Henrik Werdelin has spent the final 15 years serving to entrepreneurs construct massive manufacturers like Barkbox by his startup studio Prehype. Now, along with his new, New York-based enterprise Audos, he’s betting that AI might help him scale that course of from “tens” of startups a yr to “tons of of hundreds” of aspiring enterprise homeowners.
The timing actually feels proper. Mass layoffs throughout quite a lot of industries have left many employees reconsidering their profession paths, whereas AI instruments have markedly lowered the barrier to constructing digital services. On the heart of that Venn diagram is Werdelin’s newest enterprise, with its promise to assist “on a regular basis entrepreneurs create million greenback AI corporations” with out requiring technical abilities or giving up fairness.
Werdelin’s journey from Prehype to Audos displays the broader transformation taking place in entrepreneurship proper now. At Prehype, which he began round 2010, the main focus was on working with tech founders to construct conventional startups, the sort that may elevate thousands and thousands and intention for billion-dollar exits.
Now, he tells TechCrunch, “What we’re making an attempt to do is take all that data, all of the methodology that we’ve created through the years of constructing all these massive corporations, and actually making an attempt to democratize it.”
The thought is that “on a regular basis entrepreneurs” could sense a shift is afoot however will not be eager to experiment with so-called AI brokers or know easy methods to attain prospects. Audos is very happy to assist them, supplying these non-technical founders with AI instruments to construct refined merchandise utilizing pure language, and profiting from social media algorithms to search out them their area of interest prospects.
“Fb and lots of these platforms, they’re simply unimaginable algorithms, and so they’re unimaginable at determining [how to reach your customer] when you outline a buyer group,” says Werdelin, who co-founded Audos along with his Prehype accomplice Nicholas Thorne. In actual fact, Audos makes use of this technique to rapidly take a look at whether or not a founder’s enterprise concept has sustainable buyer acquisition prices.
The strategy appears to be working. Audos has helped launch “low tons of” of companies since its beta launch, with founders discovering the platform by Instagram advertisements asking “Have you ever ever considered beginning one thing, however don’t know the place to go?” Amongst them, Werdelin says, are a automobile mechanic who desires to assist individuals consider restore quotes, a person who’s promoting “after loss of life logistics” companies, digital golf swing coaches, and AI nutritionists. In a winking reference to billion-dollar companies, or so-called unicorns, he calls these one- and two-person groups “donkeycorns.”
All went by the identical course of: they clicked on Audos’s advert, its AI agent launched a dialog to determine the issues these people need to sort out and who they need to serve, and, when it was happy with the solutions, Audos obtained them in entrance of potential prospects as quick as doable.
As for returns, Audos operates on a basically completely different mannequin than conventional accelerators or enterprise capital. As an alternative of taking fairness, the corporate takes a 15% income share from the companies it helps launch. In return, founders stand up to $25,000 in funding, entry to these AI-powered enterprise growth instruments, and assist with distribution, primarily by paid social media promoting.
“We’re not taking any fairness of their enterprise,” Werdelin says, partly as a result of “we don’t assume these corporations would possibly ever get bought. What we’re actually impressed by are the mom-and-pop outlets which can be the spine of our society.”
The income share continues indefinitely, just like platform charges charged by Apple’s App Retailer. For founders, meaning giving up a good portion of their income in perpetuity — a 15% reduce that would price entrepreneurs tons of of hundreds of {dollars} over time. Some will undoubtedly see that trade-off as worthwhile; others would possibly query whether or not the long-term prices justify the advantages.
Audos’s worth proposition raises different questions given how rapidly the panorama is altering. Whereas Werdelin emphasizes serving to founders construct relationships with prospects, it’s unclear how a lot of that essential work the AI brokers can truly deal with. There’s additionally the matter of differentiation. As Werdelin readily acknowledges, “the world is stuffed with these instruments” and so they’re getting higher quickly. What occurs when entrepreneurs can entry comparable AI capabilities with out paying a everlasting income tax?
Audos’s VCs don’t sound frightened about these eventualities. True Ventures led Audos’s $11.5 million seed spherical, with accomplice Tony Conrad explaining the enchantment in a Zoom name this week. Along with having confidence in Werdelin and Thorne, says Conrad, “I feel there are simply tons and many individuals” who would possibly eagerly embrace the chance to work with a platform like Audos.
Conrad attracts parallels to Instagram’s $1 billion exit with simply 13 workers, suggesting that AI may allow much more dramatic leverage, even when Audos — which itself employs simply 5 individuals altogether at the moment — isn’t chasing unicorns. As Werdelin explains it, “What we’re after right here is the thousands and thousands of people that can create million-dollar companies or half-million greenback companies which can be actual and life altering.”
Provides Werdelin individually of why he spun up Audos, “What we’re making an attempt to do is to determine the way you make 1,000,000 corporations that do 1,000,000 {dollars} turnover. That’s a trillion greenback turnover enterprise.”
It doesn’t sound loopy. Extending the advantages of entrepreneurship to individuals who historically haven’t had entry to startup capital or technical abilities is an more and more compelling proposition as conventional employment begins to really feel much less and fewer steady. “We consider that there needs to be someone who goes out and actually helps these smaller entrepreneurs which can be constructing one thing that’s not enterprise backable,” says Werdelin. “We consider that the world is best with extra entrepreneurship.”
Audos’s different traders embody Offline Enterprise and Bungalow Capital, together with quite a few high-profile angel traders – Niklas Zennstrom and Mario Schlosser amongst them.
