She Built & Sold an AI Startup in Under 2 Years for $34M

So Jess, why does Factor exist?

So this normally puts people to sleep, so I'll give you kind of the fun version.

Do it.

Okay, so I want you to imagine that you are a big energy utility.

So in New Zealand it would be like Genesis or Mercury, but our customers are overseas.

But the equivalent sort of companies exist in other markets.

And when they get the opportunity to size a really big energy contract, so I like the example of McDonald's in the UK, four and a half thousand McDonald's in the UK, so lots of properties.

The process of figuring out how to cost the energy or price the energy for those four and a half thousand McDonald's is actually like an enormous task, right? And that task is getting bigger and harder because now those McDonald's can all look really different.

So...

Before, they might have sort of had different patterns of usage.

Like, you know, some might do more of a breakfast trade, some might do more of a dinner trade.

But now you've got the scenario where a bunch of them might be standalone and they've also got electric vehicle chargers on site.

And some of them might be part of gas stations and they've got some solar and some of them are in malls and some of them.

So they're looking more and more different, like almost by the day.

And this is happening for businesses all over the world.

They're investing in these different types of energy resources, we call them.

So that process of pricing that contract is now just immeasurably more difficult than it used to be.

And there is no tooling for that.

So they're using spreadsheets, they're using data queries, they're using endless data kind of munging.

It takes huge amounts of time, it's very difficult to get to a place where you are delivering a really commercially sound contract that's also really good for the customer because there are lots of levers you can actually pull to deliver a better commercial outcome as a business but actually also deliver a really great outcome for the customer.

and so we knew that gap existed um and you know when we were pitching for funding we got lots of like surely that's solved surely that's solved and it is really not solved and so there was just this beautiful clear space and we're like let's go after it um universal problem getting bigger harder yeah

pain point