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Isaiah Granite
Today on the podcast I want to talk about a really interesting company called Bland AI. VentureBeat has just reported that they raised $16 million. But I actually saw them earlier today posting on X saying they raised $22 million. So I'm not exactly sure. Well actually I'm sure I would assume that their official X account Talking about their $22 million is more accurate and Venture will update their article in any case. This is super, super interesting breakdown exactly what they do because we've actually interviewed someone from a similar company of similar company on podcast before and I think there's some interesting distinctions and I also think this is a massive overhaul, an industry wide massive overhaul. So I'm going to be breaking it down all the way to the point of criticizing the brand name. But you know, that's because I got a thing for, for naming for names and I'll tell you about that in a second. But first, if you are interested in starting a podcast, your very own podcast, which I think literally everyone should do, I record this podcast on Riverside, an amazing platform, not sponsored, just letting you know and there's many more amazing pieces of advice and tips about podcasting. I would love to give you my latest podcasting course that I have just released. This is something I'm super passionate about. Just past 4 million downloads my podcasts and have been able to raise money for my startups and do a lot of things with podcasting. So I really do think everyone should start one as a way to set yourself apart. If you're interested in getting a course that shows you how to go from 0 to 4 million downloads and beyond, raise money, get customers for your products, your services, whatever. Check out the link in the description for my podcast course. It is 50% off this week if you are willing to write me a review. If you like the course, of course, then you can have 50% off. The link for that is in the description and I also have the discount code for the 50% off. Normally it's $300, but we have a 50% off for this week only. If you're interested in starting that course, go check it out. Getting back to Bland, what exactly they do, this is a really interesting company. So essentially this is going to be this 20 million they've just raised. This is their emerging from stealth. So this isn't something where they've like kind of had a product that's been running for a while and you know, now they're, they're raising all this money. The emerging from stealth typically means, I mean other than Maybe some like, confidential clients. It really. No one's been able to use it. It hasn't been publicly available, so it would seem it's now more available. This is interesting. They're saying that this is your newest AI employee. I think that's a little bit broad, to be honest. What they're doing, which tool. But this isn't an employee per se that can do everything an employee does. It has a specific use. So specifically, this is a custom phone calling agent. It sounds just like a human. So it's got three things. Number one, can talk in any language or voice, which is really, really impressive. Number two, you can use it for a ton of different use cases for what it's actually talking about. And number three, no, this is. Can essentially handle millions of calls all at the same time. 24 7. Something I would absolutely love as I get put on hold all the time for the most ridiculous things. Shout out to my electrical company, my Internet company. I feel like it's at my phone company. Like, honestly. T Mobile. Shout out to T Mobile. Shout out to many other people that I wait on hold for. That drives me absolutely. Oh, man. Quantum Fiber. That's my latest one. I literally had an. An hour waiting on hold for Quantum Fiber because my Internet was broken. That was terrible. Anyways, so I want every company to use this. This is not a. This is not like, maybe they should, like, I think everyone should use this. Just if you can. If I could go through all of the steps of, you know, testing out. You know, it's kind of interesting when I think about, I'll go through a use case of what I've literally just used, which is Quantum Fiber. They had a problem with my Internet. I wasn't even actually. There was some renters at one of my properties and they had a problem with it and somehow I got stuck with figuring this thing out. So I called them up and first off, it was an hour on hold. This could completely eliminate that because it can do unlimited scalability. By the time I got on, like off, like off of hold and was actually talking to someone, they're like, okay, can you like reboot the device? What color is on the device? There's like all these very basic questions, you know, that they have like a very specific script. They ask you for it. By the end of it, we did everything that they asked and they're like, okay, sounds like your device is a problem. We are going to send out someone. When can we schedule a person to work this time? Is there someone available? Blah, blah, blah, blah. They go through. Everything that that agent or that, you know, that or service representative did was very replicable. It came off of a script. It came off of like precedent. It came off of. This is just what they do every single time. So using an 8, using a tool like this, which I'll show you how kind of work, it would be absolutely perfect to essentially replace that entire process and have this AI be able to take over the phone calls. Now you should go check it out. Blend AI is their website, just to hear kind of the quality of the voice, have a demo where their CEO is talking to it or whatever. But what I do love is kind of have a note for when you're actually building this out for what people are like, what they say and how the call is going. I think it's building out like a. I'm thinking, unless, like someone had to program this. But in any case, it's like, you know, it asks who they're speaking with, it says they're talking about this product. It says, you know, introduce yourself. It has like funny prompts. It's like, introduce yourself. Be a little cocky, Elaborate on your technical abilities and industry use cases. So you can actually put prompts in there for exactly how it's going to act. And I think this is just essentially running on probably GPT4.0 for the actual language. It's interesting because depending on what they say or do, there's different prompts of how it should respond anyways. It's just this giant flowchart of depending on what their situation is, what it should do. And I'm assuming if it's like, you know, if someone asks for something that's outside of its use case, it could either transfer them to another department. I think that'd be interesting if you have these in multiple departments. I also think it could be very annoying if for some reason over the use case of the user. So I'll. Yeah, I'll give you the downside of this. If for some reason the use case of the actual user is not in this system somehow, or it can't figure it out, it might not. It might just bounce you back between a bajillion agents that all think another agent should take care of a specific problem and it never solves it, that I can imagine would be a whole new level of pain and misery. Uh, but to be honest, it's actually no different than when I go through like a bank's, you know, number phone system thing. And it's like, for this, press 1, for this, press 2. For this press 3 and I like keep pressing it and by the time I get to the end like none of the options on the next screen actually apply to me and I gotta go back a menu and back a menu and try to figure out where. The heck. This would be so much better if I could just say this is my problem, this is what I need help with. And it just knows and it sends me to the right place so or and then has a thing to help you and maybe they're still, you know, were they unable to do it or none of these the right options speak to a customer service. I bet there's going to be a ton of people. It's kind of like when you go through the telephone like maze menus and if you push zero it sends you to a customer service rep. I'm sure it's gonna be the same problem where like you call the number, you just push zero a million times because you're like please. I don't even want to deal with your AI voice thing. So I can see that being an issue but I also can see how this is 10 times better than what we have now. So is it perfect? Maybe not. So there should probably some things in place but it's pretty dang good. So in the demo that I watched of Bland I was very impressed. It was able to explain as conversation and was able to kind of. They also showed the thought map or though I think was sort of pre programmed some degree of what it. How it was responding to questions. So overall I think this is a really, really interesting company. Now this is very similar to a company that we recently podcast called A company that's essentially doing very similar thing. Right. You can kind of program some stuff and go through some calls call menu using AI where it's talking to you. They do $0.10 per minute when they're talking on the phone for you. That's just what they do. I think it's. That's kind of interesting and I'd be curious land actual pricing models are so that'll be interesting to see when they roll it out. Overall, if you go to Bland's website it looks like it's. You can actually type in or have it call you. So I thought that's a. That's a very clever demo you could kind of do right. Everyone wants to try it. So usually you're testing out software on their website. They literally let you call you. It looks like it's got a lot of. A lot of stuff ready to go and actually get started or at least contact Them right now, I think their big push is obviously that's who they're selling this to. So go to their site. It's going to, you know, ask you to fill a form and you can submit it and I'm assuming they'll call you back. So it's not like a software. You can just like sign up and start building the thing. Sort of like Thoughtly. I think Thoughtly is more immediately ready to be. To be used. So anyways, companies Bland, I think has raised money. So it kind of has like the, kind of has that thing where whoever raises the most money gets talked about the most in the news, I feel like. But I would say don't leave out Thoughtly because this is, that's also a very interesting company. Who started Bland AI? That's the big question a lot of people want to know. Oh, right now they've raised $22 million total. And I guess that's probably what Bland was talking about in their Series A. But I think that maybe this most recent Series A is $16 million. That's what venture Beat thing. But honestly, when I'm looking at their LinkedIn post, their link or their X post, their X post for blind AI literally says, today marks a major milestone for us. We've closed our series A with 22 million in funding. Maybe it was kind of a rolling Series A and they just kept adding on to it. So I don't know, maybe that's, that's also kind of common. So I guess in any case raised $22 million and they've raised it from Y Combinator, PayPal founder Max Levchin, Eleven Labs, Peter Dev Debkowski and Twilio founder Jeff Lawson. So there's a bunch of other people, but I think this is a pretty solid group. You know, they have some legends from Silicon Valley in there. This was founded last year back in 2023. And essentially, yeah, they're just trying to call Enterprise phone calling communications. There are millions of phone calls going on every single day. So this is a massive industry that's going to be disrupted. This is what their CEO, co founder Isaiah Granite said about this whole thing. He said, quote, our mission is to fix the way businesses handle their phone communications. The problem is that humans Simply can't work 24. 7 Handle millions of phone calls simultaneously or be trained to a company's exact liking down to its voice and behavior. But AI can at a fraction of the cost. We want Bland to work alongside Enterprise employees to improve efficiency across the board. Something interesting, you know, he said in this is like we want it to work alongside their employees. I think a lot of people are quick to be like, this won't replace everyone where reality, if this works and it's scalable, you know, it's going to replace 99% of everyone. And the reason I say that is because this is literally what, what Klarna has recently been doing in theirs more was like text, but you can imagine Klarna, sure, why not? Why wouldn't they add something like this to do audio? But Klarna, which is like a buy now, pay later provider, they have a customer. They used to have about 700 customer support agents and they implemented some AI chat, GPT, custom fine tuning stuff that essentially was help them to be able to, you know, get all of their customer support done with just AI agents. And the results were pretty crazy. Essentially. I think they said they were able to massively cut down all of their costs. I saw somewhere that they let go of something like 33% of all of their customer support people and they planned on cutting maybe a thousand more or something this year because they're able to cut down on this so much or I think a thousand employees or something so of their workforce. So in any case, I think this is very interesting. I know a lot of people don't like to have that conversation about how AI might actually like be completely replacing full departments and people's jobs. At the end of the day, you know, if it's possible, people are going to do it. So like it or not, it's going to happen and it's just how are we going to respond? Is this, you know, your job that might be threatened? What other areas could you work in? Or is, you know, this something that could impact your business positively, negatively? It's all important questions to ask, but overall I think this is going to be a net positive if I can do something. I for one think that a customer service agent would be an incredibly taxing, stressful job. You know, having people frustrated and upset with you and, and if AI could do that and you know, take some of that stressful communications and interactions with people off people's plate. I don't know, I think that there's all sorts of maybe come from that, but, you know, that's just me. In any case, very interesting company. Bland AI. If you learned something new on the podcast today, I would love it if you would be interested in leaving us a review for the podcast. It would mean the world to me. Make sure to check out my podcasting course if that is something in starting the link is in the description with a discount code for 50% off. Hope you all have an incredible rest your day. I will talk to all of you next time and I will see you on the other side.