JIFFY.ai: Crossing the divide between humans & machines. Responsibly.
Reaction Catalyst - Babu Sivadasan of JIFFY.ai
Reaction Catalyst is an event series that connects the worlds best innovators, promoting solutions with global potential, with a global community of leaders, offering the influence to realize it.
JIFFY.ai is a platform for enterprise automation and innovation acceleration.
The company is pioneering a vision for “sustainable automation” and has reached an inflection point to scale its solution.
Annabelle Williams, Reaction Founding Partner and Head of Communications, spoke with Babu Sivadasan, Co-Founder, CEO and Chairman of JIFFY.ai.
Babu is a proven entrepreneur with an amazing story. Prior to JIFFY.ai he co-founded and IPO’d an e-commerce platform Stamps.com ($3.5B market cap) and a fintech Envestnet ($3.8B market cap).
In parallel to value creation Babu had also helped to create thousands of jobs in his hometown of Kerala, India.
What was your takeaway from life as an entrepreneur?
You don’t need to start a company to be an entrepreneur. There is an entrepreneur in every one of us. An entrepreneur is simply someone who sees a problem and gets so frustrated that they do something about it. This happens to everyone!
Sometimes in life you find a problem that is so large and meaningful to you – that you are moved to leave your comforts behind to pursue solving it. That was what happened to me. The initial problem I saw was needing to create technology jobs in my hometown of Kerala, India. I was one of the people who needed one! That brought me to the US where I discovered the postal service was losing $6B a year from people illegally copying stamps. Solving that problem with technology not only led to Stamps.com, but also created jobs in Kerala.
Sometimes you find a problem so large and meaningful – you are moved to leave your comforts behind to pursue solving it.
What inspired you to create Jiffy.ai?
JIFFY.ai was my lifelong passion to enable machines to really work for humans. Technology had caught up to the point where we could cross the divide between humans and machines. We are finally able to bring machines to a level where they can natively process things that historically have only been natural for humans.
JIFFY.ai was my lifelong passion to enable machines to really work for humans.
Will pursuing automation take you from creating jobs to eliminating them?
We believe in balancing “innovation with compassion”.
On the innovation side - AI is a very powerful and disruptive technology that will transform humanity. But it also comes at a cost. It has the potential to be disruptive in large quantities.
On the compassion side - we need to embrace the positive change AI can drive but do something about the disruption that it causes. Entrepreneurs working on AI need to take responsibility to drive this change in a responsible manner.
To do that at JIFFY.ai - we created a corporate structure that balances the two. We are ruthless about innovation on one end and equally compassionate about the disruption it creates on the other. Our largest shareholder is a non-profit that was funded from founder equity so that we would not dilute our shareholders. This allows JIFFY.ai to create company value by embracing innovation and use that as a currency to invest in the people who are disrupted by re-skilling and re-deploying them.
Doing this will allow us to be proud of what we’ve done after 20 years. Because this was the right thing to do. We are creating fairness in the system.
We believe in balancing “innovation with compassion”
You are at an inflection point and raising your Series B – why is now the right time to invest in this strategy?
If you look at the fastest growing trends in enterprise technology there are two:
The first is intelligent automation / robotic process automation.
The second is low code / no code ways of developing and deploying technologies.
We are a unique combination of the two. We believe meaningful transformation can happen when you are able to automate what you do today and transform your process tomorrow. It is a great time to double down. The blueprint for the enterprise of the future will be created over the next 3 to 5 years. That’s an opportunity that only comes along every 20 years. Like the opportunity Salesforce had 20 years ago to move desktop-based software to cloud based software, a new wave of apps will come that are autonomous and will power the future enterprise – we hope to be powering many of those apps in the future.
The blueprint for the enterprise of the future will be created over the next 3 to 5 years.
Why is Reaction the right partner?
Reaction is the right partner for two reasons.
The first is that you can get investment from a lot of sources – but you can’t get the heart. What matters most is not the dollars you put in – or the size of the check - it’s the care you give.
The second is what we stand for with Reaction – the global impact we are driving together.
Those are what make Reaction a great partner and what we want Reaction to be known for.
For further information about Reaction please visit the Reaction website at reaction.global or contact the Reaction team at change@reaction.global.
About Reaction
Reaction is about creating exponential change. We are a global community of entrepreneurs, investors and executives who share a vision for a world where innovation can meaningfully change more lives in less time. Why now? Because more innovations will be created in more countries and more industries over the next decade than in the previous 50 years. Many will offer the potential to solve global issues. But will fail to reach the markets they could have benefited most. Reaction was founded by a global team of Stanford alumni who united to solve this problem together. Our mission is to measurably improve one billion lives, within a decade, by scaling innovations that will change the world.
