How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (Co-founder & CEO at Reducto)
Episode description
Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. They just announced a $24M Series A. Before Reducto, Adit was a Product Manager at Google, working on Ads and Search, and conducted machine learning research at MIT's Media Lab.
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In today’s episode, we discuss:
- How listening to customers revealed an opportunity to pivot
- The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough
- Landing a Fortune 10 customer
- A technical founder's guide to sales
- Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey
- Advice for founders: “You’re going to fail”
- Much more
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Referenced:
- Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
- Chetan Puttagunta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/
- Diana Hu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdianahu/
- Liz Wessel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethwessel/
- Raunak Chowdhuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauhaarda/
- Reducto: https://reducto.ai/
- Scale AI: https://scale.com/
- Stripe: https://stripe.com/
- Textract: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/
- Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/
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Where to find Adit:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham/
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Where to find Brett:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson
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Where to find First Round Capital:
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
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Timestamps:
(00:00) Hackathons, YC, and an unexpected pivot
(05:23) The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough
(09:11) How customer signal led to PDF processing
(14:46) Landing a Fortune 10 customer
(22:42) Building “transferable features”
(25:58) How caring beats sales skills in startup growth
(30:28) The strategy behind Reducto's horizontal expansion
(36:18) Hire slow, go-to-market fast
(41:45) A technical founder's guide to sales
(43:45) “You’re going to fail”
(46:27) Why startups win
(48:30) Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey
(51:43) Less structure, more impact
(55:00) How frustrations shaped Reducto’s culture
(57:35) The question you should always ask in meetings