Base64.ai: Pioneering AI Document Processing with Ozan Bilgen

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their successes, challenges, and lessons learned. We hope you be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Ozan Bilgen, the founder of Base64. His journey from Turkey to Silicon Valley and what Uber taught him as an engineer before moving on to build his own tech startup. Ozan, welcome to the show.  

Ozan Bilgen: Thank you for having me, Jake. Nice to meet you.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So, a little background on Ozan. He is the founder and CEO of Base64.ai, the AI that automates document processes. He has a Bachelor's of Science and a Master of Science in Computer Science. He led important R&D projects throughout his career at IBM, Microsoft, Netflix, Palantir, as well as the world's largest payment processor PayPal, and Uber's vehicle leasing department that had thousands of people processing documents. Ozan saw firsthand that even top tech companies in Silicon Valley rely on manual labor to process documents and realized an opportunity with AI to automate document processes with incredible improvement. This AI is patented and called Base64. Ozan is a Turkish American, a certified pilot, and a scuba diver.

Ozan, walk us through... you've had an incredible career and you're building a startup. Came from Turkey. What was that path like from Turkey to Silicon Valley?

Ozan Bilgen: Sure. So uh, like you said, I did my bachelor's and master's in computer sciences and I had the opportunity when I was in Turkey to be an intern at IBM, and I got fascinated by the scope of things that are happening at large tech companies. So I applied for Microsoft and they hired me from Istanbul to Seattle, which is Redmond, Seattle area, to their headquarters. So I took the leap, leap of faith and then came to the United States in 2006.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. You know, they say proximity is really important when it comes to building a startup and working with investors and hiring people. How is Silicon Valley from people that aren't here? What's your experience been like in this environment since you joined uh, really the ecosystem of the startup world?

Ozan Bilgen: I think the software and products built in the Silicon Valley has a very different uh bar as compared to more local companies. Everything built in Silicon Valley is meant to be consumed by the entire world. So there's no local market um mindset in the, in the Silicon Valley. This obviously means to looking at the problem and project from a global perspective, building teams that will address that, and as well as like you know, receiving funding that uh a world domination company will need. So basically by thinking big, by dreaming bigger, Silicon Valley has pretty much provided every software we use in this world um, not just in the United States but also in other parts of the world. So I find that as a very challenging and ambitious goal um, and personally I love it.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well, you've been at some great startups uh that were no longer startups but more established companies. And for those that haven't been at Netflix or Uber or Palantir, what were the companies out of those three that you felt were most innovative? And what were some of the lessons that you've taken from that, that you've now applied to building your own company?

Ozan Bilgen: Out of my career, um I think Uber stands out uh in terms of the startup culture. In my mind, at Uber uh we were growing 4X year over year. And that is growing in number of employees, growing in, in number of uh drivers and riders and trips. Uh so it was a constant pressure to build better and more scalable systems and bringing the right fit to market. What I learned there was my foundation to start Base64.ai. I saw how hard people are working in the top startups and I saw like what hard work delivers at the end of the day. When, when I joined Uber, Uber was a single floor company. Uh you could see everyone at lunch. And I, I'm one of the first engineers at Uber. After four years, four and a half years, I left, there were 3,000 engineers at Uber.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.

Ozan Bilgen: It had development offices across the globe. So seeing this hyper-growth phase of Uber uh was a very important lesson that I couldn't get otherwise by reading books or uh listening [to] others. So it's a, a, that in-person experience, seeing the struggles of growing so fast uh really excited me to bring some of the nice things that we had to Uber at Base64 as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. What were some of the lessons that you learned by, by being there um, from an... maybe just an engineering perspective or process, or just in general, what are the things that you have, that you've taken that are helping you in your, in your company today?

Ozan Bilgen: I think I learned hustle and ownership um at, in Uber. Uh the mindset is like getting things done no matter you know, how many hours it may take, no matter how many extra people we need to find to hire. And then no matter uh what it will, how much money we need to raise. So they were looking at the problem and not, never saying like "oh we can't solve this problem." They were looking at the problem and the mindset was like "how can we solve this problem? What is the benefit of solving this problem?" And if there is benefit, let's just jump on it.

Especially, I was in the my-, close to the operations team. Uh has operations team in every city they operate worldwide. And from starting uh to hiring um or finding drivers right, all the way to processing their documents, addressing their needs, there was an unlimited energy in Uber that I loved seeing uh how it's growing so fast as well. So that is the hustle part. Uh and in terms of ownership, because the company was growing so fast, uh there was always gaps in the uh organization. Who, whether who's going to own this thing? In a typical company you may see people are saying "that's not my job." I haven't heard that word at Uber. People were pitching in and delivering their best to make the company succeed, and thus everyone as a, a shareholder achieve their financial goals as well.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that ownership aspect of it. You, you saw firsthand at Uber that there was a need to improve process and improve document processing or process workflows. Walk us through specifically what it is that you saw, and now today what is it you're building, so that people that are listening understand the problem you're working to solve.

Ozan Bilgen: When I joined Uber, I came from PayPal, building the world's biggest payment processor. Um Uber also wanted to uh work with me to build and automate their payment system. Previously they were having somewhat like a manual system where [the] finance team has to upload the records. So we started looking at this problem from an automation perspective. Like I said, it's growing 4X every year, you can't keep hiring that many people, so we built an automation for payments.

And when I got into the weed[s] of day-to-day operational problems, I did realize one of the very important problems was that drivers adding wrong bank account information, they were making typos. And this was especially hurting the new drivers because that's you know they do that in the beginning of their uh journey with Uber. Those drivers who obviously don't put the right account number, they don't get paid and they were very upset, right, rightfully so. However, there was also nothing we can do until they come and correct it. So this I saw there how much friction it is causing across the teams in multiple geographies. Um drivers losing trust in Uber thinking like Uber is just not paying them and so forth.

Later in my career, I became the technical leader of Uber's leasing department. I became much more involved with [the] driver onboarding process. And then I realized what we [were] doing is we, when we, when [a] driver uploads a driver license, a vehicle registration, or an insurance card, we actually had a few thousand people in [the] Philippines that were transcribing that. So when you put people in charge for document processing, we're all humans, we make mistakes time to time. Plus, it's never instantaneous, it takes sometimes... the document that the driver provided is not a good quality, there's not enough lighting or they didn't take the full picture. So, or maybe like the document they uploaded is not valid, maybe it's expired or they uploaded ID instead of a driver license. So this problem could not be immediately addressed while the driver is still uh on the flow, on the uh onboarding process. They were getting text messages or emails from the teams like "hey, please come back and upload a new driver license or vehicle registration" so forth, after sometimes hours, sometimes days depending on the load.

Um so obviously when you try to recall uh people, they may not be at the right moment when they get the text message, right? They might be, they might find another job. They might even go to a competitor because they typically apply to multiple gig economy companies at once. And by sheer luck, if they uploaded a document to Base64.ai driver license with a glare, flash glare on it, and they didn't to Lyft, well chances like they're going to be working with Lyft. So we were losing drivers because of that process. In the leasing department alone, we had 500 people in Phoenix, Arizona going through the documents in and out. There are specific leasing documents such as contracts, citations, adverse action letters. Having this enormous team just to read the document and understand it uh had a huge cost to the leasing department and still we could not approve a lease um under five days.

So there was also time pressure. So imagine you want to drive for Uber and you want to get a car through the leasing department. What you expect is you're just going to get the keys and hit the road. However it was like, "well, please come back you know in so many days." And then there's obviously like volume related back and forth problems. This wasn't always very fun for drivers, dealers who worked with us in uh the company. When I saw those 500 people, uh they're all young grads. Uh they're just like fresh out of college from typically from Arizona State, uh running through Arizona. I saw rows of people, like in The Matrix movie, behind the computer typing and stuff. And obviously immediately I did realize how, like how it would be great to have an AI that will actually understand the document, that will actually tell us immediately what type of document we uploaded, what's the content of it, what are the information in a structured way like key-value pairs extracted. And then you could just build the product so that the five day journey could be shortened uh maybe to just like minutes.

So that idea was a great idea. However, uh even at Uber, and you know Uber had some, one of the most fantastic fundraisers in the world. Like in one go they got $10 billion. Even at a company like that, that could attract any talent they wanted, there was no roadmap for that. Every team was already busy. We had some machine learning teams, they were mostly busy with business problems such as ETA calculation or anti-fraud and so forth. We did not have a team or charter to build that. And that's actually when I did realize the opportunity for Base64.ai. Even like a top Silicon Valley company that has so much money and talent cannot address this. How [could] an insurance company, how a bank, how a normal uh manufacturing company could even consider doing that? So I thought like if there is a vendor that is capable of providing the services, then it could be used worldwide in any company. And this is how I started.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Fascinating. So it seems like there's a lot of opportunity. How big is the market when you did your research to look at bringing a product like this into, into the markets?

Ozan Bilgen: We estimated the market to be at a hundred billion dollars. And the reason why it's such a high number is because this task has to be done by humans. And employee cost, if you think about it, not just the gross payment that we are offering. Also like company expenses such as taxes, laptops, offices, management and all those structure has a huge cost to the companies. And it is not necessarily a solution, it's always a temporary bandaid. If the volumes go higher, well either you need to hire more people or you're going to miss your SLAs to process that document. And if you do hire more people, pretty much every document, every industry has a seasonality concern. So for example, US healthcare um documents, they are typically uploaded towards the end of the year when they are doing the benefit selection. So if you hire for that capacity, for that kind of a work, then you have an idle team throughout the rest of the year. And this is not just for US healthcare, it's everywhere.

So I'm sure many of our listeners have wait in the line when they are registering for the right, we were waiting to give our documents so somebody enters into the system. So that is the problem we are solving with AI. Now you can do things instantly and throughout a scalable architecture that we are offering. The capacity goes up and down as much as demand goes up and down, so there's also an economically viable solution to the problem.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So you have your product, you've built it. Uh um, did you go out and raise capital?

Ozan Bilgen: Yes. We raised about $2 million from the top Silicon Valley venture firms, including Sequoia Ventures, which is number one in the world. Long Journey Ventures, um which was investors uh [in] SpaceX, Postmates, Notion, and other very top companies. And Data Community Fund, which changed its name to Prime Zero now. They're very active in data related opportunities. We also had many uh worldwide known angels who joined us in that path. Um uh and that's our short story about fundraising.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: With today's market, you know uh it's tough to, to raise capital. How, what was your strategy to, to raise, and, and how often do you or how many times did you have to pitch before you closed on your funding?

Ozan Bilgen: Well, um it's not a rose garden, I'll tell that much. Um as much as I have experience in engineering, I actually had no idea in fundraising. But I was super, super lucky to be surrounded by excellent classmates from school who ended up being angel investors. So I started working with them, I asked them like how should I pitch, and if they will pitch it, and they did immediately help me out. So I'm very grateful to that. But, and also learned throughout some of our customers and vendors by talking to other founders, how did they approach this problem. So we created our, my pitch, they perfected it, and it is always something in the works. Always you try to bring more data or remove information based on the feedback you're receiving.

I think founders should expect a, or prepare for a very hard uh journey when they are raising funds. The economy right now, it's not the best. The interest rates are high and that's why a lot of funds are not investing as much as they were a couple years ago. So what the founders I will recommend, and that's exactly what we do, is actually prepare for a failed fundraising event. Continue improving the product and ARR, so that those who they rejected them may reconsider after seeing an explosive growth.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, we've heard some companies go for a few weeks to raise capital, it doesn't work out, and they just kind of throw in the towel, give up, or maybe they're running out of money. But just wanted to go back again to, to the question, how many times did you have to go out and present before you actually were able to, to get the term sheets in, in place?

Ozan Bilgen: I think it was over like 50 different [VCs] until I found the right one.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow.

Ozan Bilgen: And, and the process typically happens is, someone introduces yourself, which is a more preferable way, or can of course directly reach out. Um and then they take a look at it. If they like it, they usually call in their friends, uh their other VC. Uh for several reasons. They may want to take a second look on this problem. They may want other VCs to join so they don't have to put all the money in. Um and sometimes like those funds are not typically a lead investor who is doing the due diligence process and so forth. So they might just want to invest at this point, especially in where seed funding level, but not necessarily do all the due diligence uh work around it. So once you find uh an investor who are interested, then you ask for intros to them for other funds. If they are interested in like you know joining, and that's how you uh at the end of the day get to your numbers.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that. Uh once you got the fund and you built a team, uh how big are you today? Are you local, are you international?

Ozan Bilgen: We are international from Day Zero. We are about 20 people today. We have uh most of our employees in the United States, um particularly in the East Coast, New York, Jersey area. However, we also have teams across the US um as well as Germany, Turkey, uh and Philippines.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: And what's been your strategy on finding the right people? It's always a question of understanding who you are, what you build, and attracting the right people, but what's worked for you making sure that when you hire you get the right people in place?

Ozan Bilgen: I think Step One is knowing what you're looking for. Like in everything in life, if you don't know what, what kind of person you really need, then there's you know, slim chance that you're going to find the right person. As a small startup, of course we cannot hire a dozen of people and then pick and choose based on performance. We have to have some sort of insight uh what, how this person will perform. The typical methods we use are advertising our descriptions on LinkedIn and uh AngelList and other places. Uh we use our personal network. Uh I want to send kudos to my professors in the college who shared several great candidates. Uh asking your employees if they have any referral, if they know somebody from past work experience and um or colleagues and classmates and so forth that could be a great fit.

And lastly of course uh, we short the time um for recruitment agencies. Uh that's typically for uh high level positions in the management. Um you want to find people who have experience in this world um and they may not be necessarily looking for a job at that point. So you may need to actively reach them, and that's what, that's how they help us.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, it's a little bit of a gray area. Companies often don't know what it's like to work with outside firms, agencies, recruiters. What did you look for and what did you like and what didn't you like if you worked with some that were good for you and others just didn't deliver?

Ozan Bilgen: So I think like you know um reputation is a very important challenge. From the surface they all look great, from the surface they offer pretty much the same services. The only differentiator at the first glance is the price um that they want for that service. Uh what helped us to find the right services is like their, their approach. Some firms they want to sign a retainer, sometimes an exclusive uh search for them, and then that usually uh does not work out very well. Some other firms they already come up with candidates who are or could be a really good uh match for us, and then they start the conversation from that angle. Like, "Look, I know what I'm doing and this is the right person you're looking for. If you want to work with me, let's talk." Um and that I think like you know, worked out better for us uh as opposed to other methods.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, when you talk about pricing with this service in particular, it's kind of all over the map. For you, what is it that feels like this is the right price for us to go forward with a company like this, or a firm that you feel like you're getting a good value at the same time you know it's digestible, right?

Ozan Bilgen: We usually pay a percentage of the um annual base salary. When we approach this problem, uh we had deals in the past uh from 20 to 35% range. Uh one thing also very important is the retention period. So retention period means for our listeners, uh when does this employee qualify for payment to the recruitment firm? So suppose like you know, they join and in a week you realize you can't work together. Should you pay a retention? So that is typically for us, it's about 3 to 6 months for all of our roles. Obviously our intention is to hire the right person and keep them there uh working, continue working with them. Uh so there's, for good hires there's no problem. But may or not like you know, uh we, we could also make mistakes in the hiring process of course. So that retention period protects the company from not um overspending.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that sounds about in line with what we've seen as well. And I, I think it is important to have that longer extension timeframe. You can't always understand the person you're hiring if they're going to be a fit you know, for a month, two months, three months. You know, if it's longer it's obviously protecting the company more. I think that makes a lot of sense, really for anybody that's going to to build a team. So you, you... how big is the team now? Around 20 you said. And as you look at the markets today, what's your biggest challenge as a company, um in terms of uh things you're focused on? Is it growing new company accounts? Is it revenue? Is it product development? Where, what keeps you up at night right now?

Ozan Bilgen: Um all, all of them. All of them together, right? So we are you know, technically not regulated but practically uh very regulated environment. We are, we are reading customers' documents, we are understanding them, we're extracting the data for them. So security and compliance is our uh self-driven motivation from the very early days of this company. We invested in achieving uh SOC 2 compliance status early on. Today we also have HIPAA, GDPR, and ISO certifications to keep the bar high. And those are really good things um. For running a compliant company is much easier than not having... like dealing with problems. It teaches us how to you know, be better employees and managers. And it makes it the sales cycle uh sometimes much shorter uh when people understandably, customers understandably ask us like how secure it is. You can say "Well, I worked at Uber, trust me," or you can attach a letter. Works better.

In terms of growing the company, we grew 7X last year and this year uh it's going pretty well as well. Uh AI is the name of the game in many companies. Everybody is thinking about how to utilize AI. And that was actually one of the main part uh things we solved. We made AI as accessible as just using a regular web page or just a single API call. So you don't need to know all those ins and outs of machine learning model building and technicalities. You can just like you know set our, your, our AI to say "Well, read emails from this email addresses, this Google Drive folders and the scanners, and process them. And if they are invoices, put them in my QuickBooks accounting, otherwise send me an email, I want to take a look at it." And building that system before Base64.ai will take years if not months. But now everything you heard just now will take like less than 5 minutes to build because Base64.ai comes with over 400 pre-built no-code integrations. Those integrations require no software engineer to build, it doesn't require servers from the customer to deploy on. The bugs and issues have already been addressed in this component. So there is uh, time to go live is minutes instead of weeks and months and so forth. So that was one of the huge achievements we, we gained throughout this year.

We also deployed uh Generative AI and large language models at a higher scale. Those models allow us to extract data from documents we have never seen before by simply asking questions to the documents, such as "What is the total of that invoice? Who is the author of this news article? What colleges did that person go to that I'm looking at the resume too?" So doing those things without any traditional expensive and uh at times risky machine learning processes, uh now we actually can do it automatically without zero training. It's, it's called um in our industry it's called "zero shot." Uh that means like the moment you, the AI sees this document, it actually already understands, it doesn't require extra training. So that was the huge technical achievements we had in 2023.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: You know, your, your product looks and sounds like it could be, it could be used in the US but internationally as well. Is it for any language? Is it only English? What's, how does that work?

Ozan Bilgen: We support over 160 different languages. Most typically you will find um what you're looking for. It includes um obviously English and Latin-based alphabet, but also non-Latin alphabets such as Cyrillic, Chinese, Japanese, etc. Uh it can read and understand a document, it can create summaries, it can understand document types and fields. And like I said, automatically integrate to wherever you want.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: So when we hear about AI is going to replace jobs, for some companies it's going to reduce their costs and reduce their labor costs regarding you know, the manual processing. Um this sounds like it's really right in line with that discussion. Is that correct?

Ozan Bilgen: Yes. One of the fears of technology for everything is that like people going to lose their jobs. It's not limited to AI. Uh when the steam engine was invented a lot of farmers they changed jobs. But technology has never created a mass exodus on the employment factor. We need more employees. We, if we have more employees we can actually build better services. You can build, we can service more customers and generate more revenue. There is... you don't find like really many companies that say like "this is the maximum employees we should ever have." So the idea is also like employees have a cost, so a company always strives to find the best use cases for the employees so that they can have a better ROI. Whatever the employee delivers versus how much they're paying to the employee basically.

And with jobs like manual data entry that are mundane, repetitive and doesn't require um a sophisticated education and so forth, the ROI is lower, right? ROI is higher when you, when your employees are working on challenging, unique and strategic things rather than mundane and repetitive tasks. So the AI will change the job market for sure. There will be certain jobs, they will not necessarily [be] eliminate[d] but like you know, reduced in size. But those employees will be working on much more important things, much more complicated scenarios, much more uh interesting things. And that's, they will actually get paid more. That's what happened with Industrial Revolutions in the 1800s. We have a lot of poor farmers. Uh my job didn't exist back then, podcasting probably wasn't there either. Now we are doing new types of jobs that wasn't there before. Now we are actually also economically doing well, much better uh as compared to like you know a couple hundreds years ago. So that is what AI is going to do. It's going to create, it's going to make everyone a great weight. It's going to allow them to focus on their creative sides and high ROI work. So I think it's going to be great for everybody.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I agree with that. I believe that you need, you need to embrace technology and innovation, and AI is really a hot topic which is you know, looks like being embedded in many different technologies and sectors. So I think you're really right in the, in the target zone of growing. How do you know when it's the right time to scale a company? You've got funding, you have a product, it sounds like it's right for the market. Um what's your algorithm for scaling in terms of like employees?

Ozan Bilgen: Um we try to make our growth H- non-linear to the number of employees. That means if you want to grow 4X, you don't want to hire 4X people, maybe you want to hire 2X people, right? That is a more sustainable growth. We do grow quite rapidly, and that requires a lot of new employees, and in fact different types of talent that we didn't have in the company. That could be a particular area in software engineering or sales, marketing and so forth. With that we do that um as the plan and budget for the year. For every year we have a yearly budget, and then we review the budget quarterly. We are in a very dynamic field, we are a fast-growing startup. Things change here, but we try to... we always try to stick to the plan. We may change the plan, which is fair and I think really needed, but we always try to have a plan so, so we know uh what to expect in, in the coming months and years for us.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: When you, when you build a team that's international or remote, managing that team can be tricky. What, what technologies or processes or strategies have worked for you of really staying on top of where the company's going and, and how to lead the team uh in the process?

Ozan Bilgen: I started this company in January 2020, pre-pandemic if you like. I was, I was dreaming to have an office where we can all work together like a startup environment that I've seen before. Then the pandemic hit. Then I did realize, you know, that's such a bad time to start a business. But um as months and years passed, I did realize now I actually can hire from remotely. I live in Manhattan. Hiring in Manhattan is expensive because life is expensive here. But now with like remote working uh we could actually create a better team, a bigger team uh without actually spending that much. So it turned out to be a blessing in disguise for us.

When we create remote teams, one thing is particularly is very important: that's ethics. The work ethics has to be very solid. People work from home, great employees they try, they love it. They don't need to commute, they can go work on a remote sunny beach, those are all fair game for us. We have employees all around the world. It, it's not true of course for everybody. Some people require much more constant monitoring or are used to that. So that is one learning uh we had: we need to hire people who have very high self uh motivation to do the job and like uh this new setup of work environment. We also provide them tools and uh technologies so that they can work from wherever they want. Uh obviously that includes laptops and so forth. But we are in constant communication with Zoom, Slack, Google Drive, Gmail and so forth technologies.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah it's great, you know we, we, you touched on a couple points: workforce planning, uh understanding what you want to do in the next year and planning for that growth, and if the ch- the plans change, you can modify those. And then also international. We're seeing international as well as local but remote. Um and one of the things that companies that we're seeing are doing today uh, they may not all be hiring, but they also want to optimize the people they have. And it's hard to you know, how do you take a C player and make him a B player, or how do you take a B player and make him an A player? This is like uh something a lot of companies are working to get to, to try and do. And uh we went out and interviewed 200 Chief People Officers to understand how do you improve your workforce and what are the strategies and the tools that you can use. And we didn't get one silver bullet that came back that said "if you use this or you do that you're going to get you know this result." Uh it was really training, gap analysis on who people, you know, what they're doing today and how they could get better, but ultimately there wasn't like a very sound strategy.

Uh but with the innovation of AI, we actually found a couple companies that are able to do this now with AI, that can really understand how people, their behavior, and how they operate, and the systems they're logging into. But more importantly, they have habits that they have. And then being able to take your A players that are doing really well, you don't know what they're doing because they're remote, but you could start to see the trends, you could use that as a tool then take that to your B players and take it to your C players and really optimize your teams. Well, we're seeing that really start to percolate the market and I think it's, it's really worth exploring. Um but that said, I love what you're building. I, I think you're on to something really great. You've got patents around it too I think, which is really smart. And uh sounds like growth is really just starting for you. Uh where, where do you go from here? What's, what's next on the horizon? I know you're a young company now, but what do you see coming in the future for your platform?

Ozan Bilgen: So, so far up until uh last quarter actually we were still building this. By the last quarter we reached what we call the V1 status. And that V1 status for us is: any document can be processed without any training, any ordinary internet user can build end-to-end workflows by themselves. They can self-service themselves and the technological pieces, the components, are readily available. And lastly, we can deploy in the cloud or on-prem. They can use our cloud servers already, or if they, if they want to do process documents in their own environment they can do on-prem. And achieved parity on what we are offering in both services.

So this is why we believe like the growth is around the corner for us. Now we are going after much larger accounts. Those accounts you may want to knock the doors on when you're already ready because you may not going to get a second chance. Uh so that's why like you know we kept, we reserved certain industries and segments such as government for example uh up until like you know we are ready for it. We also established a very big partner network. Throughout this partner network uh we have cross-selling opportunities, we have resell partners who take our product and sell to their customers, existing customers. We have partners who introduce us to them obviously, uh we thank in return by offering commissions. We have a public uh referral policy on our website for anyone who is interested. Uh and we also got ourselves embedded into competitive products. So now three competitors, direct competitors are using us under the hood. Uh and, and that is the biggest pride I think I will, I said like we achieved this year. There's one thing like you know selling to your customer which is hard, selling to a competitor is enormously hard. You have to be so good that they actually drop what they're using and use you. So that is the level of technology that we achieved and we want to increase uh on that uh pace with partners, resellers and competitive landscape.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: I love that multi-channel um strategy Ozan, uh really great story. I love what you're creating. If someone wants to find out about your company or they want to find you, where do they go?

Ozan Bilgen: www.base64.ai. Uh you can come in and sign up for free. In fact, every person who signs up gets 100 page free credits. So you can try it yourself, you don't need to put a credit card down or anything, just see it how it's working for you. And we are here to provide AI for all types of documents: invoices, IDs, passports, forms, audio files, movie files, and so forth. We support 2,800 different document types that you can come in and sign up and try it yourself.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well you heard it from Ozan directly. Um I was wan- to give a big shout out for you, to you for joining today. And to all, all our listeners for listening. It means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us. Uh my name is Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on our next episode. Ozan, take care and enjoy your weekend.

Ozan Bilgen: Thank you for hosting.

Jake Aaron Villarreal: Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.  

This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.

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