With the intent of providing firmographic and technographic data on SMBs, Soleadify was Co-founded by Florin Tufan in 2018. Previously Florin was the Chief Product Officer at T-Me Studios, which is one of the largest mobile app publishers in Europe. Florin has been working in tech for the past 10 years, in various roles: sales, business, marketing, and product. He completed his Bachelor’s degree from Academia de Studii Economice din București, and Marketing from IAA School.
By leveraging the most modern AI and ML technologies, Soleadify constantly crawls the internet to produce 50+ data points on 70M+ companies from around the world. The firm’s clients usually integrate its APIs to streamline internal processes in industries like SMB lending, insurance, management consulting but the firm also has multiple partners in the financials technologies space that use its APIs to build new features in their existing products, features that make use of Soledify’s data enrichment capabilities and ESG data feeds for mid-market companies.
Helping Clients to Create Value
As a firm, Soleadify’s main goal is to focus on clear business outcomes, Florin has witnessed a lot of executives that push the use of AI tools just for the sake of the technology without questioning if that particular tool can bring value to the business.
Like many other geeky CEOs, Florin is also fascinated by innovative tools and use cases but, at the same time, as the leader of the company, doesn’t want to over-engineer Soleadify’s activities so it can be said that his main goal when considering new AI tools is to choose the one that aligns with the firm’s business objectives, help it create value for its customers and can be easily integrated into the existing workflows.
Emerging AI Trends
According to Florin, the future will see AI advancements in two very important and different niches;
- NLP: One of the biggest emerging trends in AI is, of course, language modelling. A particularly difficult challenge in AI since language is intrinsically a very human concept that we “force” computers to adapt to. Florin and his team at Soleadify believe GPT-3 will have a significant impact on AI adoption since it opens the door to so many new use cases, particularly in the world of marketing. And this is where Soleadify fits as well, with more on the understanding rather than creating side, the firm’s ML models are trained to be able to understand the global business world at huge scale and speed.
- Real-World Understanding with Advanced Computer Vision: AI is making it possible for driverless cars and heavy industry automation to heavily increase production speeds for the goods humans need.
- The Use at Scale of Deep Neural Networks: AI is being used to automate the most repetitive decision-making processes across enterprises, allowing easier data interpretation when combining inputs from different and varied sources, such as text, images, and numerical business outcomes (e.g. revenue, order value).
When Covid Came as a Blessing in Disguise
Right after the first Covid outbreak, Soleadify used its NLP and big data capabilities to build a search engine for various medical supplies, which was used by thousands of companies in need.
For Soleadify’s specific niche, Covid-19 has been a blessing in disguise, because the pandemic accelerated digitalization for most businesses, especially for SMBs, which had 2 choices at the start of this pandemic, focus on your online presence or go bankrupt. With this shift, the firm experienced a substantial increase in business data that it could collect and sort.
From Florin’s knowledge, this influx of data happened all over the internet since the beginning of this pandemic, so anyone that’s in the AI industry can be more than thankful to have access to increasing volumes of valuable data, that eventually will be used to build more efficient models and tools.
Tackling Challenges and Getting Prepared for the Future
One of the specific challenges Soleadify is facing right now is company classifications at scale. The models it builds can accurately predict most types of businesses, but there are still edge cases for new emerging industries and companies, one good example would be blockchain companies that still don’t have a specific industry classification. Another issue that challenges Soleadify’s models is the language barrier, the firm’s goal is to collect data on businesses from all over the world, and right now it is trying to find creative solutions to increase its coverage in countries with emerging economies.
Florin says, “In the next years we want to explore new opportunities based on our core technical capabilities, I’m talking about AI-based data extraction, sorting, and delivery. Starting from that three main pillars our goal is to build tools that facilitate access to data about any business in the world.”
Some of these tools that Soleadify is planning to build are:
- an open search engine for companies so that global company information is easily available online, at scale.
- Launching a few free company data APIs to democratize the usage of company data.
- Partnerships with major complementary players for data enrichment.
- Launching a “market trends” offering, where Soleadify can use its data to publish insights on the dynamic business world that it studies.