9.12.24: MIT STEX Demo Day - Heron AI

DAPHNE PARISER: Hey, everybody. Looking forward to chatting with you guys all today, and thank you so much for having me.

So I'm Daphne. I'm the CEO of HeronAI. And I really believe that companies like yours with all of these resources affect change on a global scale really every single day. But are the resources that you guys have being utilized as effectively as they possibly could?

Well, what if I were to tell you that in the next decade, over 75% of accounting professionals plan to retire? And I'm sure many of us probably rely on accountants. Anybody here for strategic growth reporting, end of month? Yeah, me too.

And so really what is going to happen is because there are so many people who are planning to retire, this is going to leave a very large gap in business analytics, and let me give you a quick example. Steve is a VP at a Fortune 100 company with over 200 staff underneath him, and he handles about $500 million in business every single year. But Steve still relies on legacy software and also Excel.

And Steve has a bunch of people that he has dedicated to keeping the financials on track. But even still, he finds that it can take anywhere from two months to four months to prepare the reports that he needs for some important meetings. And this all culminates where his team gives him a five-inch-thick binder with 150 different tabs and a one-day meeting where the CEO flies down over a hundred different senior executives, sit down together, and go line by line through this to make decisions that take months to implement. Does this sound familiar to anybody?

I know that when I started my first company, it was really all too familiar for me. I was generating literally gigabytes of data every single day to evaluate the health of my business, things that were more or less pretty simple, like cash-flow statements, P&L, all those things, but then things that were more complicated like board reports, scenario analysis, and things like this, and it took too much time. I honestly felt a little bit overwhelmed by the amount of data that we were collecting, and I actually have a PhD in this stuff. And even after we did all this, it still took a lot of time to actually implement these decisions.

So I did what any sane person would do, and I spent months building my own system. And yes, it is OK to laugh at me. And with this new system, not only could we actually provide a client portal so our own clients could come in and look at their data and strategic plans that we had built for them but now we could actually use the data that we had to spotlight, were there any areas for improvements? Could we utilize our resources any better in terms of potentially maybe we could reduce dependencies or diversify our income streams? And we could actually do this now in terms of minutes rather than months.

Today, we call this HeronAI, and we use advanced machine-learning algorithms to dive deep into your data, and our copilot is one of the most intuitive real-time analytic tools that is currently available on the market, and this gives intuitive and powerful analytics that provide instant understanding of your data.

So Steve switched over to our copilot. He was able to connect a bunch of his different applications that he uses, as well as any of his Excel sheets that his team was using, and he was able to get instant insights. And this was relevant in terms of revenue, inventory, accounts receivable, better estimates of his burn, and was able to do this in literal seconds versus months.

So we know right now that 81% of corporations still use legacy software and Excel in some sort of capacity. And if you're like me or if you're like Steve and you want this to be done instantly rather than in a few months, especially for the critical information that you guys need to make these data-driven decisions, then feel free to use my email. Send me an email, and I'm happy to kind of talk through this with you guys so you can optimize every opportunity for growth and value creation. Thanks, everybody.

SPEAKER: Daphne, thank you so much. And again, please post your questions in the Q&A tab, and indicate the startup that it's for.

So two key important things, security and confidentiality. How do you handle that? A little more if you could expand on that.

DAPHNE PARISER: Yeah, super important, so especially because we focus on financial analytics. We're actually in the middle of SOC 2 Type 2 certification right now. So we are about to have our certification probably by December of this year, and already we are about 90% compliant with SOC 2 currently.

SPEAKER: Great. Thank you. And how customizable is HeronAI for specific industries?

DAPHNE PARISER: Yeah, it's a really good question. So actually, the way that we have built HeronAI, we actually do a lot of fine tuning based on company-specific data. So although right now we're pretty specific for companies that have a reliance on accounting firms, but actually because of the way that the infrastructure is built, based on the data that you have provided for us, our system will be able to learn from that data and be specific to the insights that you're looking for. So, for example, if this was manufacturing or something along those lines, based on the data that we're provided, we could be very specific for manufacturing or for accounting.

SPEAKER: And just quickly, how is it similar or different from the Microsoft Copilot? You must get that all the time.

DAPHNE PARISER: I love that question. So it's a great question. And if anybody hasn't read, Microsoft recently put out a document maybe a month ago at this point of the Microsoft LLM and how it actually goes through and analyzes data in its spreadsheet. And one of the super exciting things is that we have actually compared our pilot to their pilot, and we're actually faster and more accurate. We're about 16% more accurate currently than the Microsoft Copilot. So absolutely makes a lot of sense to come and hang out with us before thinking about Microsoft.

SPEAKER: OK, thank you.

DAPHNE PARISER: Thanks, guys.