Thanks everyone for coming and thank you everyone joining us online for this company presentation of Aira. My name is Daniel Wikberg. I'm the Founder and CEO of Aira and also of Upsales, which is a company where Aira was spun off from. The format of today, I will do a presentation around 10- 15 minutes, then we will open the floor for questions. If you wish to ask a question online, you can do so throughout the presentation. Just use the chat function, we will pick them up in the Q&A section. All right, let's start talking a little bit about the background of Aira and why we launched the company and why it was spun off from Upsales.
The goal of Aira is to build the best sales agent in Europe, built upon the 20+ years of experience building these kind of tools inside of Upsales. The target group is smaller B2B companies in Europe. Looking at the data, Eurostat reports more than 25 million B2B SMEs. All of them have a founder, all of them have someone who's working in sales. That means a tool. It's a massive market, and there's no clear winner in Europe in this category yet. As you know, there's of course, tons of data supporting that it's a massive market and it's a growing market. AI adoption inside of these companies is still very early. This is the market and this is the wave we want to ride on, we want to follow.
I'd like to just start talking a little bit about the background, how Aira was born. I come from a background of building these kind of tools for more than 20 years. Systems, software to support sales in small and medium companies. We had a realization around almost two years ago, so we've always tried to help clients achieve their business goals, to find pipeline, to find customers, to drive sales more effectively. This has always been somewhat tricky from a customer perspective, because using these tools have been complicated and requires a lot of setup and training and customization. We realized that AI changed what is possible to build. Once and for all, you're able to solve all of these challenges and problems that the customers have had for a long time.
The first idea when we started building Aira was actually not to sell it as a product. It was an internal innovation project. We started thinking about what if we start from scratch with the technology that's available now, what would the product look like? That was the idea, we started building and iterating. After a while we realized that, okay, we have something. We've built something that might be the best product in the world. We should not limit ourselves to sell that to the 1,000 Nordic customers that Upsales is working with. That led us to start thinking about go-to-market and if you would like to sell this product, what would the setup be and what would the company need to look like?
The second realization was that also with AI, if you start with a blank slate and you build a business from scratch, you're able to run a much, much more effective go-to-market operation than what you do when you're working with local larger clients in an existing business. That's a quick background. The product was launched around a month ago. After all of this development and we've been on a world tour in Q1 talking to partners and clients, the commercial launch is a little bit more than 30 days ago. The product is live. It's used by clients. Clients are paying for it. It's early stage, but we are live. I'd like to talk about the three pillars as we see Aira as an investment and what we are trying to build.
The first pillar is what we call the intelligence layer. The idea with Aira is to use all the financial data that's available out there. Financial data about all European companies, use that data to help founders and sales teams become more successful when they are running their sales. We are still alone in doing this inside, built-in natively into the product. We have many competitors trying to scrape data online. This data is data that you cannot scrape. You have to buy it from third parties. We buy quality assured financial data from a number of data providers, and we build it into the product.
That doesn't get you so far because working with this kind of data also requires a lot of knowledge and experience, and there are a lot of pitfalls and problems to get the value you want from working with this data. We've been doing this for more than 20 years. All of this experience is built into Aira. Aira has all the knowledge, all the skills that you need to use this data to get value as a customer. The second pillar is to create something that requires zero effort from the user.
Again, the problem with these tools historically is that you need a lot of time, you need a lot of discipline, you need a lot of knowledge to use the tool in a correct way to get what you are actually looking for, which is some kind of business outcome in terms of increased revenue or a more effective sales team. With AI, it is possible to build something that does not require any effort from the user. That is what we built into Aira. Users download the app, they connect it to their existing email account and other systems, and Aira pulls the data and starts working autonomously for the user. The threshold of start using the app and getting the value is much lower than in traditional apps.
The third pillar, why we want to do the spin-off and why we want to list Aira, is to be a consolidator. We believe there are a lot of interesting AI startups out there with use cases and tools that can and will be an interesting part of Aira. That's also part of the plan, to use our listed position to do select acquisitions. Where are we right now? Again, we're in an early stage. We have customers across Europe using the app. Our go-to-market model is very highly based on working with partners. Partners, affiliates, influencers, which allows us to build a very scalable go-to-market model without building a huge organization, without building a huge team, basically.
That's I would say the priority number one for the go-to-market team at Aira, to continue building out this partner network and sign a lot of partners. We are keeping a high pace. The product is launched, customers are using it, but we are releasing new features, releasing updates every week. It's a high pace, and we have a long roadmap of stuff we want to add to the product. Why do we want to do this now? I think that's the number one question I got from the spin-off from Upsales was completed a little less than two weeks ago. The board at Upsales, we looked at Upsales and what strength and opportunities exist for that company, and we looked at Aira, and we believe that the adoption of AI is exploding right now.
We think we are in an inflection point, and we want to use that momentum. We also believe that most available options are still coming from established larger providers, which are still stuck in an, if you will, old way of selling, using, and delivering software. We believe there's a window right now to deliver something that gets the user up and running in two minutes and doesn't require a lot of investment or training or skill or experience. The team, we are a team of 10 people. Most of them come from Upsales and has been part of building Upsales for a long time. Adam is here today in the room, he's the CMO of Aira. He was previously CMO at Upsales. Fredrik Seidl, CTO, was previously CTO at Upsales, also joined Aira. Ninnie is our CFO.
Besides myself, the board consists of Baltsar Sahlin, who is the CEO and Founder of Mynt, a very fast-growing Swedish fintech company, and Ulrik Kristoffersson who co-founded Cling Systems, is a fast-growing SaaS company within the financial sector and accounting sector. That's a short introduction and presentation of Aira and what we want to do. I will open up the floor for some questions. Do we have any questions online yet? Not yet. Yes.
Thank you. Could you open up a bit more about the consolidation idea that you have? Are you looking specifically at sales focus or opening up for other sort of agents, or can you open up that a bit more?
Yeah. We want to try to keep the focus to the things we know best, so which is sales. The use cases we have been talking about when it comes to acquisitions is related to sales use cases that will save us time and add functionality to the platform. The idea with doing acquisitions is not primarily to buy large established companies to build revenue. It's more to build a better product. We won't buy a startup with no revenue. It has to be some kind of traction by the companies we're looking at. Having said that, I can also add that we are seeing early traction specifically from Banking and Finance Vertical, who seem to appreciate what we built with Aira.
We will try to listen very closely to the market and see where we get the best traction and see if that opens up some kind of verticalization. Again, it's still very early, but the core idea is to do sales use cases.
Yes. We have from online, how did you decide the amount of cash that Upsales provided to Aira?
How did we decide on the amount of cash that Upsales provided Aira? Yes. The dividend or the spinoff was SEK 20 million cash that was put into Aira at the time of the spinoff. Aira is still a small team, so that gives the company with no revenue a run rate of a bit over a year. The way we are executing now and the plan we have now, we have not communicated any additional plans of raising more money. We might do that, but we haven't done that yet.
Yeah. We also have, how will you manage being CEO of both companies?
How will I manage being CEO of both companies? Yes, that has been a very interesting discussion the last few weeks. The idea now is that, I've been CEO of both companies for almost two years. The only difference is that they have been inside one entity. The practical difference is very small, since having one more company listed, most of that workload falls on Ninnie, our CFO. We will continue evaluating this if it's working or if it creates a problem, but we haven't communicated any other plan as of now.
Given the accepting cash, will that really be enough?
Yeah, the question is, will Aira's cash be enough to reach profitability? With the current plan, we have no reason to believe that's not the case. Again, we are a small team. We're already producing revenue. No plans right now of raising any more cash. Yes.
I know it's an early stage, but do you plan to release any commercial update before the listing of revenue pipeline, customers, et cetera, any numbers?
No. The question was will we release any more commercial updates before the listing? We're not planning to do so. The listing plans to happen inside of Q2. The board is working around the clock to make that happen. The first update will be in the first interim report, which is planned end of July.
Yes. Also to the market, how do you sell this product?
How we sell the product. The product is a self-service go-to-market. Customers go to the website, they sign up with a credit card, and they get started without any involvement from the team. The go-to-market is primarily based on a network of partners, affiliates, which promotes the product in various digital channels. What I think is the beauty of this model is that we are paying our partners a revenue share, which we are paying after we collect the cash from the customer. That creates a very efficient model to scale the business without having to put up a lot of cash beforehand.
I like that. As an economist, I like that. What's your view on AI multiples? I know, as an investor perspective, so to speak.
AI multiples?
Yeah. As you did.
I think that in Europe, I think there are a lot of interesting opportunities. Smaller SaaS companies have taken a big hit in terms of valuations. Yeah, that's the reason why we are considering doing acquisitions. Then, multiples of Aira and the market in general, it's not my place to comment, I think.
Saw Aira's website that you have a partnership with HubSpot, which is one of Upsales' competitors. Can you talk a bit about that?
Yeah. Aira has built integrations to both HubSpot and Salesforce. I think, again, the value of using real financial data, when you have a sales use case is very high. If you want to do that in HubSpot or Salesforce, you have to buy a third-party service. You have to integrate it yourself, and it costs a fortune. We see that it's a very attractive offering for HubSpot and Salesforce customers. Having said that, it's also the market of HubSpot and Salesforce customers, an interesting market to go after. There are plenty of companies are building a huge business selling an add-on to Salesforce and HubSpot. Again, it's also very early, but we believe that's an interesting opportunity.
Is this also part of the reason why you split up with HubSpot earlier, wanted to partner with Upsales?
I think Upsales could do that. I think that they are not very picky about that. I don't think Upsales would want to do that, however. No, that was not one of the reasons for the spin-off. We have one more question online.
What is the pricing model look like and what portion of sales will partners get?
Again, we charge EUR 149 per user per month. We have not communicated the amount. We might do so in the future, but the rev share model is not communicated. We will experiment with different models. Having said that, when we look at the plan and when we look at the execution, we think that working with these affiliates, it's a much more cost-effective way of acquiring customers compared to a traditional way, as we have been doing for a long time at Upsales, with hiring sales team and building an organization. One more online.
Can you go more into about the competitive environment and how you see differentiation? Why spin this now? Why not integrate inside Upsales and push with a more competitive.
Yeah. Okay, the question is why are we spinning this off now, and then what's my view of the competitive environment? We have seen a lot of companies are trying to do similar things to build these sales agents. I believe Adam and my team has tried all of them. We think that we have built something truly special because of this access to the quality assured actual financial data, which no competitor has. When we put that inside of the app, together with all the knowledge and all the skill and all the know-how about how to use that, it becomes a lot better than the other alternatives. Why we decided to spin off, there were two reasons.
First one being that Upsales as an established, profitable company, we wanted to show the underlying profitability of that business without lowering it by funding an internal startup. We also believe that a company like Aira will be valued better on separate basis. Far, the market has told us we were right. We will see in the long term if that's the case, but that was the analysis. The second reason was that the market is happening now. To give Aira the focus it needs to build a separate go-to-market, a separate brand, a separate company, our analysis was that that was important. It also gives the organization a better focus. It's hard to do two completely different things inside of the same entity. That was the reasoning. That's the background to the decision. Yes.
Did you open up your product development? How are you looking at it at the moment, and what's in the pipeline?
Yeah, how are we doing product development and what's in the pipeline? Coming from the last two years inside of Upsales, I think we have been very progressive in terms of using AI for product development. If we compare to all the other SaaS companies we talk to, at least in the Nordics, we have come quite far, and we continue building on this in Aira. We're building truly an AI-native company from the ground up, which means a lot higher efficiency in everything, especially in product development. Looking ahead, we will continue to add more data sources, because we are seeing a lot of other kinds of data that's useful for entrepreneurs and sales reps. That's one thing. We are looking at adding an outreach feature.
When you have all this data, the AI can very correctly identify who should be your next potential client. The next step for us is to have the agent autonomously do the actual outreach. What we will be selling is basically you buy Aira, and Aira fills your calendar with booked meetings. That is kind of the end goal for that feature. Those are kind of the two main things we see short term in the pipeline. More questions?
How big is the company Aira is looking to work? How many people are they employing? Is there the entrepreneurial sales person? How big are they? Are they just a couple of person or thousands?
The clients?
Yeah, the clients, sorry.
How big are the clients? The target group is companies, smaller teams. We think that most absolute majority of the people who buy Aira will have the title founder. It would be entrepreneurs running small businesses. We also see an opportunity, people, individuals from professionals working in larger companies just buying Aira and expense it. The main target group is smaller companies, less than 10 employees.
How many people will you be in Aira in a year?
Hopefully not too many. How many people will we be in Aira? We're a team of 10 now, and again, we're really trying hard to maximize the use of AI in everything we do, in both in product development, in go-to-market. We want to build a big revenue base, but we don't want to build a big organization. We will try our hardest not to hire a lot of people, basically.
Give or take.
We don't know. There's no answer right now. The team right now, I don't see us hiring more people in the next six months, at least.
Are you using consultants for programming such a thing?
No. The product development is done inside from inside team. We have one contractor, but he's part of the team. He's working full time with Aira, I would say, but contractually he's a consultant.
You are a company.
Yeah.
Sometimes the data companies, they say they're 10 employees, and then they have consultants who's 20 in Sri Lanka or something.
No. It's 10 people. That's it. There are no other. Yeah, then it's going to be tens of thousands of affiliates and partners, but they are outside of the company. More questions?
The timetable for this, when the first time you will be officially listed?
Yeah. The timetable for the listing is, we have communicated inside of Q2. Before end of June is the plan. The board is currently looking at the listing options. We are at a late stage, but we're not allowed to say anything until it's 100%. Yeah.
Just wish to congratulate you for the choice of chairman. I like Ole very much.
Yeah. Ole is a smart guy. Yes.
Can you speak more about your companies we integrate and buy now separations. Conceptually, how do you value acquisitions?
Yeah. How do we see consolidation and will we integrate the companies? Absolutely. We will not try to become a holding company with a scattered portfolio of AI startups. That's not the idea at all. We're looking at finding interesting products that has proven themselves commercially. They don't have to be huge, but they have to have an existing customer base, and then integrate them into what we are doing with the product. That's the plan.
You said something about banks are interested in you. Can you talk a little bit more about that?
When we did the world tour, and now when we started launching the product, we see that professionals working in M&A, corporate finance, banks, seem to particularly appreciate what we've done with the financial data. It's too early to say that it's going to be a verticalization, that we're going to focus on those, we see an interesting opportunity there. I think in a way it's obvious that these are the kinds of people who are used to look at a lot of numbers and appreciate the value of using that data to find opportunities.
Okay.
Yeah. More questions? All right. That concludes the presentation. Thank you everyone for coming, and thank you everyone joining us online. The recording will be available on Aira's website if you want to see it again. Thank you.