The Vector.ai Voyage: Meet the Founders
Insider insights with Vector.ai co-founders, James Coombes, CEO, & Nisarg Mehta, CTO. Vector is a London based supply-chain technology startup.
As part of a new Vector.ai blog series we are starting, very logically, at the beginning. For us that means getting acquainted with the co-founders who started the Vector journey back in 2017, guiding the company over 2 and a half years from an idea nurtured within accelerator programs to a fully-fledged SaaS B2B solution.
Below are 14 questions, inspired by our lead investor Episode 1, that put James (JC) and Nisarg (NM) in the proverbial hot seat. Read on for insights into their Vector vision, the hardest decision they have made as an entrepreneur so far and where 3 days off the grid would take them!
Q: What’s your name and where do you come from?
JC: James Coombes. There isn’t a simple answer to where I’m from! I was born in the UK, but my family is nomadic. My Mum’s French, my Dad’s Welsh/Italian, they currently live in Australia and I carried on the expat tradition by living in the US for ten years. Home is currently SW London.
NM: Nisarg Mehta. I’ll give you the brief bio: I was born in Mumbai, where I lived up until the age of 18, at which point I journeyed onwards to Cambridge, where I studied engineering for 4 years before moving to London, joining Entrepreneur First’s cohort and beginning the Vector.ai voyage with James.
Q: Give us a quick overview of your company and what it does?
JC: We are a ‘paperwork co-pilot’, we help teams process paperwork 10x faster, using machine learning. We’re specifically focused on the paperwork-intense logistics industry for now (think bills of lading, invoices, packing lists, certificates etc.). The logistics industry in this context is a pretty broad category that includes freight forwarders, customs brokers, trade finance banks, shipping and general import/export companies, all of whom struggle with this problem on a huge scale.
NM: Exactly, this paperwork creates a serious manual processing pain-point for these players, which our platform remedies. Our technology automatically extracts data from complex documents using state of the art machine learning research. This extraction step is key to unlocking data ready for matching and approval versus external data sources. It’s not all about the ML, we spent a lot of time(!) packaging our solution in a very intuitive platform, designed specifically to assist and supercharge a logistics operator’s workflow. Using our tool, customers have reduced time taken to process a single stack of documents from a few hours to a few minutes.
Q: Looking back to the day you founded the company, what is the one thing you wish you had known before starting off?
JC: I think in hindsight I would have liked to have known how lucky I was to stumble on the amazing group of people that work for Vector.ai and how crazy it was that they came along right when we needed them. But then again maybe having that information would have changed the decisions we made, so probably best to just bet on uninformed serendipity and do the best with the information you have at the time.
NM: Very true, we’re lucky to have an incredibly driven team! My core takeaway is to keep an even keel and not get carried away, for better or for worse. Co-founding has its fair shares of ups and downs that play out in my head, on one side the excitement of something working versus the other, filled with dismay as a tricky solution evades us. In the end I have realised the best approach is balance, keep forging ahead, keep focused and preserve energy.
Q: How do you define success for you / your company?
JC: It depends on the timescale. Over the short-term, we are focused on delivering a product that we believe in and that we’re happy to put out into the world. Longer-term we/I would like to make sure we’re making things incrementally better and contributing our bit to moving society forward, I think that’s a good North Star. I’ve always felt privileged to live in a time when a small group of motivated individuals in a start-up can access a tremendous pool of resources within an ecosystem and do amazing things.
NM: I think we’re on the same wavelength here. Doing something meaningful and useful, that people find value and happiness in, that’s what success looks like to me. That philosophy applies to the company at a high level too, I would like to create a step change in the way the industry operates so that our customers and partners can reach their goals faster.
Q: What behaviour or personality trait do you most attribute to your ability to achieve what you have achieved so far?
JC: I like to think that my upbringing has allowed me to be comfortable with the unknown and the unfamiliar, as well as the self-delusion that my opinion on what the world should be like actually matters. I enjoy questioning things and I was always the kid who asked ‘why?’ to everything. I tend to chafe more than most at accepting norms that don’t make sense to me. I’m grateful for the fact that I’ve had so much exposure to different cultures which means I could more easily break out of a lot of the cultural programming we all have.
NM: Adaptability. The last few years have involved me wearing a lot of different hats, shifting gears from talking deep tech one minute to business strategy the next and everything in between. Being able to do that smoothly and make decisions decisively, without getting bogged down in over-thinking, expectation or pressure, that’s helped me enormously.
Q: What’s your top idea to improve diversity in the workplace?
JC: I think it is about casting a wide net and optimising for smart people who demonstrate the capacity to grow into a role rather than limiting recruitment to a narrow pool of candidates who have been fortunate enough to have exactly the right experience and opportunity. One of the things I like to see is hustle and purpose, several of our team members approached us and didn’t give us a choice not to hire them. We like to hire missionaries not mercenaries.
NM: Grass roots changes in thinking is the key way to have a lasting impact on diversity in general, not just in the workplace. I fundamentally believe in not restricting people to specific pathways based on stereotypes, instead allowing them to constructively express and explore the interests they hold without limitation. In the Vector workplace we give the team ownership to explore creativity in their working approach and the space for them to define their own career pathways.
Q: What’s the next big idea that nobody is thinking about yet? Why is this so important?
JC: Our industry aside, I am a biochemist by training and I think a future physical/digital interface between tech and the human genome and protein transcription is going to unleash something really special and really scary at the same time. Imagine the potential of being able to deliver a digital instruction to a group of your own cells to create an antibody on demand?! Game changer.
NM: For me it comes back to one of Vector’s core ambitions, improving access to data, albeit in a different guise. I think unlocking the data hidden within archives in large companies, organisations, libraries and institutions will become of huge importance. Yes, it’s certainly very difficult to index and structure this archived information, but the wealth and potential for knowledge means it is certainly a worthwhile endeavour. Access to this depth of data is useful in almost every industry imaginable and if I were not building Vector, I would be building a company to do this.
Q: What is the best advice you have ever been given and by whom?
JC: Plenty but if I had to choose one it would be: ‘It’s sometimes better to ask for forgiveness than permission’. From an old boss. Within reason of course.
NM: To be a good person, by my Father. It sounds very simple, but it means to be a good person at any cost. His advice was that all the different facets of a “successful” life (fame, money, prestige etc) are worth so much less than being a good person, that is really the most important thing.
Q: What was the most useful resource (networks, books, websites, blogs) you used when starting out?
JC: Mostly just general tech blogs that I used to read in my day-job as escapism. Techcrunch in the Michael Arrington era may have featured heavily. I enjoy reading books about other founders that don’t gloss over the hard stuff or romanticise how much foresight they had. Character etc. is important, but let’s not kid ourselves that luck is a factor too.
NM: Network. I asked a lot of people for advice, sought out many different perspectives, which helped me form my approach in an educated way. Listening to people who have done it before is a very humbling experience and allows you to think of perspectives you may not have considered in isolation.
Q: What is the single most important thing you’ve done to increase the value of your business?
JC: Easy. Convinced bright people to work with me.
NM: Built a good team that is inspired by the work we’re doing and enthused by the challenges we have, they certainly do not shy away from solving a hard problem! Creating the right mix of personalities and skills has been so crucial to our ability to deliver impactful outcomes.
Q: What has been the hardest decision you’ve had to make in your entrepreneurial journey?
JC: So far, the FOMO of saying no to potential customers because what they wanted didn’t align with our roadmap.
NM: Deciding what to do and what not to do, prioritising different ideas over others. That’s hard on an ongoing basis, it’s a battle against distraction and a constant mission to ensure we use the resources at our disposal to get the best out of our ideas and achieve the highest impact.
Q: What will be the biggest change to how we lead our lives in 15 years? And what won’t have changed?
JC: There’s a lot of change happening at the moment with Covid-19. The obvious ones in our domain are remote work and an increased focus on collaboration tools, which presents a huge opportunity to layer in machine learning and process optimisation into the enterprise stack. Separately I think as a society we have a responsibility to make behavioural changes while Covid-19 is reshuffling the deck. I think large metropolises will have to go fully car-free and the collective memory of a pollution-free lockdown will encourage an acceleration in EV adoption. What will not have changed will be a need for meaningful physical connections with each other, just maybe in a more targeted way.
NM: Agree with that, the power of relationships is core to human beings, we will always rely and gravitate towards human connection in personal and professional life. At the risk of sounding obvious, what will keep changing is technology. 15 years ago we had no idea where technology would take us and the impact it would have on our lives. The same is true today, we have no idea what lies ahead in 15 years!
Q: Tell us something we don’t know about you?
JC: I’m a single dad with a daughter who is roughly the same age as the company. The running joke among our ML engineers is to make sure our AI can understand any kind of paperwork better than she can. She can’t read yet so they’re safe, for now!
NM: Despite deep tech being an obvious passion, I also have a big love of wildlife and natural surroundings. When I was a child, our family travelled to a new Indian state almost every holiday, visiting national parks and wildlife sanctuaries. These days getting back to nature is a daily occurrence, which involves taking all my calls whilst wandering around the local parks of London!
Q: If you could be offline for 3 days — where would you go and what would you do?
JC: Budget no object, I’d go sailing in the Mediterranean with good company, great food and better wine. I might push it a few extra days.
NM: Go to Antarctica! 3 days is probably not enough time to get out there, but I would find some way to make it happen and sail around the glaciers taking pictures of the wildlife.
Vector.ai: Your Paperwork Co-pilot ™ — We help teams process paperwork 10x faster.
Vector.ai specialises in transforming logistics and trade-finance paperwork and workflows with machine learning. Wave goodbye to manual data entry, we use cutting-edge technology to automate digitisation, understanding and checking of trade documents. Get in touch at contact@vector.ai
