Powering new ventures with AI

Picture the scene. Months and months of work, weekday and weekends spent scouring through competitor analysis, gathering data about the products, sales, and marketing strategies of your competitors.

It is vital work for any professional working in marketing, sales, business development and PR – or for those entrepreneurs establishing their own companies. Competitor analysis helps you understand the market landscape and make informed decisions to improve your product’s position in the marketplace

Ringing through the minds of experts and specialists engaged in such activities will be a series of critical thoughts, such as, ‘what are the likely needs, preferences, behaviors, and pain points of my competitor?’. ‘Are they targeting someone new?’ By examining how competitors position themselves, you can establish what sets your product and your company apart, and how your product or service is better, or can be made better.

But, oh the hours and hours work and mental concentration! All of it takes up mindspace one would much rather devote to being creative, producing innovative ideas.

LBS alumni Karthik Suresh (MBA 2017) Co-Founder & CPTO of AI-powered product lifecycle management platform Ignition knows this pain extremely well – he’s worn the t-shirt. Which is why Karthik, who has worked at such admired names and power brands as Morgan Stanley, KCG Holdings, Inc. and Facebook, began his startup, Ignition, to bridge the gap between engineering a product and bringing it to market.

Ignition’s AI analyses competitors and customer data to continuously draw out insights and build roadmaps, helping enterprise professionals and entrepreneurs rapidly develop go-to-market plans that will help grow sales, and identify upsell opportunities.

By aggregating competitive and customer data from hundreds of sources, including customer calls and chats, continuously categorising and analysing that data to extract insights such as feature asks, differentiators, and testimonials, Ignition helps in-house professionals and entrepreneurs rapidly build market roadmaps.

Ignition also uses AI to help generate text for copywriting and extract insights from customer conversations, and is currently working on AI agents and introducing a chatbot called ChatGTM to help its users navigate product roadmaps.

The frustration of product launch planning ignited the idea of Ignition

Back in 2020/21 and while working as a product manager in what was then Facebook Reality Labs in the famed tech hub of Menlo Park, Suresh was seized by the inefficiency of product launch planning. He was working on a new product launch when he became frustrated with its lack of organisation.

“The launch plan was a spreadsheet with about 100 tabs,” he remembers. “It was a nightmare to run the whole process.”

From this frustration, Ignition was born in 2021. And after only two and a half years, Ignition has raised $8m in funding from Altman Capital, Audacious Ventures and other venture capitalists.

An exhilarating ride, with amazing experiences offered up along the way

It all sounds so seamless and effortless, but it wasn’t, and to hear Suresh tell the tale he wouldn’t have been without the bumps and ruts in the road.

While working as Vice President, Engineering, KCG Holdings, Inc, and working in the field of high-frequency trading (HFT), the experience offered up some genuine scares even though he successfully led an algorithmic trading team in New York and London that built an HFT platform capable of $1bn -plus in daily trade volumes.

And developing the 100 tab spreadsheet while working for Facebook Reality Labs was clearly no picnic.

But throughout all the genuine thrills and spills of Suresh’s fast-paced career, he was able to draw on his time at LBS, which he sought out for the experience it offered in entrepreneurship and technology, and banking and technology.

Passionate about his time at LBS, and the skills, community and international network that the School continues to offer him, Suresh is excited about the future of Ignition and of the continued pace of change in AI.

“The recent developments in Gen AI is absolutely revolutionary, offering as it does an almost human level of perfection,” he says. But at the end of the day it is the human in the loop and finding the right people to understand how to apply these exciting new developments that really matters.”

The photograph depicts Ignition’s Karthik Suresh, CTO (right) and Derek Osgood, CEO