 Hello, everyone. I'm really excited to be doing this, auntie. Personally, for me, venture capital, my favorite part of venture capital, is working with extraordinary entrepreneurs and getting to learn their story. Auntie is no exception, and at Benchmark, we get the opportunity to work really close to it, auntie, and really, I think the best place to start is maybe just telling people what RoboCorp aids. We heard a little bit before just now, but maybe from your own words what RoboCorp is. Okay, so at RoboCorp, we do something called RPA. That's really not a household tech name. So it stands for Robotic Process Automation. It's not real robots. It's actual software bots, and the point of that is to automate hundreds of different, not thousands of different types of routine work that people do across enterprise companies. So think about entering orders into an ERP system or working on a healthcare system. So anything where you connect multiple different information systems together, like humans you do by hand, we can build digital workers that then go and automate that work for people. So it's a very broad industry, in a way, has been emerging in the past five or six years here. Yeah, I mean before being in venture capital, I'd never heard of RPA before, and every time I dive into it, the use cases are just endless. Maybe it's helpful just to give context of how you even ended up in the RPA world, like what's your story there? Because for me, I wouldn't have been something I'd known about unless I'd studied that deeply. Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's a long story. I'll tell you that. So my background is in software. I've been a software engineer. It's already mentioned here. I started off with a project called Roboframework. That was a QA test automation framework. So while I was doing software, the company that I was running with some partners, we did consulting work, we ended up using Roboframework quite a bit for the QA parts of the projects and you know, that was an open-source community that was growing up. It was a lot of the core people were in Helsinki. So I got to know them, got to be part of the community, but still global things. So we had, you know, companies like Salesforce implementing their QA with Roboframework. Now, it's just a cool thing to be part of. I think like an open-source community being part of it, you know, hosting events, you know, thinking about how we can grow the community. And so, you know, QA test automation and RPA happened to be similar on the sort of the fundamental level. So both things, I use applications. One uses to validate it, one uses to drive a business process. So on the sort of foundation level, the actions that the bus take are the same. So, you know, it was one of these things. I was at an alumni event at my university and so one guy on stage talking about RPA. I was like, what's that? I was like, huh, so that seems interesting. Like, you do that? What's the outcome? It's like, I actually just clicked in the head. Like, I mean, that's something that we already do here. So, I mean, that would be interesting to learn more about. And so RPA at that point was sort of painted at this magic AI thing. And that would sort of watch your work on your desktop and then automate it away. It's like, I think that's kind of BS. I think if I would go deeper into that, I'd actually find something that's more close to test automation. So I started exploring, started basically cold calling people to come to the office and learn more about RPA. And this back in 2016, 17 time frame. And so when I actually drilled deeper into how it was used, what kind of use cases were being deployed, I found out it's not actually magic AI box. It's actually the same thing we were already doing. So coming from an open source background, I thought that, OK, these are these monolithic, massive enterprise tools, clunky and brittle and all that. Could we do that better through an open source foundation? And sort of started on journey, getting the community first excited about RPA. And really, I just sort of had this moment in time where I was maybe driving into office or whatever as I realized that if I don't bring this open source tech into RPA, maybe nobody will do that. So I kind of felt compelled in a way. And then started working towards that and tried it out and seems to work. But it kind of had a bunch of things missing. So I figured that we need to start a company to kind of make it complete. Yeah, I mean, you have a unique story in that this happens. And I know the story more intimately because we've talked offline. But when you get this idea and you're like, OK, RoboCorp is going to be a thing. I'm going to start it. What happens next? Because there's the one path of, OK, I'm going to build this in Helsinki. I'm going to start this all and then maybe raise money. What do you do? Because it is different than maybe the conventional wisdom. Yeah, I mean, so when I kind of understood that we need to build a company around it, our competitors, UI path, automation anywhere, Blue Prism, they trace half a billion each or so. So it's like, OK, we're not going to be able to bootstrap this thing most likely, we need some capital. And then putting one to one, one to one together, as I realized that, gee, I mean, I think we need to learn about venture and kind of figure out how we could attract some investments. So when we launched the company, the first moment that I got the chance to do that was January 2nd, 2019, when I had my previous company being acquired and I was kind of through my earn out. We incorporated that. We actually incorporated it in the US from Finland. I was scheming to do that in 2018 and then finally got the team together and then got to incorporate the company and then, you know, basically started building a prototype of all the things that we need to put together to make it sort of an enterprise scale and just booked a flight to San Francisco and started meeting people. You land in San Francisco and you literally didn't know anyone. Is that right? Yeah. What happens next? Do you start going to like meetups or how do you end up meeting investors? I mean, yeah, I mean, they don't really take cold emails from unknown people. So that's sometimes worse. But I mean, I just tried to figure out how to meet with some some investors and happened to bump into, you know, a VC partner at an event. It was the first week there and got invited to the office and did the worst pitch ever. And lucky for me, they were so kind to introduce me to other VCs in the network. So it's kind of spread out from there. And I took meetings like four or five meetings a day for a few months. And, you know, I think I had a spreadsheet of all the all the VCs that I met. And I think I spoke with probably like 50 different firms. Wow. And, you know, Benchmark was fortunate enough to lead that seed round. When did you eventually meet Peter? Like, how did that eventually happen? Yeah, I mean, I already have a few terms. She's at that point, it was, you know, late in the in the in the fundraising. So I attracted some initial supporters who helped me out sort of, you know, you know, basically said that, hey, I'm in for a million if you get a lead. I was like, what does that mean? And they started helping me out, get introduced to new people and eventually got a term sheet and a second term sheet. I was ready to sign when Peter Fenton reached out and they most likely had been searching for an open source play in RPA because RPA at that point was the fastest growing segment in enterprise software three years in a row. So there needs to be a better way to do that than the sort of the first generation of companies were doing it. So I think it was through an exercise of, you know, this category might be, you know, good for open source. They'd be searching for it, heard about it from somebody else, reached out and I was already ready to commit to a term sheet at that point. So we just ended up doing a six a.m. phone call. He was in Paris, I was in London. We spoke two hours on the phone on a Zoom meeting. Then spoke with the two other partners the same evening, Eric and Chaitan on another call. And then did the investment come in on Monday and they sent the term sheet on Tuesday. Yeah, I mean, we're incredibly fortunate to be a part of this journey. And, you know, you've mentioned it a few times around open source being sort of the real opportunity here. How do you look at the Gen 1 companies in RPA like the UI pass and why is open source so critical to that? Well, I mean, in a way, you know, when you build on top of an open source foundation, you get to leverage a lot of innovation from the community. So you get to combine and match together this, you know, everything coming from, you know, the Python ecosystem, for instance. So so you kind of leverage a lot of existing foundation in there. And to me, as a sort of an, you know, engineer myself, I think open source is the sort of the fundamental right way to do software. But at the end of the day, if it doesn't amount for a better product, the customers won't really get a share. There's some, you know, customers like some financial institutions that want to leverage open source more. But I think it's sort of being able to be open for innovation through the through the network that makes open source such a such a good platform to build on. And then obviously, we are an open core company. So so we have the foundation on an open source. But then we lay on top of that, a fast solution that makes those bots that we build able to operate in an enterprise environment, deploy them, govern, monitor, maintain. So it's kind of a figuring out the right open source commercial model as well. But, you know, things like GitHub co-pilot, for instance, when you build on open source, you actually have co-pilot that knows how to write our code instead of being a sort of proprietary black box of your path or something like that. You really don't have those benefits. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And just another interesting piece within this journey is you raise that seed round and from my understanding or from what I remember, that's early 2020 or right around 2019. OK, OK, like end of 2019, a couple of months later, covid hits and takes over as you're scaling out the company. You have to make this really important decision. I think at the time you might have still been in San Francisco or at least coming back and forth. Do you end up saying, hey, we're going to build a company in Helsinki. We're going to go all the way and move the company to San Francisco or do you decide to get remote at that time? What's the next step? Yeah, I mean, the first instance was instinct was, first of all, make sure that we have capital to operate. So the stock was in freefall and we just start the OG. We might actually need to extend this thing if you go into a brutal recession, which didn't happen. But at the time, nobody knew. So this is sort of the wisdom of the day. Just react super fast, raise additional capital, make sure that you can operate for two years or so. And then when the sort of dust settle, everyone is in lockdown. We were already remote on the baseline, so it wasn't too big of a difference for us. And so I just figured out that this might be six months, a year, two years for a company that's like a year old. That's eternity. So we just decided that we're going to operate as this would be forever for us. And so we set out the company as a fully distributed operation instead of fully remote central location. And then you have remote location. We wanted to be distributed. The headquarters, officially in San Francisco, we have an office here in Helsinki. But we hire people across right now, nine different countries, and just build the culture from the beginning around that. And it's been working out. Obviously, you need in-person interactions. And now that you're able to travel, it's much better for everyone. But I mean, it's hard to kind of go back and, well, not even go back. Go to something that you never had, which is an office culture. So for us, it works. And it was like one decision to transition that way. It's interesting that you say San Francisco is a headquarters when you're based in Helsinki, correct? Yeah. How many people are in San Francisco, let's say? San Francisco proper, we have one person. And you call that the headquarters? Yeah, yeah, the CMO is over there. He picks up the mail, I think, from the office. But it does say headquarters. That's where the main address is. But the small office there, a slightly bigger office here. But I stayed in Helsinki when everything started going to lockdown. And so when things opened up, it didn't make sense to all of a sudden move around and things were working. It took many years. But when we grew as a company, launched the product, started building up sales code market team in the US engineering product in Europe, we already landed our first enterprise customers in the US. And when we came out of COVID, I had a functioning executive team in place where I wasn't all of a sudden needed every day in the middle of the night on a call. So it was we kind of, sure, if I would have done that without COVID, that maybe would have worked out different. I would have moved somewhere, maybe East Coast or wherever. But that the forcing function of COVID made it so that we had to build the company that way. And then all of a sudden, it works that I can stay here. Yeah, it's got to be interesting for you because you really do have to work across all these different time zones. You have people in the US, and I think you said nine different countries. Yeah, nine different countries. So I'm always impressed that you're even able to balance all that. Are there any major lessons so far from that, of operating fully remote? Or is there anything that you think you would change based off of how it's been so far for you? I think the main lesson is that, obviously, when I get people together, despite working fully remote, sometimes come together, that's pretty obvious everyone understands that if you're on the board, somebody new, you really need to put in the work. If you bring in a new VP to your team, you want to make sure that you're joined from the hip for a few months, and that's just really putting the hours to make sure you're meeting person before that and all of that. And then customers, obviously, customer acquisition wise, it's much better to go just in person there, meet them up. It's actually funny when we came out of COVID lockdown and we were finally able to go and meet with some of these customers. And we walk in and say, gee, this is a huge place. Like a Fortune 200 category company has like what we actually sold to these. And we were successful in implementing it. So you kind of didn't even realize that you were kind of punching about weight a bit when we were doing that from your home office. Yeah, and you just touched on something interesting as well, which is just around that go-to-market motion. There's a lot of different ways to build an open source company. What have you found or success in from a go-to-market motion? Yeah, I mean, I think the typical assumption in open source is that you build a project, you get as many GitHub stars as you can, and then boom, something happens. In our space, it's a bit different. It's B2B SaaS enterprise. So it doesn't have the sort of a viral bottom-up motion in a way which would be kind of expected in many ways. So there, you kind of get the benefit of having a sort of thing that everyone can try and sample out, but you still have to close it top down. So these decisions are made by developers themselves. For sure, something that a developer can pick up and use immediately and integrate into a product that's great. With us, they can train themselves, get successful, but we have to close the deal top down or we have to use some of our partners to do that. So in a sense, it sort of feels like more traditional enterprise sale than a sort of an open source, maybe a PLG type of motion, but at the end of the day, you really need to just find the right kind of motion to your customers and the product without trying to go into a pigeonhole of I'm an open source company, I need to do this or that. So it was a lot of experimentation. We thought it might work bottom up, but ended up realizing pretty fast that you just need to go top down in order to close the deal. Yeah, I mean, you are obviously going up against the Gen 1 giants and they're all massive. They have major customers, and in a lot of cases you're going head to head or you might even be convincing them to leave one of those other platforms to cut a roadblock warp. For you, it feels like so much of your journey is actually just around ambition and trying to take down these people. When you actually, in those early days, you didn't know anyone in venture capital, you didn't know anyone really in the startup scene, what do you think drove that? From your side, being in Helsinki and looking around and you and I have talked a little bit about you weren't even that involved in the startup scene at the time. And so what convinced you that, oh, I'm going to take on the giants in the space? Yeah, I mean, that's a good question, first of all. I wish I needed the answer in a way. So it's a weird thing because at the same time I saw something happening in the industry, a trend emerging, and I had some exposure to that. I had some tech leverage and I just thought that if I'm not going to do this, it's not going to happen. It's all in front of me in a way that just felt so compelled to do it. And so I kind of didn't see any option. Like, there wasn't an option not to do it. And then, like, why go to Silicon Valley from Helsinki? Why go head to head against the big ones? Like, I don't know if there's anything like, but would you waste your time doing something where you want to start off with being a niche regional player or whatever, it's like, for me, it didn't make sense if you want to do something, why not do it on the highest level possible? And obviously, if you want to become the open source standard in RPA, you don't do that by just sitting in a comfort zone in a way. So it's like, I actually never asked that question for myself, but it's sort of obvious in many ways. You've put together, obviously, an incredible group of investors around you and you've, I think, now raised over $30 million and you're in a really incredible spot as a company. You chose to work with Silicon Valley investors. How is that impacted in some ways from your side? Or how do you think that's helped shape the company from that side? Yeah, I think it's shaped the company in many ways. I think when you start out journey like this, you're pretty clueless. You don't know anything about anything. And working with a Silicon Valley VC obviously sets your expectations on the right level, so you're not aiming for a small win. You're obviously aiming for something huge and that was something that I wanted to do. So I kind of found a partner that is on the same sort of level with my ambition there. And then, you know, when you start out as a here Finnish founder, you don't, you know, we are typically like very good at tech and execution and all of that, but aspects like marketing, how do you sell to an enterprise? How do you manage the sales cycles and all that? Like there's not that much knowledge around that here. So obviously then my investors have been able to bring in some of those learnings that have been sort of proven time and time again in the industry and you sort of learn a lot of things that you didn't even know that you were missing. Yeah, I mean, I imagine from your side, it's been just like really, I mean, you're constantly learning and growing from the good of market motion to hiring to all of those things. It feels like the past three years have just been a constant sprint. What can we look forward to from RoboCorp in over the next three years? Right? We've obviously the first early innings of it all. And I know your ambitions is to work on this, not just for three years. It's ideally decades. How do you think about the future of RoboCorp? Yeah, I mean, it's interesting to look at the sort of the path from an idea to a first team to, you know, first product launching, then figuring out go to market raising, funding, all that sort of the focus as a founder throughout this stage shifts. And now it's very much on customers, product, you know, investors, obviously. And, you know, where we want to be in the next three years is obviously right now we have sort of cracked the nut on the go to market motions that we have placed in place. So it's partly driven by direct sales, but mostly around partner ecosystem that we build around RoboCorp. So right now it's really doubling down on the partner ecosystem, make sure that we have the right assets and systems in place that allow them to get successful with our product and take it as many customers as possible. So next year is going to be about, you know, scaling sales. We have pre-ambitious targets there and getting the partner network in the right place. And then, you know, after that, it's going to be series B and hopefully then we can scale the organization a bit. It's right now just 50 people, 52 or so. So it's fairly compact and we want to stay that way until we kind of, like, hit an inflection point where we know that, OK, now we can pull more capital and to fire, you know, just grow the fire. And so in three years, like, geez, it's, I know what's happening next quarter, maybe. So, you know, you have this, like, one year plan and a half year plan and a quarter plan, but three year plan. I don't know if that exists. Yeah, I mean, I imagine if I asked you that back in 2019, you would have. I think you'd be really proud of where you are today. And I think so much of your journey is just around this ambition and grit when, you know, you didn't know what you didn't know. And you just embraced that and you surrounded yourself by some incredible people. And you've built an amazing team and an amazing company to date. And really, I just want to thank you again. Like, it's been just amazing from our side, from Benchmark to work with you, but also to just hear more of your story. Yeah, it's been an amazing journey, obviously. And somebody actually said to me a few weeks back that, you know, when you, when you start off, you might think that, you know, any capitalist capitalist just needs some money and you might, you know, a hire is a hire. You just need people. But, but if you get the best people, the best investors, the, the angle of growth just like changes. And then a few years later, you're sort of on different planes from the ones who compromised in the early on. So we were lucky enough not to compromise in the early on. It's like part of it's just luck, I guess, to meeting up with right people. You might say it's luck, but I think a lot of it has just been hustle and grit. And really, it's just amazing, an amazing story. And I think we are still in the first settings of it. So I look forward to looking back in, you know, 10 years and even just rewatching this and seeing how far the journeys come. So thank you again. Awesome. Thank you.