Meet Rob Carpenter of Valyant AI in Cherry Creek

Today we’d like to introduce you to Rob Carpenter.

Rob, can you briefly walk us through your story – how you started and how you got to where you are today.
Valyant was founded in 2017 when I was in London acquiring a custom software development company for my then company AppIt Ventures. I was at the British History Museum looking at the Rosetta stone. It was an important part of human history that helped us to translate ancient hieroglyphics. Given the metropolitan nature of London and the conflict based background of the artifact, there wasn’t much information available about it in the museum.

The initial concept for what became Valyant’s first product was actually a holographic museum curator that could give you tours and answer questions about various items within the museum. It was at this point that I realized if we could pull off building a digital museum curator, we could also build digital employee assistants. Fast forward several years later and our first product is going to be a conversational AI platform (think Siri, Google Home or Alexa) for fast food drive-through. Our AI is capable of greeting customers, taking their order and answering questions.

Has it been a smooth road?
It has not been a very smooth experience, but that’s fairly standard for most entrepreneurial journeys. For us, the biggest challenge that we encountered was the lack of maturity with current artificial intelligence software. We thought things like conversational AI were essentially solved problems and we just needed to come up with unique ways for people to use the technology (hence digital employees and digital museum curators).

We realized pretty quickly how naive we were in this regard and as a result, we had to make a small pivot from building front end interfaces to actually developing our own proprietary conversational AI system. It required retooling our focus, some of our team, our expectations, the amount of capital we needed to raise and ultimately realistic assessments of what types of products we could actually bring to market. Taken together, this small pivot was both in line with our original vision, and ultimately part of the work of any startup. Going from an idea or concept to an actual product in the market, that creates value and hopefully possesses some type of competitive barrier that makes it hard for competitors to release competing products.

We’d love to hear more about your business.
As was previously mentioned, our company and what we’re known for is developing conversational AI for fast food drive-through. What sets us apart is the fact that we were the first company that actually got a product into the market. We’ve since been contacted by most of the major fast food companies in the US and the existing technology vendors in the market looking to partner.

What I’m most proud of as a company is the team we’ve been able to assemble. Half of the engineers at Valyant have either been chief technology officers (CTO) or founders of their own tech companies. Average development experience is 10-15 years with several people on the team who have gone through the process of scaling a company and being acquired by a larger firm. It’s been this experience that our team possesses that has allowed us to make such significant progress with developing what is an exceptionally complicated platform. On top of everything our team brings to this problem, they’re also just wonderful human beings who are a lot of fun to spend time with.

Is our city a good place to do what you do?
Denver is the best place in the US to start a new company. People are the lifeblood of any organization and without great people, you’ll be hard-pressed to build a successful company. Due to the natural beauty, economic vibrancy and overall great environment, Denver has attracted amazing people from all over the country. It was because of that, Denver has held the distinction for a long time as the number one place in the country for 24-34-year-old.

This economic opportunity has also attracted major companies to the area like Google, Amazon, Slack and Apple. This in turn brings more great talent to the area and creates a positive cycle of opportunity.

On top of being able to attract an incredible mix of talented people, Denver is also far more affordable than places like San Francisco or Seattle which reduces the cost of hiring new employees and providers Denver companies the ability to build more and go further with less capital. Anyone reading this and thinking about starting a new business should absolutely consider Denver.

Contact Info:

• Address: 50 S. Steele Street, Suite 505, Denver, CO 80209
• Website: https://valyant.ai/#/
• Email: info@valyant.ai
• Twitter: https://twitter.com/valyantai

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