Henrik Werdelin has spent the final 15 years serving to entrepreneurs construct huge manufacturers like Barkbox by his startup studio Prehype. Now, together with his new, New York-based enterprise Audos, he’s betting that AI will help him scale that course of from “tens” of startups a 12 months to “tons of of 1000’s” of aspiring enterprise house owners.
The timing definitely feels proper. Mass layoffs throughout quite a lot of industries have left many employees reconsidering their profession paths, whereas AI instruments have markedly lowered the barrier to constructing digital services. On the middle of that Venn diagram is Werdelin’s newest enterprise, with its promise to assist “on a regular basis entrepreneurs create million greenback AI corporations” with out requiring technical expertise.
Werdelin’s journey from Prehype to Audos displays the broader transformation occurring in entrepreneurship proper now. At Prehype, the main target was on working with tech founders to construct conventional startups, the sort that may elevate hundreds of thousands and goal for billion-dollar exits.
Now, he tells TechCrunch, “What we’re making an attempt to do is take all that information, all of the methodology that we’ve created over time of constructing all these huge corporations, and actually making an attempt to democratize it.”
The thought is that “on a regular basis entrepreneurs” might sense a shift is afoot however is probably not eager to experiment with so-called AI brokers or know the way to attain prospects. Audos is more than pleased to assist them, supplying these people with AI instruments to construct refined merchandise utilizing pure language, and making the most of social media algorithms to seek out them their area of interest prospects.
“Fb and numerous these platforms, they’re simply unimaginable algorithms, and so they’re unimaginable at determining [how to reach your customer] when you outline a buyer group,” says Werdelin, who co-founded Audos together with his Prehype accomplice Nicholas Thorne. In actual fact, Audos makes use of this method to shortly check whether or not a founder’s enterprise concept has sustainable buyer acquisition prices.
The method appears to be working. Audos has helped launch “low tons of” of companies since its beta launch, with its personal prospects discovering the platform by Instagram advertisements asking “Have you ever ever considered beginning one thing, however don’t know the place to go?” Amongst them, Werdelin says, are a automobile mechanic who needs to assist folks consider restore quotes, a person who’s promoting “after dying logistics” companies, digital golf swing coaches, and AI nutritionists. In a winking reference to billion-dollar companies, or so-called unicorns, he calls these one- and two-person groups “donkeycorns.”
All went by the identical course of: they clicked on Audos’s advert, its AI agent launched a dialog to determine the issues these people wish to sort out and who they wish to serve, and, when it was glad with the solutions, Audos acquired them in entrance of potential prospects as quick as doable.
As for returns, Audos operates on a basically completely different mannequin than conventional accelerators or enterprise capital. As a substitute of taking fairness, the corporate takes a 15% income share from the companies it helps launch. In return, founders rise up to $25,000 in funding, entry to these AI-powered enterprise growth instruments, and assist with distribution, primarily by paid social media promoting.
“We’re not taking any fairness of their enterprise,” Werdelin says, partly as a result of “we don’t assume these corporations may ever get offered. What we’re actually impressed by are the mom-and-pop outlets which might be the spine of our society.”
The income share continues indefinitely, just like platform charges charged by Apple’s App Retailer. For founders, meaning giving up a good portion of their income in perpetuity — a 15% lower that would value entrepreneurs tons of of 1000’s of {dollars} over time. Some will undoubtedly see that trade-off as worthwhile; others may query whether or not the long-term prices justify the advantages.
Audos’s worth proposition raises different questions given how shortly the panorama is altering. Whereas Werdelin emphasizes serving to founders construct relationships with prospects, it’s unclear how a lot of that work the AI brokers can truly deal with. There’s additionally the matter of differentiation. As Werdelin readily acknowledges, “the world is filled with these instruments” and so they’re getting higher quickly. What occurs when entrepreneurs can entry comparable AI capabilities with out paying a everlasting income tax?
Audos’s VCs don’t sound frightened about these eventualities. True Ventures led Audos’s $11.5 million seed spherical, with accomplice Tony Conrad explaining the enchantment in a Zoom name this week. Along with having confidence in Werdelin and Thorne, says Conrad, “I believe there are simply heaps and many folks” who may eagerly embrace the chance to work with a platform like Audos.
Conrad attracts parallels to Instagram’s $1 billion exit with simply 13 workers, suggesting that AI might allow much more leverage, even when Audos — which itself employs simply 5 folks altogether at present — isn’t chasing unicorns. As Werdelin explains it, “What we’re after right here is the hundreds of thousands of people that can create million-dollar companies or half-million greenback companies which might be actual and life altering.”
Provides Werdelin individually of why he spun up Audos, “What we’re making an attempt to do is to determine the way you make one million corporations that do one million {dollars} turnover. That’s a trillion greenback turnover enterprise.”
It doesn’t sound loopy. Extending the advantages of entrepreneurship to individuals who historically haven’t had entry to startup capital or technical expertise is an more and more compelling proposition as conventional employment begins to really feel much less and fewer steady. “We imagine that there needs to be someone who goes out and actually helps these smaller entrepreneurs which might be constructing one thing that isn’t enterprise backable,” says Werdelin. “We imagine that the world is healthier with extra entrepreneurship.”
Audos’s different buyers embrace Offline Enterprise and Bungalow Capital, together with quite a few high-profile angel buyers – Niklas Zennstrom and Mario Schlosser amongst them.
Pictured above, left to proper, Audos co-founders Nicholas Thorne and Henrik Werdelin.
