09: Ajay Bulusu | NextBillion.ai
Co-Founder at NextBillion.ai | Powering Enterprises with Customized Mapping Solutions.
Ingredients for Success:
Founder-market fit is a moat. When the founding team set out to build a custom map solution for businesses, their experience was the point of differentiation. Having worked on the mapping team at Grab, they already had a nuanced understanding of the user pain point. As they were fundraising, one thing was clear to investors: that Ajay, Shaolin, and Gaurav are quintessential stalwarts of the term ‘founder-market fit’.
Find your niche. Ajay was well aware that building mapping software for consumers would incite competition from incumbents. So, by navigating the opportunity and committing to sell to enterprises, Nextbillion.AI is bypassing the crowd. When building a product, survey the competitive landscape to find evergreen opportunities, and then - go deep.
Culture fit trumps all. As he was building out the team, Ajay gave precedence to ‘fit’ over other criteria. Hiring on values and core beliefs is critical - especially for early employees - as they determine the long-term mindset of the company. Clearly, this view is working for NextBillion - the firm has had zero attrition since inception.
Have you ever been frustrated when the estimate to get to a friend’s place on Uber is mistimed? Or when your food delivery ends up at the wrong location? Chances are, it’s something that many of us have felt. Most of the time, however, the driver or delivery person isn’t at fault, but a flawed map system that we’re all misled to blindly trust.
That’s the pain point NextBillion.ai is hoping to solve for. “The future is hyperlocal. We are building a decentralized, modular, custom map solution for businesses. Our thesis is that every company requires their own mapping stack.” Given the proliferation of mapping use cases, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution anymore. Challenging the conventional method to how companies interact with mapping software isn’t easy, but if there’s anyone who has a fair shot, it’s Ajay and his team. Let’s dive right in.
Right Place, Right Time
Founder-market fit. Ah, nothing like investor lingo to start off this story. But I just have to: the NextBillion.ai team resembles the term too closely for me to avoid it. Gaurav, Shaolin, and Ajay have worked at Grab, Google, and Waymo – unarguably, top-tier technology firms, where the reliance on maps is a core part of their strategy.
“At Grab, we grew the mapping team from 0 to 400+ in 3 years. We were living and breathing the problem of having enterprises rely on mapping interfaces built for consumers. Realizing there’s no vanilla solution, we aimed to create a market for niche-based mapping APIs for companies to use. After growing the team and forming a thesis on the nuances of the core pain point, three of us jumped ship to start NextBillion.ai.”
Aside from having a team packed with relevant skill sets to solve this problem, Ajay had another tailwind that was the deciding factor to start NextBillion: perfect timing. “We launched the company during the pandemic, at a time when B2C applications – Grab, Gojek, Instacart, to name a few – were exploding. We knew that each company relies on maps differently; the way a Swiggy driver operates is different from an enterprise logistics company in the same city. You can’t just give someone distance and time and assume it’s done. Companies need more tailored solutions. So, as we set out to build and launch NextBillion.ai – we knew we had our timing right.”
With any company trying to create a new market, there are almost always going to be challenges around selling. And selling to enterprises, a process typically filled with bureaucracy and pleas for customization, tends to be even more complex. Ajay, fortunately, thought otherwise.
Anything but Vanilla
In an enterprise sale, founders find themselves in a constant battle of solidifying and executing the vision of their product with the actual customized demands of the client. For NextBillion.ai, however, this doesn’t seem to be a problem. “For us, the product and system we’ve built are highly nimble. Our tool can be deployed anywhere in the world; it doesn’t matter if our customer is in Mysore or Melbourne. All the pieces are set… it takes us 2 weeks to plug in with the first API, and 2-3 days thereafter.” In order to simplify the process, Ajay and his team have derived a simple ‘3C’ mnemonic: customization, cost, and control. “First we customize the API for the client using a low-cost framework. Once completed, we hand over the keys to the customer – giving them the set of tools to work with.”
That said, it’s not as high-touch as it’s made out to be. After all, Ajay is targeting large companies, with an aspiration to go after small-to-medium technology firms in the future. “Given that we work with enterprises that have large pools of data, there is hand-holding while setting up. Mapbox, one of our competitors, is working on a do-it-yourself (DIY) solution that is better suited for startups. For us, we typically have a 3-month pilot, coupled with 3 months of product testing with the companies. I don’t think this will go away – at least not in the near term.”
But, for any company that offers customization, there is always a worry of simply becoming a service provider. Ajay uses this to his advantage when thinking about product development. He is constantly ruminating on ways to iterate and add enough value to customers so that he is a long-term fixture in their technology stack.
“Our team sits around a table and ideates on where we want the roadmap to go. We consider ourselves experts and are highly aware of customer pain points. My goal is to never have companies think of us as an outsourced service provider; we build products that scale across customers, not ones for a single customer.”
Dynamic Duo
I think of NextBillion’s software as a ‘zero to one’ (credit to Peter Thiel) solution, where there’s no existing market that the team is catering to. Instead, Ajay and his team are forging their own path by targeting an evergreen opportunity. With that, however, comes a tradeoff. Being the first mover and selling into a (presumably) bureaucratic enterprise points to an unpredictable sales process. And that’s where NextBillion’s first challenge stems from. “For us, one of the key challenges we see going forward is building a repeatable sales process. We are fortunate to have early champions, but our ambition is to insert ourselves into the stack of a wide range of large technology companies. For that, we need to scale our process of selling.”
The second challenge that NextBillion.ai faces is churn. “We only launched last year, which means that even though we’ve received promising feedback from customers, it’s important that we retain them in the long run. To counteract any issues on this front, we hope to build a robust customer success team. We want to be there to answer any questions and show our partners that we care.”
And lastly, the elephant in the room is sitting on the home screen of our phones: Google Maps. Before speaking to Ajay, I had a feeling that this ‘competitor’ would form the bulk of our conversation. But that doesn’t seem to be the case – Ajay feels that they are targeting different segments of the opportunity.
“We think that Google is too big. NextBillion is focused on niche verticals and we don’t see Google pursuing the space we are in. What they’ve achieved is significant, of course, but they are more aligned with consumers vs. enterprises.”
Keeping Investors Close
The large addressable market, clear pain point, and – most importantly – relevant team, makes NextBillion an attractive investment case for venture investors. Being in high demand, Ajay took the opportunity and pursued an intentional set of criteria when committing to his first institutional checks.
“We spoke to several VCs, but two of them really stuck out for us – Lightspeed and Falcon Edge. Our team looked for a mix of investors that brought a range of capabilities. Lightspeed is the classic early-stage VC that will help us navigate the scaling process. And we viewed Falcon Edge as more of a financial investor; one with deep pockets that can make our fundraising process more seamless in the future.”
Similar to Sonal, Ajay chooses to always keep his target investors in mind. “We built the relationships and knew the investors at Lightspeed and Falcon Edge a while before investing. In fact, I know exactly which VCs I’d like to add to the cap table for the next round!” This goes to show that when it comes to investor relationships, it’s best to take the short-term transactional hat off and use a more long-term synergistic view. In fact, the case-in-point for Ajay’s preparation is how he raised his Series A round: with nothing but a presentation deck.
Friends Like Family
Through managing the 400+ mapping team at Grab, Ajay not only gained the relevant skills to build a solution in the vertical, but also the chance to rub shoulders and collaborate with a talented team. So, when contemplating on the culture for NextBillion, Ajay had the benefit of recruiting some of his most skilled colleagues who he deemed a good fit. “It’s a relaxed culture at NextBillion. We’ve hired only people we know, except for two folks; it really feels like family. My goal is to empower our team and help them understand the important problem they are solving for. We really want our employees to be happy.” And happy, they are – Ajay is proud of the zero percent attrition rate at NextBillion.
The collegial, trustworthy culture allows for independent thinking and the pursuit of risk; a prerequisite for a startup solving a novel problem. And, with systemic tailwinds by its side – including India’s recent deregulation of the mapping vertical – we will soon live in a world where the knock on the door will be your food delivery, right on time.