We recently connected with Elias Torres and have shared our conversation below.
Elias, thanks for taking the time to share your stories with us today Can you talk to us about serving the underserved.
Elias Torres, founder of Novy AI, is pioneering a dual mission that encapsulates the essence of technological innovation and social empowerment. As a leading AI consulting firm, Novy AI aims to redefine the landscape of artificial intelligence application, ensuring that it plays a pivotal role in enhancing the operational efficiency and innovative capacity of its diverse clientele. This includes businesses, governments, and non-profit organizations, many of which operate in sectors crucial to the public welfare and economic development.
However, the impact of Novy AI extends beyond conventional business parameters. Guided by Elias’s personal journey as a Latino entrepreneur in the tech industry—a sector where Latinos have historically been underrepresented—Novy AI is also committed to serving as a beacon of representation and inspiration for the Latino community and other underserved groups. Through his leadership, Elias aims to demonstrate that Latinos can excel and lead in the high-tech sector, breaking stereotypes and fostering a more inclusive industry culture.
At the heart of Novy AI’s approach is the utilization of AI to address specific, tangible issues that resonate with the day-to-day experiences of underserved communities. For instance, one of Elias’s significant initiatives involves leveraging AI to revolutionize college advising systems, making them more accessible and effective for Latino students and other minority groups. This not only increases their chances of academic success but also sets a precedent for using technology to tackle educational disparities.
Moreover, Elias’s commitment to social impact is reflected in Novy AI’s operations, where the firm actively engages in projects that enhance transparency and data accessibility in educational institutions. This enables more informed decision-making that can lead to better educational policies and outcomes, particularly benefiting those in disadvantaged positions.
Through Novy AI, Elias Torres is not just building a company; he is crafting a legacy that merges innovation with inclusion. By positioning Novy AI as a leader in AI consulting that prioritizes both business excellence and social responsibility, he not only paves the way for future technological advancements but also ensures that these advancements are harnessed to uplift and empower the most vulnerable segments of society. Thus, Novy AI stands as a testament to the transformative power of combining entrepreneurial spirit with a commitment to community upliftment.
Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers.
Elias Torres is a prominent figure in the tech industry, known for his leadership skills, entrepreneurial spirit, and dedication to advancing AI and technology solutions. As the Founder and CEO of Novy.ai, Elias leverages his deep expertise and strategic partnerships, particularly with OpenAI, to deliver impactful, client-driven solutions rapidly. His approach sets Novy.ai apart in the crowded AI space by focusing on practical implementations that resonate with organizational needs and deliver substantial value.
Elias’s entrepreneurial journey is marked by significant achievements. He co-founded Drift in 2015, a pioneering SaaS platform that revolutionized how businesses interact with each other through conversational commerce. Under his leadership as CTO, Drift scaled impressively to over 600 employees and serviced over 50,000 customers globally, culminating in a sale to Vista Equity Partners in 2021 with a valuation exceeding $1 billion USD.
Before Drift, Elias had a robust track record of technological and executive roles. He was VP of Engineering at HubSpot after the acquisition of Performable, a software platform he founded and where he served as CTO. His tenure at HubSpot was instrumental in integrating and enhancing their inbound marketing solutions. His earlier career includes a significant role at Lookery, where he developed a cloud-based targeting infrastructure, and a foundational position at IBM as a senior software engineer.
Elias is also committed to supporting the Latinx community and nurturing the next generation of tech entrepreneurs. He actively contributes to this cause through his involvement on the board of the Bloom Institute of Technology (formerly Lambda School) and Escala, a LATAM-focused inbound marketing company. His educational background, with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from the University of South Florida and a master’s degree in computer science from Harvard University, underpins his technical and business acumen.
A member of the prestigious 2022 Class of Henry Crown Fellows at the Aspen Institute, Elias continues to embody leadership that combines business success with a deep commitment to societal impact, setting a powerful example for future leaders in the tech industry and beyond.
We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.
This story was published on Sequoia Capital’s blog:
https://medium.com/sequoia-capital/drift-a-tale-of-two-transformational-leaders-2441eb373255
Our first memories of David Cancel and Elias Torres go back more than a decade. We’d just gotten into business with HubSpot founders Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah, who were doubling down on the “MoFu” part of their product — which dealt with the Middle of the marketing Funnel. David and Elias’ company at the time, Performable, had the best MoFu functionality in the market. If HubSpot acquired Performable, it would get that functionality and a bunch of engineers, and Performable would get the benefit of HubSpot’s thriving customer community.
As it turned out, the acquisition was transformative for HubSpot in other ways, as well. David and Elias did indeed bring functionality and a bunch of engineers, but also a whole new breed of startup energy. They were smart, they moved fast, and they got great people to follow them. It didn’t take long for them to go beyond the MoFu product and into the rest of the HubSpot platform. Within a couple years, HubSpot’s engineering organization was operating at a new level, and its product had become the best in the market.
HubSpot was full of great people, and Brian and Dharmesh had a practice of bringing them into board meetings. But even with the high bar set by his peers, David Cancel’s forays into our gatherings were memorable. We so enjoyed his appearances that when we had some extra time before or after a meeting, we’d seek him out just to say hi. We’ve met quite a few founders over the years, and we can confirm that David is truly one of a kind. He is brilliant, thoughtful and brutally honest. He doesn’t pull punches, and his hyperkinetic mind can leave you breathless. He is an utterly fascinating coffee companion. We couldn’t help but gravitate toward him. After a few wonderful years at HubSpot, David decided to scratch the startup itch once more. The next time we made it out to Boston we paid him a visit — and that’s when we started getting to know Elias.
Elias, we learned, was the perfect complement to David. Few people can match David’s pace — but Elias can. And while David tends to live inside his mind, constantly working through novel ideas, Elias lives in the world around him, constantly meeting people and building relationships. Elias is also a fountain of eternal youth, both physically (he looks a full 20 years younger than he is) and in spirit (his energy is infectious; the only gear he seems to have is “drive”).
Together, they made for compelling co-founders: a visionary and a team-builder, both of whom were already “successful” by any objective measure, and yet felt like they had something to prove. That underdog mentality is characteristic of many legendary founders, and it is catnip for us at Sequoia. When we had a chance to get into business with David and Elias, we leapt at it — and thus we became their partners in building Drift.
The early days of Drift were magical. The product was beloved by customers, and the team was stocked with younger versions of the founders — brilliant, energetic people who thought from first principles and took nothing for granted. (Exhibit A: Dave Gerhardt’s content marketing was equal parts startup wisdom and reality TV show.)
Winning was contagious, and Drift had caught the bug. The metrics were beautiful. Drift started to hire some of the best leaders in Boston, such as star CFO Jim Kelliher and AI genius Jeff Orkin. David and Elias knew that this was unusual — companies aren’t supposed to work that well — and we all tried to figure out what we could be missing. What issues could sneak up on us and cause the music to stop?
Soon, we found our answer. Drift’s extraordinary product velocity — which created raving fans and followers in the early days — left chaos in its wake. The accumulated debt, both technical and cultural, came due. Suddenly the wins were harder to come by.
But this is when we really learned who we were in business with. David and Elias embraced the pain and tackled the new challenges head-on, refactoring the product into a cohesive platform with a logical flow, capable of enterprise scale; refactoring the culture into that of a mature enterprise business; and refactoring the team by bringing in next-level executives like Todd Barnett, whose impact was nothing short of game-changing. There are plenty of clichés we could use to describe this period for Drift, but none would do it justice. Suffice to say that David and Elias were the best of what founders aspire to be: resolute, indefatigable, in some ways even defiant. They were beyond determined to see Drift fight through its growing pains and come out stronger on the other side. Thanks at least in part to the sheer force of their will, Drift won that fight. Their winning streak was back on track.
Fast-forward a couple of years, and the company has become the new way businesses buy from businesses. Drift’s enterprise business has been the rising tide that’s lifted the whole organization. They are the fast lane for B2B commerce — and the more people who travel down that road, the more Drift’s AI team turns the content of those journeys into a compounding advantage for customers. Rarely have we seen an ROI as compelling as Drift is able to provide.
As was the case with Performable and HubSpot, David and Elias have been wildly successful with Drift; they have hundreds of exceptional employees and thousands of happy customers. And yet, once again, they feel like they have something to prove. Drift’s partnership with Vista is the next move on the chess board — not an end to the story, but a new chapter. Just as David and Elias made for compelling co-founders, Drift and Vista are compelling “co-founders” for this next stage — a company with the creativity, vision and passion of the startup world, and a firm with a tried and true playbook for bringing operational excellence to at-scale enterprise SaaS. And just as the Performable acquisition became a transformative moment for HubSpot, we believe the Vista partnership will prove to be a transformative moment for Drift.
So from all of us here at Sequoia to David, Elias and the entire team: thank you for allowing us to be part of your journey and congratulations on this exciting new milestone. We believe you are just getting started on what Drift will eventually become, and your best days are ahead.
We’d appreciate any insights you can share with us about selling a business.
Vista Equity to acquire majority stake in SaaS startup Drift, taking it to unicorn status
Private equity firm Vista Equity Partners announced today that it is taking a majority stake in Drift, a company which aims to be the Amazon of businesses, with a “growth investment” that propels the venture-backed startup to unicorn status.
Unfortunately, neither party would disclose the amount of the investment, or Drift’s new valuation. But co-founder and CEO David Cancel did say the SaaS company saw 70% growth in its annual recurring revenue (ARR) in 2020 compared to the year prior and is on target for a similar metric this year. It is not yet profitable, as it is focused on growth, he added.
Prior to this financing, Boston-based Drift had raised $107 million in funding from the likes of Sequoia Capital, CRV and General Catalyst since its 2015 inception.
So just what does the company do exactly? The startup says it is out to ”reimagine the B2B buying experience,” according to Cancel. By using its software, Drift’s 50,000 customers are able to bring together sales and marketing teams on one platform to “deliver personalized conversations” that the company says build trust and accelerate revenue.
Its customers include ServiceNow, Okta, Grubhub, Mindbody, Adobe, Ellie Mae and Snowflake, among others. Today 75% of Drift’s customers are mid-market enterprise, according to Cancel.
Over the past five years, Drift has worked to create and define something it describes as “Conversational Marketing” with the goal of helping marketers “harness the digital experience for lead generation.” Or to put it more simply, Drift subscribers can use chatbots to help turn web visits into sales.
The company says it is out to remove the friction between buyers and sellers so they can not only get more leads, but also close more sales. This led Drift to expand its focus to build a platform that includes conversational sales, which integrates chat, email, video and artificial intelligence to power conversations, not just on a customer’s website, but for the sales team too.
Cancel said that Vista’s strategic growth investment will help the company move even faster, expand globally and launch a new B2B category called “Conversation Commerce,” an interactive approach to conversations that Drift believes has the potential to “transform the entire B2B revenue function.”
Basically, the company is trying to make the B2B buying/selling experience similar to that of a B2C one. At least 80% of B2B buyers are not only looking for, but expect, a buying experience similar to that of a B2C customer, according to Cancel.
So far in 2021, Drift’s customers generated $5 billion in pipeline value by making the customer side of the buying process easier, he said.
For Cancel, a serial entrepreneur who previously founded and sold four other companies, the notion of owning a company with a unicorn valuation was not something he and co-founder and CTO Elias Torres were overly consumed with.
But what did appeal to the pair was the opportunity to add to the too-short list of U.S.-based unicorns with Latin founders and serve as an inspiration for other entrepreneurs of Latin descent. Cancel’s parents emigrated from Puerto Rico and Ecuador while Torres emigrated from Nicaragua in his teens.
“I didn’t really care about that [unicorn] status except for one reason and the reason was that we are both Latino and if we hit this milestone, then we would be part of the less than 1% of Latinos that had ever done that,” Cancel told TechCrunch. “And that was important to us because we believe that we have the responsibility to pay it forward and to help people and to inspire other people who are like us and are often marginalized. We want to show that they can do this too.”
Torres agreed, saying that he and Cancel were “proud to be one of the only Latino-founded companies to ever achieve over $1 billion valuation – a rare, Latino-founded unicorn.”
“We want to see more of us do the same and we will pave the way for other Latino founders and leaders to achieve success,” he added.
By having a majority owner in Vista, which focuses exclusively on backing enterprise software, data and technology-enabled businesses, Cancel believes that Drift can “get more efficient in some areas.” He also thinks that the firm can help it ramp up its acquisitions pace. (So far it has made three.)
The nearly 600-person company still has its sights on going public, according to Cancel, and believes that by working with Vista, it will have a “clearer path” to do so.
“It’s something we think about a lot,” he told TechCrunch. “It’s still in our future.”
Monti Saroya, co-head of the Flagship Fund and senior managing director at Vista, thinks that Drift represents a “compelling” opportunity for Vista.
“Drift is a company that is experiencing hypergrowth at scale, we and we believe the conversational marketing and sales tools it offers will continue to be in high demand as companies race to modernize their B2B commerce strategies,” he told TechCrunch.
Earlier this year, Vista — which has over $77 billion in assets under management — invested $242 million to acquire a minority stake in Vena, a Canadian company focused on the Corporate Performance Management (CPM) software space.
Meanwhile, Vista’s acquisition of Drift is expected to close in the fourth quarter of 2021.
Contact Info:
- Website: novy.ai
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- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/eliast/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/eliast