Your Data Needs a Human Touch
The story of Iva Gumnishka, a Bulgarian entrepreneur, whose passion for human rights led her to starting an award-winning tech company with a social purpose.
Meet Iva, Founder and CEO of Humans in the Loop
Born and raised in Bulgaria, Iva Gumnishka was interested in linguistics and foreign languages from a young age. After graduating from the Spanish High School in Sofia, she decided to continue her education abroad. She moved to New York to study Human Rights at Columbia University, where she discovered her passion for helping others. During her stay in the United States, she became a lot more actively involved in the pursuit of social justice and social change in her local community.
The 2013 refugee crisis in Bulgaria and across Europe acted as an unexpected catalyst for Iva that motivated her even more to become the driver of positive change beyond borders. She was struck by the lack of sensibility in the way the Bulgarian government and media handled the crisis and felt let down by her own country and people. Observing the way those events unfolded from afar made her feel helpless and she developed a strong desire to make a difference on a larger scale! By the time she graduated in 2017, she was determined to go back and attempt to change the way migrants and refugees were perceived in Bulgaria. She knew it would not be easy, but she was excited to contribute to this mindset shift and to help better the lives of those affected by creating more opportunities for them.
Shortly after returning from the United States, Iva founded Humans in the Loop, a social enterprise aimed at providing refugees, asylum-seekers, and migrants with marketable computer skills. Her goal was to offer people in need easily accessible remote digital work opportunities they could do from anywhere in the world. The company is especially sensitive to the needs of women, who are housewives and mothers, and have a dedicated program to ensure their economic inclusion.
Beyond the Data — Humans in the Loop
Human-in-the-Loop (or HiTL) is a concept that leverages humans as part of the process of building a Machine Learning (ML) model. Humans are involved in the training, validating, and testing of the data that feeds into an algorithm in order to increase the model’s accuracy.
Iva knew that, as more companies move towards adopting Machine Learning models, the need for human involvement would naturally increase. Her vision was simple — being a professional “human in the loop” would become a job title of the future, one that would require professionals with a very specialized set of skills and knowledge to assist with eradicating bias, monitoring Artificial Intelligence (AI) performance, and, essentially, teaching AI how to think (and eventually feel) like a human. Her company, Humans in the Loop, has been able to settle and thrive in a very exciting niche: dataset collection, annotation and validation for AI, primarily for computer vision applications. In a short amount of time, her company has succeeded in building long-lasting relationships with some of the most innovative companies in the field of autonomous pilots, facial recognition, object detection, etc. to help them prepare the data that fuels their ML models.
Her team is currently working towards setting up a full Human-in-the-Loop pipeline, so that once the ML model is trained, their workers can be also involved in the cycle of improvement by verifying the outputs and handling edge cases that the model cannot.
So far, Iva and her team have trained close to 100 people and have provided work to more than 150. In 2019, they started partnering with organizations in Syria, Iraq, and Turkey to send work directly to the conflict-affected communities there. The amazing work her team was doing to positively influence the lives of the people in those communities did not go unnoticed! Humans in the Loop was selected as one of 75 Global Innovators by the Dubai Expo 2020 “Expo Live” program and will be showcased at the World Expo this October. As a result, they received a generous grant that would allow them to scale their operations to even more countries in the Middle East, helping them maximize the impact of their work in the most severely affected areas.
Challenges and Lessons Learned
Iva did not expect being an entrepreneur to be an easy job, but she didn’t foresee many of the hardships that she had to face right off the bat. To start with, the funding for refugee-related projects in Bulgaria was really scarce. Securing funds proved to be challenging and she spent the first 2 years having very limited operating capital, investing everything she made back into the business. Reflecting on her experience, Iva realized that the hard financial times and lack of resources early on made her a much more savvy and frugal entrepreneur. She had to find out-of-the-box, creative solutions to business problems to make sure her business was self-sustaining long-term, skills she leverages today.
Another major challenge for Iva was finding the right people to join her in building her company. She was really passionate about her cause and she wanted to find partners, potentially a co-founder, who embraced her mission just as much as she did. She knew she needed a strong core team she could rely on if she wanted to scale her business. Attracting talent, though, especially when she could not afford to pay salaries or offer job security, was cumbersome. To complicate matters, part of her workforce was remote, which made keeping the same level of engagement and contribution once the business took off difficult. If she could go back in time, she would have done things differently. She still believes finding the right partners was important, but she wishes she didn’t spend so much time on it. Instead, she wished she concentrated on building a strong brand and increasing the company’s revenue faster that would have allowed her to afford industry talent earlier.
Embracing Growth Mindset
Now that Humans in the Loop is well-established and funded, Iva is focused on creating a balanced life. Although she loves what she does, she understands that working long 12-hour days is not sustainable. She used to frequently face the pressure of controlling the urge to catch up on pending tasks over the weekend and holidays, and oftentimes she would give in to it. She now realizes that taking time off and setting up boundaries is good for both: her personal sanity and professional success. She believes in working smarter, making the most of the working hours, and completely disconnecting once the work day ends.
With regards to her company, Iva started investing a lot more time in building and nurturing the community of beneficiaries and supporters surrounding it. Since the growth of her business, she finds staying focused on the company’s goals a key to its continuous success. She became a lot more selective about the projects they choose to work on to make sure they align with her company’s long-term goals. She is learning to say “no” more often, as uncomfortable as it may be, to projects and collaborations that might have an adverse effect on her business. She constantly challenges herself and her team to broaden their thinking and practice learning and understanding new, complex ideas — a concept she calls “mind elasticity”.
Iva’s Top 3 Tips for Success:
- Build partnerships with everyone in your ecosystem.
The first thing I did when launching my startup was to go from one organization to another with a one-pager about my idea and ask for feedback and support. I met the most important stakeholders who I still work with very closely. Even though nothing came out of 90% of the meetings, 10% resulted in us launching our first program, securing a free space for trainings, receiving laptop donations, and onboarding our first client.
- Learn how to sell — or at least discover what type of a salesperson you are and make the most of it.
I’ve been told that I am a “farmer” who likes to nurture relationships with clients and values them more than closing deals. I prefer to build authentic relationships with people who genuinely enjoy doing business with me. Same goes for pitches — I always end up opening up and delivering a very sincere speech of who we are and what we do. Seeing people get excited about our idea is more important to me than closing a million dollar deal.
- Give every opportunity a try and forget about it after you click on the “submit” button.
There are so many opportunities out there for funding, grants, awards, recognition, etc. A pivotal moment for Humans in the Loop was when we won an award at the 2020 Expo Live in Dubai last year. But this success came at the price of so many rejected applications that I can’t even remember. I tend to forget about submitted applications, I don’t even wait for a response, I just move on to the next one. I know the snowball will inevitably start rolling, one reward will bring another and that will open endless opportunities.
About Bulgarian Women in Tech
Bulgarian Women in Tech is a global organization that aims to establish a strong network of women working in technology across the globe.
Our mission is to increase the women in tech global impact through providing accessible-for-all global opportunities for education, collaboration, growth, inspiration and mentoring, while celebrating our successes together.
In support of our mission, we love to inspire women around the world by telling the success stories of Bulgarian women leaders, who are changing the world through Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM).
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