Business model: reputation then services

Andrew D’Souza is the Founder of Boardy, the Creandum backed AI super connector reshaping how founders and investors meet and build trust.

Before Boardy, Andrew co-founded Clearco, one of the first revenue based financing companies. Clearco deployed over $5bn to thousands of businesses, scaled to six hundred employees, and passed one hundred million dollars in revenue. Andrew is one of the few founders who has built a nine figure company before starting again.

Clearco’s early AI work and Andrew’s interest in generative AI since 2020 sparked the idea for Boardy.

Boardy is a voice based AI that speaks to founders and investors, remembers context instantly, and makes high quality introductions at scale. What started as a side experiment is now one of the fastest growing AI products in fundraising.

We also cover Boardy’s newest chapter. After helping founders secure meetings, term sheets and oversubscribed rounds through his recent campaign, Boardy has launched Boardy Ventures, the world’s first AI led venture fund, allowing him to back the founders he already supports.

We explore the journey from bedroom prototype to top tier backing from Creandum, and how Boardy is building powerful emergent network effects.

In this episode we get into:
 🧠 The Clearco story and lessons from hypergrowth
 🤖 Early GPT-3 experiments and the Clear Angel project
 📞 Why voice matters and why intelligence beats latency
 🎯 How Boardy creates uncannily strong introductions
 📈 Network effects and solving the cold start problem
 💸 How founders are already closing rounds through Boardy
 🧪 The superpowered version now helping founders and VC firms
 🧩 The long-term vision from venture partner to AI holding company
 🎨 Creativity, identity and why great companies reflect their founders

A sharp and thought provoking conversation on AI, networks and entrepreneurial energy.

Listen on: Apple Podcasts   Spotify