Founding Tools: Ankur (Multimodal)

"We use all the LLMs, closed and open source... we've fine-tuned hundreds of LLMs."

Nov 21, 2024

Meet Ankur Patel, the CEO & founder of Multimodal, a next-gen automation platform helping middle and back office workers in banking and insurance do their jobs faster. Ankur started the company in May 2023, building on his experience from his previous startup, Glean AI (AI-powered vendor spend management).

With a team of 20 full-time employees and some additional fractional hires, Multimodal is already revenue-generating and bootstrapped. Ankur's background - from fixed income trading at Bridgewater to running a macro hedge fund - informs his approach to building a company that tackles the most complex workflows in banking and insurance.

We talked about everything from international payroll to the nuances of fine-tuning dozens of language models.

This is an honest account of the software Ankur chose, why he picked it, and how he feels about it now (including early mistakes and what he would've done differently).

💼 BUSINESS STACK

Can't Live Without

Payroll: Rippling and Deel - A dynamic duo for global hiring. Right now, they use the best in breed for each use case, but Ankur notes that in the “longer term, we collapse into one, and I'm not sure who wins that."
Email Marketing: Beehiiv - Even though Ankur uses Substack for his personal newsletter, he wanted to experiment with other options for the company newsletter. They tried Hubspot and Mailchimp, but had more flexibility, higher deliverability and a more modern UI with Beehiiv.

Wouldn't Recommend

Email Outreach: Apollo - Found deliverability to be poor compared to alternatives.
Website Builder: Bubble - Lacked the flexibility they needed for design customization.

Honorable Mentions

Corporate Card: Ramp - Chosen partly because of their strong brand, and partially due to admiration for the founder’s journey. Similar to Dani’s reasoning for choosing Grain for meeting recording!
Podcast Recording: Riverside - Great editing tool suite, reliable support, and control around how to have guests join a recording.
Cloud Storage: Dropbox Enterprise - "We use enterprise Dropbox because it's HIPAA compliant and it's great for sharing sensitive data for POCs."

What They Wish They Knew

CRM implementation isn't plug-and-play: "For Salesforce to work really well, you need to do a lot of custom work, either yourself or you need to hire other players to do the services."
Email deliverability is a moving target: "The rules keep changing year over year. We've seen a huge influx of AI-generated content. Google is reacting to that, so deliverability gets harder and harder."

Wishlist (Open to suggestions!)

AI-powered sales orchestration: Looking for tools that can create better email outbound workflows and integrate across their stack.
Enhanced Salesforce integration capabilities, without the need for extensive custom development.
Unified global payroll and HR platform: Excelling in both US and international hiring and compliance.

🤖 TECH STACK

Can't Live Without

Cloud Providers: AWS and GCP - Primary infrastructure, with plans to expand. "We're always going to be multi-cloud. It comes down to pricing and availability. And then, of course, credits." Ankur’s team values the reliability they get from diversifying cloud providers.
AI Models: Multiple providers (Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, etc.) - "We use all the LLMs, closed and open source... we've fine-tuned hundreds of LLMs."
Serverless Computing: Modal - "We use Modal, which is a Series A startup that builds on Oracle Cloud and GCP, but they provide serverless compute for running smaller, shorter runtime jobs.”