[agibsonccc]

We're "horizontal".

We would not fit his definition of a vertical specific startup. (We have also been around a while though) The bulk of what we do is time series.

Applications we do for real paying customers include:

Detecting theft of power on the raw grid

Online payments fraud

Detecting people stealing from the telco network

Detecting faults in assembly line machines

Detecting computers about to fail

Detecting root cause of dropped calls

Kind of researchy, but we've also done robotics with RL to teach a robot to learn an obstacle course.

[nora4]

I mean these are great stuff. But do you plan to be a venture-backed company (i.e. looking for hyper-growth and an exit, e.g. acquisition or IPO) or are you planning on being some sort of LLP?

The problem is that though the above may currently be a profitable business, I can't see how you will generate a "moat" and mature into a monopoly or a big market share in a vertical.

[agibsonccc]

I'm a YC founder with 7 mill in funding and 40 employees. We already are :).

Skymind is a weird mix of joint ventures in asia, US and Chinese investment. We're not looking for an exit anytime soon. We are looking to build a big business though.

The "moat" is a land and expand strategy. There is lockin with our tooling. It's a standard on prem play. We're hard to get rid of once you install us. We help in house teams compete with external vendors. Interest actually aligns there. Happy to elaborate a bit otherwise.

[lambdadmitry]

Aren't you describing a consultancy?

[agibsonccc]

No we're a horizontal AI platform vendor with a strong focus on anomaly detection in time series applications. Our main product is a competitor to AWS sagemaker for on prem and hybrid cloud deployments.

[Nasho]

Tell me more, who is 'we' ?

[nora4]

Just look at his profile (a click away). He is the founder of Skymind.

[agibsonccc]

Yeah sorry, I just assume people click profiles :).