Tony Tom, the young co-founder and CEO of Produx AI – one of the two Kerala-based firms selected to Techstars Seattle startup accelerator programme recently – believes he is an eventual entrepreneur.
The Kottayam native says he started building products because that was the only thing that interested him. “I wasn’t a sports or arts guy. The only thing that I could enjoy doing was building something and managing activities around it. Eventually, that work gained a name ‘entrepreneurship’,” he explains.
A BTech in computer Science from Cusat, Kochi, Tony has been a product manager for the past decade. He launched Produx AI along with Jerin A Mathews, another Kottayam native who has done his BTech from Toc H Institute of Science and Technology, Kochi, after their stint at Insent.ai, a conversational marketing platform.
“We had the chance to scale Insent from 0-1 and it got acquired by ZoomInfo (NASDAQ: ZI), a public company in the US. Both of us worked there in the product team building different products and eventually decided to start again,” Tony said.
Produx is not Tony’s maiden venture. He says he has always been a startup guy. “I started building products out of college and built a bunch of apps that serve the needs within college and continued building products after college with a few co-founders from the batch. After that, he joined a startup and co-founded one of the products that had a bunch of users. But never got to product market-fit,” he remembers.
Jerin has been building apps since his college days and has published more than 11 apps with 8 million+ downloads overall. During Covid days he made an app to convert images to PDF and vice-versa which was a huge hit among students.
Origin of Produx
Tony and Jerin began their startup from their experience as product managers. Produx AI is a product intelligence platform enabling B2B product teams make revenue-driven decisions by leveraging insights from prospect and customer feedback.
“Most companies, especially the venture-funded ones scale from a small team to a big team super fast. During that process, the team and the departments getting created will uncontrollably increase in size and there’s nothing we can do about it. That’s how it’s supposed to be! But as this happens the after effect would be that the product team would move farther away from the customers because interacting with customers will become more process driven and unnatural. They eventually lose context on what the real customer needs are. We realised this problem and decided to solve this for the product teams. We connect with the sources of customer feedback for a company and generate AI-driven insights from those for the product manager in the company to make smart decisions,” Tony explained.
Produx AI is built for B2B and plugged tightly into the workflow of a B2B product manager. Two engineers, Gokul G and Lakshmi K N and a designer, Sanjay Suresh, are among Produx’s core team.
Expansion plans ahead
The company is looking up to expand in Kerala and beyond and its efforts got a shot in the arm recently with a Rs 3.2 crore pre-seed funding. The investors who have backed the nascent company include Callapina Capital, Arjun Pillai, 1.0 Ventures and Nurture Ventures. As an entrepreneur who has invested his confidence in the fast-evolving AI sector, Tony is optimistic about the prospects of the Kerala startup ecosystem.
“Kerala, as an ecosystem is evolving fast to compete with the cities like Bengaluru and Chennai. The talent we have is catching up fast and with the right set of infrastructure in place we’ll have our footprint in the AI-world as well. Hubs like Kerala Startup Mission is playing a huge role in bringing the right set of investors and well-wishers to the ecosystem making it more scalable and efficient. Also, there are a lot of Malayalis in high-up positions in amazing companies across the world who could help fuel this movement as well,” he said.
(Startup Saturday is Onmanorama’s weekend series featuring promising startups from Kerala. Find the previous stories here)
