be in 18 months, we have promised ourselves to be cash flow positive and break even with what we do. So with that goal in mind, You know, I spend most, 65, 70% of my time on sales, right? Like customer prospecting and closing deals. And I would say the remainder right now is fundraise because of course we need the capital, especially in the world of AI when, you know, some of the talent is very expensive, is why you need the capital initially. And also we have built our models as well. So, and we'll continue to do so. We're building some great IP as well in the process. So yeah, I would say that's sort of my split for the day. And like I said, I went to Bentonville, just came back, returned from there. Again, another conference coming up next week. So it's all focused on sales.

And these conferences, do you find that they have ROI? Like when you include all the costs and the time and all of this, do people still buy physically?

I would say there's something about eye contact. IRL, as they say, right? When you meet someone, the trust you build, the questions you can answer in person. So to answer your question, I found ROI more with smaller events like boutique-ish events, where it's a gathering of maybe 100 or 200 leaders. Like for example, Bentonville, like it was a conference with 200 retail execs and they were all listening. It was the entire day was retail innovation. It was hyper-targeted towards 8 startups who were invited, including Vodas. It was highly focused. They were paying attention to what we do, what we were presenting. I think that kind of event is extremely— can generate ROI, right? Because you come back with these conversations, you understand their business challenges, you understand what's top of their mind, right? And also, you're sharing with them also what's new, what's next as well, right? How can they grow So I would say yes, there's something about eye contact in a small group, a smaller group where it's like, I would say like if you take versus you take ShopTalk, which is like massively big e-commerce conference, I think honestly instead of participating in the conference itself, what I found better ROI is those side events where you host a cocktail hour for a very targeted ICP or you take a group group of people out for dinner. And, you know, they— it's not just that they want to listen to me. They also want to listen to each other. And I want to capture what they're listening to each other as well, right? Because those are those natural flow of conversations is where I'm going to get those nuggets about their business challenges and what's top of their mind. So, I would say smaller events, yes, you can— you do see some ROI.

And it's not your first rodeo, right? Like, what's different about building in this current landscape than it was in, I don't know, 2005, 2010, 2015?

I would say we're measuring, like you light years, right? When light reaches our— right? I'm measuring everything in AI days now. Like, the speed of which, like, I would say what I accomplished in my first startup in maybe 2 months is now in 2 days. So, yeah, staying on top of the game for everyone, by the way. I mean, no matter what company, what business you're in, whether it's— whether you're even in, like, you know, selling shoes on a shoe store, I mean, everyone has been impacted by this big transformation with AI. So I would say speed of execution, right? I'll just give you a simple example. TikTok itself is moving so fast because ByteDance is also building their own AI models, right? That if, I will tell you this, that if most retailers don't catch up in the next 6 to 12 months with some, in some capacity with TikTok, they're gonna be dead in less than like 18 months, 24 months. It's, it's my point is that even for our customers, that timeline has shrunk to 12 months for them to do something versus 2 years or 3 years to execute, right? You just have to execute fast. So that's the first thing. The second thing that's playing a big role now, what I've seen is remote hybrid workforce, right? The beauty now is, you know, you don't need everyone in the same place, especially sometimes when the talent is very hard to find. And that talent cannot move for personal reasons, family reasons, right? At least remotely you can hire them and you can bring them in every quarter or every month to your office. But that has its own— my point is hybrid workplace and remote work has its challenges on how you need, as a CEO, I need to organize my team, how we organize our meetings and how we organize our in-person meetings as well, right? So I would say that has, that has changed. And the third part I would say is, you know, as in many companies, especially in tech, a large portion of my team— teammates, colleagues are under 28 years old. And it's a different mindset. It's a different culture, you know, with them, right? They speak openly. They're not shy to give you feedback as a CEO. So, for me personally, you know, or my C-level, you know, me and my CTO and others who are like more experienced people, I think we also have to— we have also had to need to adapt to the Gen Z demographic and the culture that they bring to the table as well, right? And also I found that, you know, never undermine someone because they're young. They might bring a fresh perspective. And especially with the exposure they have with ChatGPT and search these days or just access to information, I'm blown away with how young people come up with some mind-blowing ideas that you might have never predicted, right? And of course, they're also my demographic who shop. So nothing better than actually hearing from your target audience how they would like to shop and how the world could make a difference for them with their shopping behaviors. So I would say those are some of the things, those 3 areas that have changed quite a bit since my first company.

Yeah, I love it. Where can people find out more about you, Ajay?

Yeah, absolutely. So, you know, you can just email me, ajay@vyrill.com, and hopefully, Charles, maybe you can even put my email out on your— under your podcast as well. Or check out vyrill.com, and I would say the best is connect with me on LinkedIn as well. You know, I think that's a great place to— I always check my DMs every day, and I respond really well on LinkedIn as well because it gives me a little bit of context to who you are. So, I would say those are some of the ways of reaching out.

Oh, is it Jay and Ajay?