Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. They just announced a $24M Series A. Before Reducto, Adit was a Product Manager at Google, working on Ads and Search, and conducted machine learning research at MIT's Media Lab. In today’s episode, we discuss: How listening to customers revealed an opportunity to pivotThe weekend project that became Reducto's breakthroughLanding a Fortune 10 customerA technical founder's guide to salesKey insights from Reducto's fundraising journeyAdvice for founders: “You’re going to fail”Much more Referenced: • Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/ • Chetan Puttagunta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/ • Diana Hu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdianahu/ • Liz Wessel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethwessel/ • Raunak Chowdhuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauhaarda/ • Reducto: https://reducto.ai/ • Scale AI: https://scale.com/ • Stripe: https://stripe.com/ • Textract: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/ • Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/ Where to find Adit: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham/ Where to find Brett: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/ • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson Where to find First Round Capital: • Website: https://firstround.com/ • First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/ • Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround • YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital • This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast Timestamps: (00:00) Hackathons, YC, and an unexpected pivot (05:23) The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough (09:11) How customer signal led to PDF processing (14:46) Landing a Fortune 10 customer (22:42) Building “transferable features” (25:58) How caring beats sales skills in startup growth (30:28) The strategy behind Reducto's horizontal expansion (36:18) Hire slow, go-to-market fast (41:45) A technical founder's guide to sales (43:45) “You’re going to fail” (46:27) Why startups win (48:30) Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey (51:43) Less structure, more impact (55:00) How frustrations shaped Reducto’s culture (57:35) The question you should always ask in meetings
How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (CEO at Reducto)
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