Zunaid (00:04): Good afternoon Bala, how are you?
Balakrishnan A.P (00: 06): Good afternoon Zunaid. I’m good, Thank you. How are you?
Zunaid (00:10): I’m doing great. Happy to kind of have this conversation with you. There’re so many things to talk about, but before we kind of get started, give the viewers a quick overview of what is it that your company does.
Balakrishnan A.P (00: 19): Sure, um we are iLearningEngines and my name is Balakrishan. I’m the president and the Chief Business Officer. We are a leading AI, applied AI platform for Learning and Work Automation. We enable Enterprises to rapidly productize and uh deploy a wide range of uh AI applications and a lot of use cases at scale. At the core we are powered by proprietary vertical specific AI models and data with a very flexible No-Code AI canvas to drive out of the box deployments. We are deployed in over 1000+ Enterprise customers. We have about 4 million licensed users, across 12 Global vertical markets which include Healthcare, Education, Insurance, Energy and so and so. From an operational viewpoint, we are at a recurring revenue of 97% of our total revenue. Our trailing five-year CAGR is 48% positive adjusted with each year since 2020 and a rule of 40 company for the past uh five years, Zunaid.
Zunaid (01:28): Yeah, you mentioned some lot of great stats there. One question I have for you is, what’s the company’s current net retention rate right and how does it kind of compare to the industry’s Benchmark, especially in the AI sector itself?
Balakrishnan A.P (01: 40): Right, very good question. Our current Net retention rate is about 132% of which operationally significantly outperforms the industry average which is at about 101 to 102% for tech companies in the SAAS domain. This again is a key indicator that we are retaining our clients. Very high customer attention and also very successfully expanding our relationships through Up-sells and Cross-sells, Zunaid.
Zunaid (02:13): Got it, and then what are the strategies though, that go behind your company to implement these and achieve what you’ve got going on with the net retention rate?
Balakrishnan A.P (02:22): Right. At iLE what we drive across all our engagements is a proof of concept, a POC led strategy which helps us get closer to our customers and build very strong scalable client relationships that is one key aspect of our strategy to drive a very high retention rate. Besides that we’ve got dedicated success managers who ensure our clients maximize the value from our AI engagements and touch points deployed into the client premises. Thirdly, we invest sign significantly into R&D to ensure our AI Solutions remain Cutting Edge and continuously innovate our product offerings based on what the clients tell us constantly, and we continue to meet their evolving needs. Bottom line Zunaid, is we set a benchmark in terms of support services that we’ve heard from our customers that no competitor has been able to match and this is supported through a very very strong um uh Channel partner Relationship model which helps us to keep scaling in the markets that we operate in.
Zunaid (03:35): Now, when you’re working with these companies, so many companies want to be a part of the AI Revolution right? They want to be engaging in it, they want to go ahead and have it be a part of their business and streamline their processes for them. What are some challenges that you see these companies facing and but also more importantly how are you helping them face these challenges and provide those solutions?
Balakrishnan A.P (03:56): See at the core, I mean most of the organizations have been struggling with long deployment timelines, in terms of the time taken for AI to be deployed, which includes one of the outcomes or offsets of that is high initial costs, deep integration cost with their existing systems and a very very steep curve – learning curve for employees. So what iLE does is, we have driven by a No-Code canvas which makes the whole platform configurable and provides rapid deployment with, we would say minimal disruption to Enterprise’s way of working. So the AI engines which is created on our platform, they leverage what we call pre-built modules and data that is pre-trained for specific Industries. So what this essentially means to a customer is that, a client starts benefiting from very accurate insights and automation almost immediately from deployment. So we are able to deploy this platform in about 3 to 6 weeks from when we begin the engagement and the discovery session with the customer, which is something that helps drive very measurable outcomes across our client engagements.
Zunaid (05:13): Let’s continue on the topic of challenges because I like where you kind of provided the solutions that you have to help these companies, but data security has got to be one of the top key ones as well, right? So much data is now being collected in terms of AI – on the consumer on the other side and of course now who knows what the future of EV looks like and I’m hearing even planes might be, you know automated there. But when it comes to data security what measures are you taking to make sure that it’s protected from getting into the wrong hands?
Balakrishnan A.P (05:44): Well at iLE we provide the platform in multiple modes to the customer, based on what the customer prefers. So while data security is critical and the cornerstone of what we provide, we offer multiple models in terms of On-premises, we offer a private Cloud deployment. For Industries like, say for example, Education, Banking and Finance, the data security and compliance are very very critical parameters that have a great say in decision making. So by allowing our customers to opt for On-premise or a private cloud deployment, we help address these concerns and also provide the safeguard mitigant for sensitive information. Now, our implemention process is compliant with global industry standards which exist across these regulatory frameworks, and which also ensures that customer data at every point is protected at the highest level.
Zunaid (06:43): Do you have any examples of companies that you’ve successfully integrated with in terms of these Legacy systems of what you’re working on?
Balakrishnan A.P (06: 99): Yeah I would like to take a quick example if that may help explain the context. One of our large customers is a global manufacturing conglomerate, with about 22 business units and 40,000 employees in about 6 to 8 locations globally. So at some point they had a great deal of trouble aligning the subject matter experts inside the company to drive company specific training for their 40,000 employees and plus, an ancillary dealer network of around 10,000+. So they had no ways to get this done. So while the company was struggling with two critical parameters, which is siloed knowledge and expertise not being carried through the organization, so they wanted to get a handle on performance dynamics on a daily basis across the network. So what iLE did specifically in this account was, we did an Enterprise wide, used our enterprise-wide Knowledge Cloud to ingest and Aggregate and curate all the Enterprise content from multiple touch points within the industry, within the company, creating an Institutional IP repository for them. So from there on we integrated with their SAP and success factors and they also had a platform called BMC remedy and a host of other homegrown bespoke platforms which seamlessly integrated into the iLE framework through the no code canvas to capture every event trigger in one single place. So by doing that we were able to drive learning automation by integrating iLE into the Enterprise and also having the Enterprise content indexed at scale which is the bulwark of our ability to provide learning and workflow automation across the Enterprise.
Zunaid (08:40): Yeah, the seamlessness of making sure everything is aligned is critical. Right, we see that on our end in terms of Benzinga. Heck, I even see it in my personal life how things hectic could be and I would love Automation in my life in many ways. Final question for you How big can this get, right? What is the upper limit to this market especially in terms of AI as well?
Balakrishnan A.P (08:59): We see the market converging with multiple tailwinds across multiple areas. The Artificial Intelligence Market is predicted to be a market of around 135 plus billion with a five-year CAGR of about 25%. By 2025 we’ve got a global e-Learning market which is a 250 plus billion Market with a CAGR of about 16%. Now dovetailing into both of these is what we call the hyper Automation and the insights Market which is again a 60 to 65 billion Market by 2026. Now we operate at the sweet spot where all these forces convert so we bring in AI. We bring in a No- Code canvas and we layer all of that with what is the sweet spot which is configurability. So by bringing in configurability, we are able to address a a total Market size, a total ATAM of uh of about on the learning site of about 250 billion and Hyper automation of around 65 billion. So we believe the ceiling is pretty high for a lot of people to operate in this market, successfully going.
Zunaid (10:15): I look forward to the growth. Obviously you’ve already had great success, I was looking at your earnings, transcript and things like that, but before I let you go any final thoughts from you? I thinkI didn’t get a chance to bring up. The viewers are all yours.
Balakrishnan A.P (10:26): Yeah thank you I would like to say that um we would continue to uh stay focused on driving growth and keeping our growth margins scaling and ensuring that you know we continue to invest significantly into R&D which has been the uh this the biggest pivot which has helped us to create differentiators in the market and we look forward to our growth in the global markets and the verticals which include Healthcare, Education, Insurance, Retail and Energy. I’m very happy be here with you tonight Zunaid.
Zunaid (11:03): Well hey, as you reach those Milestones, I’d love to have you come back and kind of explain it to the viewers what exactly that means and where else the business is continuing to grow. Thank you so much for your time Bala.
Balakrishnan A.P (11:12): Great, Thank you.