From Pivot to Fortune 10 Customers, Lessons in Founder-Led Sales | Adit Abraham, Co-founder and CEO of Reducto

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Adit Abraham is the Co-founder and CEO of Reducto. Reducto’s product takes PDFs and physical documents, and extracts all the data, just like a human would if they were reading it.

At the time of recording, they’ve processed over 1 billion pages, grew 6x over the past five months, and are fresh off a $75 million Series B led by a16z. And Adit told me they’ve only burned $1 million of capital so far to get here.

And the craziest part, Adit told me they’ve only burned $1 million of capital so far to get here.

Anyone building an AI product probably sees Reducto as essential infrastructure. Our conversation gets into how they built the best product in the space, landing a Fortune 10 customer as a two-person startup, getting to $1 million in ARR within a few months, lessons doing founder led sales to over $5 million in ARR, and what the future of PDF’s, and human / computer data looks like.

Thank you to Liz Wessel at First Round, Chetan Puttagunta at Benchmark, and Adel Wu at Reducto for helping brainstorm topics for Adit.

Thank you to Numeral and Hanover Park for sponsoring this episode.

Numeral: The end-to-end platform for sales tax and compliance. Try it here: https://bit.ly/NumeralThePeel

Hanover Park: Modern, AI-native fund admin at https://www.hanoverpark.com/Turner

Timestamps:

(3:35) Reading unstructured human data

(10:44) Growing 5x in four moths

(12:38) Insurance, healthcare, legal, logistics

(19:13) Where LLM’s still struggle

(28:23) Starting Reducto from a blog post during YC

(32:01) Landing a Fortune 10 customer with two people

(35:48) Limiting the product and growth early on

(40:57) Getting an MIT professor fired

(43:50) How to avoid pivot hell

(49:00) $108M from First Round, Benchmark, a16z

(51:48) Chetan convincing them to raise a Series A

(55:50) Raising a Series B in 48 hours

(59:36) Redeye flight to hire the 1st AI researcher

(1:05:42) Lessons hitting $5m ARR with founder-led sales

(1:13:09) Staying on top of changes in AI models

Referenced:

https://reducto.ai

https://reducto.ai/careers

Follow Adit

Twitter: https://x.com/aditabrm

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham

Follow Turner

Twitter: https://twitter.com/TurnerNovak

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/turnernovak

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