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If at first, you don’t succeed, try 125 times … to build the future of business

05.10.2022

After our founder Romesh Wadhwani finished his Ph.D. from Carnegie Mellon University, he looked for venture capital for his first company. One hundred twenty-four firms turned him down.

The 125th firm, Urban National Corp., said yes.

As Forbes India reporter Naandika Tripathi wrote, this tenacity and hard work are familiar characteristics for Dr. Wadhwani. After selling his first company early in his career, he did the math on how many hours he worked versus the money made. Dr. Wadhwani calculated he made close to the minimum wage on a per-hour basis.

But he got more out of it than the money. He has said that running the company—American Robot—taught him possibly more than any other venture throughout his multi-decade entrepreneurial career. Figuring out the processes and solutions for solving the problems he faced gave him the tools he needed for turning the next 40 companies into successes, with each impressing customers more than the last.

This brings us to SymphonyAI—the accumulation of lessons across multiple industries refined into applying AI to solve business problems at enterprise scale.

At SymphonyAI, we don’t start with a product. We start with your specific business challenges. We dig into your systems of record and apply AI analysis to reveal patterns and insights to help you improve processes. Our software can take on many workflows in diverse industries, which at first seem to be too different and too nuanced, but because we have spent so much time in the industries we serve, we’ve done the hard work to tune our AI for your data and your challenges to make it work.

Only what you need, when and how you need it

The unstoppable drive Dr. Wadhwani exhibits is well integrated into the SymphonyAI DNA. Digging into an issue to come up with a useful software application that delivers real value is what drives us. Another recent example is in Peter Verstraeten’s column in The Engineer this past week.

In the article, Peter talks about the brilliant engineers and leaders at agricultural equipment manufacturer AGCO. They demand employees have superior tools to ensure AGCO products are exceptionally high-quality. Carrying around paperwork, walking back and forth between stations, and sifting through documentation is slow and inefficient. In 2022, there’s a better way. 

Peter’s Proceedix connected workers solution takes the immense volumes of information manufacturing employees need, digests it down to the essentials, and delivers it only when needed. It meets the incredibly high standards of AGCO. And Proceedix has helped AGCO decrease process time by 25%, significantly reduce quality issues and errors, and improve customer satisfaction. 

Proceedix started as a product to provide real-time information to cardiac surgeons during surgery. Cardiac surgeons are a demanding group. Peter heard ‘no’ a lot from his customers. Still, Peter and his team tested the ability of software to take immense volumes of nuanced data and deliver it to surgeons in the operating room. Before allowing Proceedix in such a delicate and high-risk setting, those surgeons rejected every piece of information that distracted rather than aided them. They did the same for any information the system offered too soon, or too late.

The work was grueling and humbling. But the team embraced the challenge and turned Proceedix into a solution that today supports many workers, including those at AGCO, who use it to deliver excellence in their work.

It’s a story that repeats across SymphonyAI. Every time you engage a member of our team, you know they are relentless and proven problem-solvers. It’s how they got here. We build our products on dedicated domain expertise created by endlessly addressing challenges and undertaking the hard work of turning those “no’s” into “yes’s.”