Deepak Shrivastava is a seasoned entrepreneur in tech, early-stage growth, and finance, spanning Fintech, SaaS, travel, and healthcare. As Founder/CEO of Sunrise AI, he leads an AI-powered credit risk assessment start-up. Formerly CFO of The Flex Company (YC16), he was a finalist for the 2022 LA Times CFO Leadership Award. He co-founded Porter & Sail and Hotel Credits in the travel tech sector, managing operations from inception to sale. Deepak’s background includes early GTM roles at Dropbox and a decade in investment banking at Morgan Stanley. He’s committed to non-profit work and arts education, with his entrepreneurial journey featured on various podcasts.
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Alka Bahal: Welcome to the Think Factory’s Workplace Podcast, powered by OGC Solutions. My name is Alka Bihal. I’m a partner with Outside General Counsel Solutions and the chair of our Corporate Immigration Services Group, and I’ll be your host today. I am very excited to have with me here, Deepak Srivasta, co-founder of Sunrise AI, providing AI-powered customer intelligence. Welcome to the podcast, Deepak.
Deepak Shrivastava: Thank you, Alka, I appreciate you having me.
Alka Bahal: Can you tell us a little bit about Sunrise AI to start off?
Deepak Shrivastava: No problem, and thank you. I know, I love doing these sort of conversations because they’re just a lot more organic, so appreciate you doing all the hard work and the heavy lifting here. But to answer your question, Sunrise AI is a customer intelligence platform where purpose-built specifically for go-to-market teams. We have an acute focus on post-sales teams. So think folks like customer success managers, account managers.
What we do for them is unify a lot of their enterprise data, and that lives across their CRMs, their support platforms, payment systems, data warehouses. And then we layer on proprietary AI to help those customer success and account management teams actually know their customers better. So think of it like a mini-chat GPT, but trained and fine-tuned just on your company’s data. So reps can ask anything from which customer is at churn risk to what feature requests are trending, and they get real answers in real time.
Alka Bahal: That’s really exciting. And so Sunrise AI is not your only ongoing adventure. You’ve got some other things in the pipeline as well, right?
Deepak Shrivastava: I’m a serial entrepreneur, and by way of intro, in a former life, I was an investment banker, spent some early days at Dropbox, and now I’m just in the business of building and scaling companies, which has been a ton of fun, and obviously just a wonderful privilege.
So after what feels like a lifetime ago, spending about a decade in investment banking at Morgan Stanley, and I spent the bulk of my career actually on the West Coast and in Hong Kong, out in Asia. I’m a snobby native New Yorker, so finally back here on my home turf building this latest company, but my previous stints in the startup space both involved travel tech or travel slash entertainment. I had a solopreneurship about 15 years ago where I essentially had a DJ and music entertainment agency.
I was bringing talent from mostly Los Angeles and Vegas to venues across Asia. So think of clubs like places in Shanghai, Taipei, Bangkok, Hong Kong, New Delhi. So that was tons of fun, but I didn’t wanna be the 40-year-old at the club, so I moved back to the States.
And my next couple of businesses were in travel and hospitality. I was a co-founder at a company called Porter & Sale, which essentially we built mobile apps for luxury hotels and served as a upsell platform to help their guests extend their stays, upgrade their stays, and book additional amenities at the hotels and resorts that we worked with. In a different iteration, I also was the CEO at a company called Hotel Credits, which essentially was a glorified Groupon for a lot of those same luxury hotels that we used to work with.
And this was in COVID times where folks could get access to heavily discounted gift certificates to stay at these wonderful properties and with elongated expiration dates, no blackout dates. So that was tons of fun. And this is my next business, Sunrise AI, which is headstrong in the enterprise B2B and AI space.
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