Category Visionaries Inna Tokarev Sela, CEO & Founder of illumex: $13 Million Raised to Power the Future of Enterprise LLM Deployments
illumex is pioneering the future of enterprise data access through their generative semantic fabric platform, which enables self-service data analytics for every employee within large organizations like banks, insurance companies, and pharma corporations. In a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Inna Sela shared how with $13 Million in funding, illumex is transforming how business users interact with enterprise data by providing a ChatGPT-like experience that's hallucination-free, governed, and fast.
Topics Discussed:
- The evolution of illumex's go-to-market strategy from targeting unicorn startups to enterprise customers
- Creating a new category called "generative semantic fabric"
- Building a complete platform offering versus selling individual features
- Content-driven marketing strategy focused on thought leadership
- The role of controversial opinions in driving market education
- Strategic importance of in-house marketing expertise
- Leveraging corporate venture capital for distribution channels
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
- Adapt to market conditions: When Inna saw the 2022 downturn affecting their initial target market of software unicorns, she pivoted to enterprise customers. This required starting with paid POCs and gradually working up to larger deals with major corporations.
- Category creation requires patience: Inna recognized from day one they were creating a new category. As she explained, "I was aware it's category creation... But for the sake of fundraising, I had to bring those parallels... so I was trying to bring these parallels to existing tools for investors to understand where we are."
- Build for enterprise scale: Inna shares, "For the offering that we provide to companies like the augmented data management and access, you really need to have small Swiss panel. So it's not enough to have just one fork or one component of the Swiss knife, you really have to have full offering which is minimal."
- Take controversial positions: Rather than making incremental improvements, Inna advocated for a completely different approach to data management. "I actually thought it's a benefit to have controversial opinions and to some extent differentiate product because this is how you make change," she explains.
- Blend investor expertise: "You really need to have a blend of investors with different appetite and different business acumen so it can serve you on hiring, on reach out on different aspects of investors value add," Inna advises about fundraising strategy.
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