Episode Transcript
Julia: Welcome to the Be Inspired series of the London Stock Exchange. Very often I do these things in the London Stock Exchange, but I've actually come to Quantexa's headquarters in London today to meet with Vishal Marria, who is the CEO and founder of Quantexea, which is a company doing some remarkable things, and I couldn't be more delighted to be exploring your journey with you, in part because one of the first times we really spent time together was celebrating you reaching unicorn status on the balcony of the Exchange. With your family, where I think I probably got a more personal understanding of your journey than a lot of people might have had, and it's still very close to my heart today. So let's start with that journey. What's led to the creation of Quantexa and what's your vision for it?
Vishal: Well, firstly, thank you for those kind words, Julia. It's a huge privilege to host you here today in our HQ in London, and we've been on a journey here at Quantexa since we started in 2016. In some cases, it feels a bit like yesterday that we started, and we're over 850 people now worldwide. We're in 18 countries around the world, supporting over 20,000 users who are coming in every morning and using our platform and our capabilities to either help them protect their organisations, help them to drive efficiencies within their organisations, or help them grow their organisations by using the best of trusted data, the best AI as part of their day-to-day workings. And it's been a journey. In one respect, we've achieved a lot, and in one respect there's so much more to do. I use the phrase internally a lot 'plenty done, but plenty more to'.
Julia: You're only getting started.
Vishal: And we're just getting started. Why did we go on this journey with Quantexa? Many people saw the power of data, but one of the biggest challenges to get this value from data was trying to bring this data together.
Julia: To knit it together.
Vishal: To knit it together, to stitch it together. You know, organisations had data in these different silos. Those silos could have data coming from potentially when you've acquired a business as you inorganically grew the business through partnerships or organically grew the businesses through different countries you went into and so on and so forth. So siloed data were being created right across the enterprise. People knew that if I could somehow connect the UK data with the US data or with the European data and try to bring this together, there is substantial value. But they couldn't do it. I've always said for a very long time, if you can apply your decision on context, you will make more powerful decisions, more trusting decisions. So if you're buying a house, you never buy a house by looking through the letterbox.
Julia: You look at the street, you look at schools, you look the hospitals nearby.
Vishal: Precisely. You look at all the outside information. So you're bringing in external information, schools, bars, bistros, restaurants, crime rates, how much did other properties sell for in the neighbourhood? You're bringing external information to make that, to support your decision.
Julia: And then you want to know whether there's a leaky tap behind that letterbox.
Vishal: Then you want to know what's the internal info? Does it have a leaky tap? Does it any subsidence? So what you're fundamentally now doing, you're bringing in the internal information of the property or the house to say, what does that provide insight? And then you bring it all together and then you make a decision. Do I want to buy, yes or no? And if I do want to, how much do I want to pay? So as a human, you are fundamentally contextualising data, internal and external, to make that decision. It's the same thing for an enterprise. If I want to understand, are you a high risk customer? I want to know your KYC information, your transactions, your payment data. I want understand more patterns about you. But I also want to understand external information. Do you have companies where you are director of companies that have become bankrupt or are insolvent? Because again, by using that information and your internal information, I can better risk assess, do I still want you as a client? Or do I want to provide you more services as a client? Because if you're a good client, you pay your bills on time and so on.
Julia: I want to give you more.
Vishal: I want to provide and support you in a different way. So just like how you bring together internal and external data in buying a house. For an organisation like a bank, you want to do the same. And the same is true for government. This contextualising data has been at the core and has been the core to the DNA of the business since we started.
Julia: And can I ask a question about that? In the relative role of what you do as a company, to what degree are you supporting your clients to really be able to shape and understand their context and even decide what it is in the first place? Versus saying, okay, we can give you the tools to knit it together? Because in a sense, they're increasingly inextricably linked, I think. If you think of these things and the old silos that organisations did, there's a sort of, the technology is facilitating a cultural shift as well in the way organisations think and behave with their data. Is that what you're finding?
Vishal: You're spot on. And this has been a journey for our clients, but a journey of the industry for decades. The old cliché from my consulting days, 'people, process, technology, data', and you've got to look at all streams of that, and now AI. The power of having trusted data, contextualised data, to drive the best value out of AI has been huge. Now, what's happened in the last few years? This has moved away from a lab conversation that I used to have in the data labs to much more of a board-level conversation.
Julia: Tangible, real-world things.
Vishal: Tangible, real-world examples with tangible, real- world outcomes. And those outcomes are driving impact for our clients today. So it's now a set of forces all coming together, and AI is driving this. When you have deployed your platform on a trusted fabric of data, it is materially changing how you go to market as an organisation, how you manage your risk. And the impact and results are truly tremendous for our clients. And for me, on a geeky level, I'm loving it.
Julia: And you've only just got started.
Vishal: We've just got started.
Julia: Because the use cases, I mean, you could use the word infinite the wrong way as hyperbole, but in a sense, it's true. I think over the time, and in part because of the introduction of AI, the range and frame of use cases that Quantexa has been put to has just changed exponentially. Is your sense of not only who your clients should be, could be and now are, but also what you are as a company and who you service and in service of what, the purpose is kind of the same, but the landscape is shifting quite radically, isn't it?
Vishal: You're spot on, and it's a great observation, Julia. So my background and many of my co-founders were in financial services and in government. Two great places to start. Some people said I was crazy to go after financial services and government as my first.
Julia: Possibly two of the hardest parts of the ecosystem to penetrate in some ways, but with the greatest need as well.
Vishal: Greatest need, but also some other very important factors. The non-functional requirements of deploying in those two industries is very critical. Scale. I am processing for some of my clients an exabyte of data. Quantexa, the reason why we came up with the word Quantexa, it's the exabyte data at the end. The quant was for quantitative analytics.
Julia: Yeah, yeah.
Vishal: You know, we have got that, and we've got that scale. When you're talking with the likes of HSBC Bank or UK government or other clients like Vodafone, you're talking about a large corpus of data, siloed from different product lines or different industries or different geographies, but you're taking about a mammoth of scale. All of transactions for all of your customers for the last three years. All of the KYC records for all of your customers for the last seven years. This is scale. So going into those industries, first off, you are building a DNA in your business of scale. The second thing of going in those industries is the high bar of scrutiny when it comes to things like model risk management, model governance, transparency of the models. This was, again, in the DNA of me when we started, but in the DNA of the business.
Julia: And then it becomes foundational to all the other use cases.
Vishal: And so any time we think about a new feature, a new capability, a new go-to-market motion for a new product, this is fundamental to Quantexa, because we serve highly regulated markets.
Julia: I want to move on to your journey as a leader of the organisation because the evolution of this company is phenomenal. And you're only getting started. How do you feel you've taken your organisation through that, and how do you lead through that?
Vishal: Being a leader and being a leader in a market which is moving at a pace. I've been working in this field for 20 plus years, but the rate of pace right now that we are witnessing is a once in a generation opportunity for anyone who is involved in the world of data and AI. A once in a generation opportunity. That fundamentally excites me. Trying to do things with data to drive insights. The power that we have seen witnessed and the impact we are providing to society, honestly allows me to, A, go home, spend time with my family knowing that we've just made substantial impact to society. That impact is something that we distil right through our culture in the business. It's in our values. If you continue to put the customer at the centre, to everything you do, you're going to be successful. So that view, that culture, that value of making sure you're doing right by your employees, you're right by you clients, you're do right by partners, you're done right by investors, things will happen.
Julia: I've said this phrase, 'the right thing to do is the right thing to do'. It's very simple, actually. One of my observations is that you describe it as reinvention. To me, it's that constant evolution that the person running a business has to be responding to where the business is going next and next and next, and shifting and taking the helm and moving it in certain directions. And then identifying that the most important thing you need to do is surround yourself by really good people who can go on that journey with you. But it's through that kind of common lens of purpose.
Vishal: And that mustn't change. Connecting data to empower people and machines to make better decisions is at the core to Q. That mission mustn't change. And your other point is spot on as well, Julia. My dad came to this country in 1961 from India, and he worked all hours that God could give him. When I was at school, I finished school, most kids would go home and do homework. I went to my parents' cash and carry. I worked. I used to work on weekends. And so I learned first-hand a lot about business. And I learned so much, so much about business, this little word called profit. How do you make profit?
Julia: It matters.
Vishal: It does matter. And clients want me to make profit because if I don't make profit one day, this is not a sustainable business.
Julia: They want to be able to commit their data to your sustainable business.
Vishal: Correct.
Julia: How are you finding navigating how we put the really positive case out there in the country about why this stuff could unlock so much value for people?
Vishal: An awesome question. AI has tremendous value. For example, an organisation using deep learning, machine learning, generative AI to support a use case like detecting and preventing human trafficking, sex trafficking, children trafficking is a very, very important use case. I will not listen to anyone who will say to me that AI does not impact society positively in a use case like this.
Julia: Or in diagnostics in medicine.
Vishal: Or in healthcare. Or helping organisations identify patterns to become more efficient. AI is transforming every single process, every single task in every single industry. Those organisations that are investing money, time, in getting that data foundation right, to then put the different use cases of AI on top to service different areas of an organisation are going to be true winners.
Julia: They are going be the people creating the value of the future.
Vishal: They are going to be creating the values for the future for them and for society. You know, I give you a great example. So we launched earlier this year a product which we've been working in R&D for about 18 to 24 months called Q-Assist. It was launched at our QuantCon earlier this year. And we've been on this journey. From creating data products coming out of the platform to having a secure protocol using MCP to drive insights to then go into a range of different large language models through agents, through a full on secure framework, an agentic framework, to a human or a machine so they can ask a question.
Julia: Of that data set.
Vishal: It transforms the way people and machines interact with data to make decisions. And this is decision intelligence. This is moving the industry from business intelligence to decision intelligence
Julia: So based on what you've learnt to date and the phrase that we've been using throughout this is you're only ‘getting started’. So what would you tell other entrepreneurs based on the journey you've been on what would your advice be?
Vishal: Well, I think there's probably there's an order of magnitude of points but I'll try to pick three. The first one for me I know it's a bit of a cliché, 'culture'. We came up with this acronym called 'DATA' the D for determination; we have to be determined. Honestly I didn't come to the party just to be a number. We came with purpose. A, Ambition. We need to be ambitious. Ambitious of that North Star to be the decision intelligence leader is our ambition. We will be it. Teamwork. Teamwork is at the core to Q. Get the right people in the room to make those hard decisions and get this delivered. And the last A is accountability. We have to be accountable. I'm accountable to my clients my shareholders, my people, my partners and they're accountable back for us. Accountability is critical. So DATA is a true part to our value and a true big component to the culture of the business. So first in culture. The second thing I would say to an entrepreneur it is so important to communicate to the company as much as you communicate to your clients to communicate to the company of the North Star vision of the key word ‘why’ are we doing this?
Julia: The purpose.
Vishal: The purpose. And that why that purpose you recruit incredibly smart people who will make very incredibly smart decisions.
Julia: So long as they know why.
Julia: It's giving your own people the context, isn't it?
Vishal: Giving your own people the context. And then the third piece. Do not ever underestimate investment. The power of delivering to your promise. The power to take investment and deliver back to your shareholders is really critical to the success of your business. And you know again coming back to starting Q and where we sit today and you know we've had to make some really big decisions. And you know some of them do we take investment? Do we not? Do we expand here? Do we acquire not? The buck stops with me. It's so important when it comes down to communication, culture, investment strategy when it's running. For any leader who's about to embark on this journey it's a really important point.
Julia: My sense is from here I mean the world remains your oyster. The vision for what Quantexa is seeking to do is remarkable. It is at the apex of as you say one of the most rapid changes for good that we've been through at any point in the last however many years. And to have a homegrown British company that is driving so much of this value proposition is wonderful to see. Congratulations on where you've got to. It's been a real pleasure to come here today and to learn even more about the journey. So thank you very much.
Vishal: Thank you for today as well. It's been a great interview. Thank you.
Julia: Pleasure.
