Early in the pandemic, the board of AI startup Hypersonix asked if the company was planning to revise its projections for the year ahead. The company said no, there was no need: It was already running pretty efficiently, its leadership tol the board, and it had plenty of venture capital cash in the bank just in case.
"We changed processes and we tried to do business, but we charged forward," Hypersonix founder and CEO Prem Kiran told Insider. "We've been smart in pivoting where we need to pivot."
Kiran says Hypersonix saw "tremendous" growth in the past year as many companies started relying more on data as they brought their businesses online. For example, many of its clients are from the grocery and retail sectors, which saw an increase in demand as online shopping surged, which in turn helped bring in more cash to Hypersonix's business.
This growth helped Hypersonix raise a $35 million Series B led by B Capital Group, the company announced Wednesday. Its valuation also quadrupled to $200 million in just over a year since its Series A.
Hypersonix plans to use the funding to scale by expanding to more industries and locations and building new partnerships. It also plans to invest in its product and technology.
"As we get into the next level of scale, we want to have more and more automation to the product," Kiran said. "The more automated the product is, the faster the product is. It becomes the ultimate advantage."
Hypersonix could compete better against 'traditional big boys' like Oracle and SAP during the pandemic
Kiran, an 11-year veteran of SAP before becoming an entrepreneur, founded Hypersonix in 2018 out of his "own frustrations." At previous companies, every time he and other executives tried to make a decision like a price change, he had to go through a lengthy process and had to consult multiple people and analysts. Even for basic questions, it could take two to three days to turn around. In some cases, it could take weeks.
Kiran decided to build a system that tells people the pros and cons of decisions they want to make to help them weigh their options. It can help users get all the data they need to make a decision in minutes, or even seconds.
"The amount of time it takes to get an answer to a simple question like that, it was astronomical," Kiran said. "I was shocked."
Hypersonix competes with tech giants like Oracle and Kiran's former employer SAP. But as a smaller startup, Hypersonix has speed and agility on its side, Kiran said.
"They cannot store and process and compute and stitch data and leverage data in the way we're able to do it," Kiran said. "Hence what we're seeing is time to value. We're able to get our customers up and running faster."
Transitioning to remote work during the pandemic also helped Hypersonix compete with the "traditional big boys," Kiran said. That's because all companies are having meetings with their large clients on Zoom or other videoconferencing software, which puts them all at a "level playing field," especially since a startup like Hypersonix may not have as large of a salesforce.
"No one had a different benefit over us," Kiran said. "It gave us a fair shot at large clients."