ivee has just raised £1m Seed: An interview with Amelia Miller, Co-founder of ivee

0:00Scaling Europe Host:Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe Show presented by Deal. I'm Sir Johnson. Today I'm joined by Amelia Miller, one of the co-founders of Ivy, who's got some very exciting news to announce. Amelia, take it away.

0:10Amelia Miller:Hello, Sir. Thank you for having me. Yes, we are really excited. We're announcing the first close of our seed round. We set out to raise a million dollars, which we've raised, but we're going for more. But we want to announce this as our first close because we've also got some really exciting expansion news as well.

0:28Scaling Europe Host:amazing well look why don't we just touch on the expansion news and then we can go deep on the round who's coming in and what for and all that kind of good stuff nice yeah absolutely well if

0:36Amelia Miller:anyone's been following us for a while which most of you probably haven't um but we actually started as a pure recruitment play here at ivy and the initial problem that we sought to tackle was helping candidates get back into the workforce after career breaks we launched about 18 months ago my co-founder is my sister Lydia and we built our MVP after watching our mom experience that exact problem but what's been really interesting is over the past I would say 18 months but it's actually been over the past eight months really is you know just seeing what AI is doing to the workforce both from a talent job seeker perspective but also inside organizations and how fundamentally every organization is now saying i don't know if i'm allowed to swear on here but saying for lack of a better phrase shit we now need to become an ai company what does that mean well we need to retrain our workforce retool rehire so that we can remain competitive um and we're seeing that across every single industry and every single organization and because we were so close to the labor market in our you know in our infancy and in our um in our launch it was a no-brainer for us to to expand quite broadly um and enter the ai upskilling game and so we're super excited to announce our expansion in in becoming an ai upskilling and talent network amazing and so

2:04Scaling Europe Host:you're going to be upskilling the talent network and people who are kind of in the companies

2:08Amelia Miller:already to kind of help them make the most of ai yeah exactly i mean my favorite quote from last year which I literally say every day came from the CEO of Microsoft Satya Nadella and he said every company is now an AI company or it will die and that is absolutely what we're seeing in every single conversation we have with c-suites which is how do we you know how do we do this how do we hire the right talent how do we redeploy talent because you know as you know unemployment is rising AI driven layoffs are here they are accelerating especially in the grad market especially in you know highly automatable jobs but a lot of companies are thinking about how can they identify AI fluency within their organization and then redeploy that talent elsewhere into a lot of these new roles and new teams that are being created and right now there's no infrastructure for upskilling your workforce training that talent identifying that talent but then also hiring that talent if you need to bring in external you know external AI fluency into the organization And I think something that Lydia and I have witnessed, and it probably rings true for anyone watching or listening, is there's so many new AI tools out there, to be honest.

3:21Amelia Miller:You know, the AI tool overwhelm is real. There's a bajillion new tools that get launched. And, you know, you open your LinkedIn feed and you see, you know, Claude just launched its Nimbus 2000 model. and you're there like oh my god I'm still using chat GPT and I'm I feel really anxious and that's something we hear time and time again from individuals but also from organizations that are still stuck on just using copilot or just using chat GPT and I think what's really missing it when we think about AI fluency in the workforce is we need to get back to basics you know I think something that potentially Silicon Valley are forgetting when you know a lot of these these founders say Silicon Valley of course it's happening everywhere but launching these really amazing products and the technology is getting better and better and better but actually your everyday person isn't using AI or they're using it in its most basic form or their prompt engineering sucks and actually what we found is going into organizations and getting back to the basics and actually giving their workforce that aha moment with AI has been extremely powerful and that's what can really move the needle as well and when you think about like ai fluency and the skill set

4:38Scaling Europe Host:do you have a a hierarchy in your own mind of like okay what is the most basic skills that maybe people are using at the moment but they need to be really good at and then how what does that hierarchy look at from like just using chat gpt to agentic technology yeah it's a really good

4:53Amelia Miller:question i break it down pretty simply in into just two key areas the first and the main skill which is not going anywhere is prompt engineering. You know, you don't need to be technical. The word engineering, in my opinion, is a massive throw off for a lot of people. It's copywriting, isn't it? It's the way you talk to AI to elicit the best response. And if any organization is using Copilot or Chachewiti or Gemini or whatever their LLM of choice is, as we all know, it's only as good as the prompts you give it. Most people cannot prompt. That's a fact. And that is one of the easiest skills to learn, but it's the one that can be a massive game changer for organizations because you go from going, please rewrite this email or please summarize this email to actually using persona prompting, chain of thought prompting, prompt stacking, you know, all of these terms, which most people, as I said, just really don't know about.

5:46Amelia Miller:The next level is the workflow automation and the agent building. What we're starting to see from a lot of forward thinking organizations, which are few and far between don't get me wrong is okay great my workforce are using llms they're talking to them it's this you know one-way street because you need to initiate the conversation you need to initiate the ask you you are the trigger essentially how do we move from that to getting all of our employees actually building out their own workflow automations and agents that is the the holy grail that most organizations want to get to but right now they are nowhere near there because they either don't have the buy-in from their employees.

6:27Amelia Miller:And one crucial thing here is a lot of employees don't want to, you know, AI themselves out of their job. And so you see this really interesting dynamic where there's some resistance in the internal workforce because, you know, they really don't want to automate themselves out of work. And so what we do when we go into organizations is we really try and, I guess, nip that fear in the bud and say, no, this is actually going to make you a far better employee. And fundamentally, upskilling on AI is the single best thing you can do for your career. Whether you stay in that organization, whether you're job hunting, whether you want to get a promotion, learning this technology now is game changing.

7:10Amelia Miller:I personally believe the future of jobs, instead of having a white collar versus blue collar and what we're going to start seeing is actually ai fluent versus non-ai fluent candidates or employees and that divide we're already see we're already seeing widening widening widening and those that have ai fluency already are commanding a 56 wage premium across all industries as an average according to pwc they released a great report late last year what our thesis is our big bet is that the ai talent war is going to emanate outside of engineering and research and hit every single um every single function and we're already seeing that jobs non-technical jobs citing generative ai have increased 323 percent year on year which is crazy and like i mean we are this is very much the beginning of the j curve because as a total percent of jobs it's still minuscule um but of course we we believe and think that that's going to rise and so being able to access and assess ai fluency both within the organization but also from external talent i think is is going to be the the new norm yeah i mean and

8:22Scaling Europe Host:we're still so early on in this and that you think that it within like five or ten years 20 years the the rate of adoption the increase in the capability of technologies is just going to be crazy and so it's like getting upskilled now is a huge advantage right like in 10 years time it's going to be required as a base baseline now as you say like so few people are really making the most out of the tools that if you can do it amazingly well you can bring such value um i want to talk about the way that you and your sister are using ai because you know i always see on linkedin that you're sharing like nan workflows automations you're building an ai native first company and lots of people talk about it but it feels like you two really do live and breathe the new technologies and i think one of the interesting things that we spoke about last time i interviewed you was about both of you being non-technical and i thought that was really interesting because it almost forced you to adopt these tools that are enabling people always talk about how like now anybody can build technology i was like well actually youtube really it did really feel like you were living a lot of that because you weren't technical you had to adopt these tools really quickly and so it does feel like you two are very ai native and that you you've got a lot of great use cases so i just wanted to like see what kind of things are you using ai for in your job as founders yeah great question i mean what aren't we using it for

9:39Amelia Miller:genuinely it's anything manual anything non-human if it's a task that does not require human nuance AI does it for us and that is anything from you know straight I guess our sales funnel is a good example like a lot of people have maybe quite a clunky sales funnel we actually did a masterclass this week on this but you know it's and this is why agent building is really important we love NAN it's a great tool for this but of course there's loads of others that we've tried and unused but i guess if we take an example of an inbound comes in ai is categorizing it based on all of our documentation from what our icp is previous sales that have converted um if it's categorized high a call will come you know a call go straight in with the founder directly um if not we have an automation where they're sent information every sales call we use for example granola that's transcribed that's sent through to crm aonative crm atio a proposal is immediately drafted through gamma gamma have literally just launched an integration with claude um so that it can read your sales calls and immediately build a proposal before you even need to prompt it so all of these and again if anyone's confused with this or going oh my god my brain's exploding like that's exactly why we built ivy to try and reduce that tool overwhelm and only tell you and show you the best in class because there are so many tools out there.

11:10Amelia Miller:But yeah, I guess a short answer to your question is we use it a lot. What we've just launched on Ivy as part of our expansion is a AI tool discovery platform. And that's free available to all. So if you literally, you know, Google Ivy or AI Ivy and go to us, you will be able to type in something that you want to achieve. or let's say you're a social media manager and you want like a caption writing tool we curate and take kind of take the knowledge in our brain of what we're using what the internet's using we have a knowledge graph that maps what's being said on reddit or twitter or github or big fundraiser announcements or patents and we will show you the best in class tool for that particular request because that is helping people quiet the noise around AI because a lot of people want to start using it but they just don't know what the best tool to use is.

12:05Something we're building out as well well what we've already built out is then having an AI

12:10Amelia Miller:skills profile so that is a living breathing profile with your AI stack and you know you literally have a visual representation of that stack and then it's peer-to-peer knowledge sharing as well so you know it's great using a tool but actually why don't you document the workflows you're doing why don't you film a loom video of you actually using that um and then share it with the net with with the ivy network so that one social media manager to another can can watch someone using something like poppy ai and go oh okay i could see that working for me i'll give it a try i'll i'll pay for it because every ai tool unfortunately sits behind a paywall and so not knowing where to where to go you know you're not gonna you're not gonna spend$1.99 per month just to try something so yeah super exciting um what we do a lot at Ivy is micro upskilling which is something I'm super bullish on in the age of AI you know gone are the days where we learn Excel via a 50-hour course and then it sat on our CV for 10 years unfortunately the half-life of AI skills is compressing so much so you need to be constantly micro upskilling constantly learning the new tools and crucially knowing when a tool has been knocked off the top spot so for example we've just gotten rid of klaviyo which is our email software and we've moved on to active campaign which is much more an ai enabled um but being very nimble in your tech stack as a startup is really important because what was best in class six months ago is probably no longer best in class

13:41Scaling Europe Host:yeah i think that's one of the difficulties even the llms people are like why are you still using chat gpt over gemini or why or claude or you know like every it changes so quickly um and that you almost feel like oh god i feel like an idiot like i'm still using chat gpt for this when everyone's talking about how like gemini is the dominant llm at the moment um and like let's talk about this transition then because now you're very focused on ai upskilling how did that resonate

14:04Amelia Miller:with investors when you went out to fundraise great question so with existing investors we something we really want to do which is like you know why i'm even speaking about it publicly is like we really want to normalize pivoting expanding changing your offering moving with the market because it's something that most early stage companies do you know pretty much every company in its first year is going to pivot pretty drastically i think and even i when i look on social media platforms you see the story zero to five million arr in six months and you're like oh my god your initial idea has to be it or you failed um but that is not the case even the biggest companies in the world right now are pivoting take multiverse they've doubled down on ai upskilling read.co.uk they were once a bread and butter job board well they're now read.ai and so i think yeah normalizing a pivot and normalizing moving with the market especially the world that we're in right now where things are moving bloody fast it's yeah it's something I'm passionate about, as you might be able to tell.

15:09Amelia Miller:But in terms of new investors, it's been, I mean, the pitch has just, it just lands so much better versus our initial narrative that we had 18 months ago. It's, yeah, it's game changing. It's where people are throwing money and obviously it's sexy for investors. So it's been, yeah, it's been really positive in that sense.

15:29Scaling Europe Host:And at what point did you realise in the journey that maybe that this was a direction that you needed to go in you know was it really strong market pull like at what moment did you realize okay this is the direction we have to take the business in interestingly it was when we went on

15:43Amelia Miller:dragon's den so we filmed dragon's den before we even had a product 18 months ago and our initial offering as i mentioned was helping it's actually helping specifically women get back to work after career breaks we filmed 16 months later our episode aired which was back in october of last year that was quite game-changing because it essentially amplified the fact that and i'm not going to sugarcoat this dei budgets have zeroed no one is throwing money at this problem the buy-in just wasn't there from senior to senior stakeholders we were already thinking about this pivot but that was the you know essentially it just poured so much fuel on the fire and it amplified the problems that we could already see in our narrative.

16:31Amelia Miller:And it was at that point that we were like, right, now is the time. We're completely shifting gears here. Now, it's not that we have moved completely away from our initial problem that we're solving. Fundamentally, we still want to make sure that everybody can find meaningful employment. But we know that the best way to get a job right now is to become AI fluent. And so for us to help our initial users, plus millions billions more people this just made so much sense yeah absolutely and um yeah it's

17:04Scaling Europe Host:interesting because like lots of drag and den companies are very consumer focused and you know so it's like their their court offering often doesn't change that much in the sense that like oh maybe you're like a food and beverage company and you see your sales skyrocket as a result it must be an interesting like filming this so so long ago and then having all this time to change and iterate your product before it got released i mean it must be a strange experience yeah it really wasn't to be honest it was like oh it was something that was like really hard as a

17:32Amelia Miller:founder to grapple with because you don't want to tell the world that you're changing because and I'm going to be really honest you see it as a failure you know you see it as oh our original idea you know couldn't cut the mustard that's a bad thing um actually it's not you know and it you what I've you know spent some time over the last few months doing a lot is is becoming okay with that actually and and and really reframing it as a positive and saying actually no if we want to build the business we want to build and scale to the lengths that we want to scale this is a fundamental business decision and you have to view it as such and like we're seeing it in our revenue so it's i mean it's kind of good now that we've done it and we're like okay it worked kind of thing but beforehand it was definitely scary yeah it's interesting because you have a much more

18:21Scaling Europe Host:public profile than most founders at your stage of the journey so most people will just pivot and you wouldn't even notice unless you were one of their handful of customers they would just pivot change the messaging and most people wouldn't notice because you've been so public about the problem that you're solving the journey that you've been on and that it's i imagine it must be much harder for you than it would be for most founders to accept the pivot yeah exactly it's

18:43Amelia Miller:like definitely a blessing and a curse and i remember a lot in our last interview i was um talking about how I hated stealth mode, people that build in stealth mode. And now I'm like, oh, I wish we built in stealth mode. No, I'm joking. I obviously don't wish that. Building in public has been so good, but it just means we have to get the message out now even more because a lot of people have been following us and think they know what we do. And now we need to tell the world we're expanding and this is our narrative and we're drawing a line here.

19:13Scaling Europe Host:Yeah, it's really interesting that now you have to undo so much of the great work that you've done building your brand building you know letting people know the problem that you solve and now actually we're changing it slightly and so we've got to kind of almost go back on it and undo it um but let's also talk about so go ahead no i was saying it's been a really interesting

19:29Amelia Miller:project to be honest and we work with we actually through boulder turn the goats shout out um we got this pro bono um project with a comms agency who do like ubers comms and pepsi's comms and it was it's been so interesting doing a project with them around actually how do you tell the market you're expanding do you do you do it publicly do you do it subtly we made the conscious decision no we want to do it publicly we don't want to have this subtle change we don't want to confuse anyone um but it's actually been really fun we've obviously been documenting it all so stay

20:04Scaling Europe Host:tuned for that content yeah i mean you guys yeah your content's amazing i feel you on tiktok and it's like all day every day there's so much content coming from you and the team so i'm sure there's going to be um going to be a lot coming but before we wrap up i want to talk about some of the investors so you've raised a million dollars of course like stephen bartlett is coming on um i think flight fund is coming on as well can you talk a bit more about kind of what type

20:26Amelia Miller:of organizations who's backing you yeah yeah so yeah fun wise um as you mentioned there stephen bartlett is on board he's great he's yeah we we have a lot of time for him super super helpful social impact enterprises a fund have come on board who are really really great and they care a lot about our mission fundamentally we are a mission-driven organization that will never go away we want to make sure that everybody can learn ai and the ai fluency is you know available to every single person because as i mentioned it is going to be the new great divide in the workforce um it's been amazing seeing the government's drive with their ai skills hub and we've we've managed to become their primary events partner there they're upscaling the the their aim is to upskill the entire uk population on ai fundamentally this will mean that we can as a as a nation be at an advantage in this ai race and we want to make sure that we are helping every single person um we also have some great angels we love working with angels we have a lot of time for our angels some notable ones uh we've got some strategy execs at microsoft ai from their super intelligence lab got partner at dawn capital we've got investors from the likes of boulderton uh not the fund sorry individuals and and we yeah we're really excited to have a mixture of brains on board you know we've got people like steven that are game changing from a socials perspective organic media as you mentioned is so important to us it's our biggest lever it's our biggest channel we don't spend on marketing it's all organic um but then we have some some deep experts in the in you know in the industry who are genuinely in the furnace of building these models which is super helpful to understand exactly what's going on behind closed doors or a lot of these large ai companies so yeah we're we love the dynamics of this the first close of this round and we're excited to start working with some of these new partners

22:28Scaling Europe Host:amazing well amelia congratulations it's amazing what you and your sister have built It was such a short space of time. And it's great to see you well-funded for the next stage of your journey. So congratulations again, and thank you for joining me.

22:39Amelia Miller:Thanks, Ed. Thanks for having me. I'll see you later.