How a weekend hack became a multimillion-dollar AI startup | Adit Abraham (Co-founder & CEO at Reducto)

Adit Abraham is the co-founder and CEO of Reducto, which helps leading AI teams extract and structure data from complex documents and spreadsheets in their pipeline. Within 6 months of launching, Reducto went from 0→7 figures in ARR. Reducto has grown to process tens of millions of pages monthly for companies ranging from startups to Fortune 10 enterprises. They just announced a $24M Series A. Before Reducto, Adit was a Product Manager at Google, working on Ads and Search, and conducted machine learning research at MIT's Media Lab.

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In today’s episode, we discuss:

• How listening to customers revealed an opportunity to pivot
• The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough
• Landing a Fortune 10 customer
• A technical founder's guide to sales
• Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey
• Advice for founders: “You’re going to fail”
• Much more

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Referenced:

• Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com/
• Chetan Puttagunta: https://www.linkedin.com/in/chetanputtagunta/
• Diana Hu: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sdianahu/
• Liz Wessel: https://www.linkedin.com/in/elizabethwessel/
• Raunak Chowdhuri: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sauhaarda/
• Reducto: https://reducto.ai/
• Scale AI: https://scale.com/
• Stripe: https://stripe.com/
• Textract: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/
• Y Combinator: https://www.ycombinator.com/

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Where to find Adit:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aditabraham/

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Where to find Brett:

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brett-berson-9986094/
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/brettberson

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Where to find First Round Capital:

• Website: https://firstround.com/
• First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
• Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
• This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast

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Timestamps:

(00:00) Hackathons, YC, and an unexpected pivot

(05:23) The weekend project that became Reducto's breakthrough

(09:11) How customer signal led to PDF processing

(14:46) Landing a Fortune 10 customer

(22:42) Building “transferable features”

(25:58) How caring beats sales skills in startup growth

(30:28) The strategy behind Reducto's horizontal expansion

(36:18) Hire slow, go-to-market fast

(41:45) A technical founder's guide to sales

(43:45) “You’re going to fail”

(46:27) Why startups win

(48:30) Key insights from Reducto's fundraising journey

(51:43) Less structure, more impact

(55:00) How frustrations shaped Reducto’s culture

(57:35) The question you should always ask in meetings