338. Scaling the World's most adaptable conversational AI for Real Estate w/ VP Singh | Verbaflo

0:00So can you tell us who you are and what you're building? Hi, I am VP Singh. I'm one of the co-founders and chief operating officer of Verbalflow. Verbalflow is the largest AI operating system for real estate in Europe. We currently power about 300 ,000 units across 12 countries. And now we are about to launch our 13th one.

0:17Amardeep Parmar:Wow. So which country did you start? And how did that journey go to? Like, how did you stagger that growth? So we, I mean, our past background is that we have worked in the student accommodation industry in the UK. So we knew it in and out. that was like how we started the journey uh then from there we went into some other uh parallel industries like uh co-living and single family multi-family housing then some of those operators that work in uk they also have got their properties or investments in the other markets in the europe so that's how we expanded into other european markets and then from there on then we learned that okay we can expand into the other geographies then we kept on like expanding other geographies so you said like you've got a background in student accommodation how did you then discover this is the problem that you wanted to solve so two parallel stories which all came together on 20 30th of october 2024 so my background is i used to work for a pms company based out of london uh i joined them right after doing my mba from university of edinburgh i used to manage a team of about 30 odd people they all used to sit in philippines So their job was to take care of all the customer inquiries that were coming.

1:27A lot of these inquiries were very repetitive, which could have been automated if AI existed at that time. And I'm talking about 2021. So I had something in my mind that there should be something about it that we could do. But at that time, there was no chat GPT. There was no APIs from OpenAI or Anthropics. So there was nothing much we could do at that time. So we would use to run it more like a BPO. Then I moved on to another company. Again, same thing. I was managing a team of 24, again sitting in Philippines and doing the same thing. My co-founder, Sainten, he used to run a marketplace called Uniaco, which was the fourth largest global marketplace for students to find accommodation in the international markets, majorly sending students from India, Middle East, and Nigeria into countries like UK, Europe, Australia.

2:12So they were sending about 35 ,000 students every year, but they used to get a lot of inquiry because they were a marketplace. So they were catering to about like 5 million inquiries every year so they had a big team also they had a team of about 550 people in mumbai big team just to cater to all the inquiries that were coming year around 24 7. it was a proper call center there and he could see that i could automate a lot of these things with the ai and by that i'm now talking about about uh start of 2024 so he wanted to do something in the ai so that he could solve this problem because he knew that this problem exists in my marketplace and it could also exist in with the operators also so he took an exit from his previous company he sold us equity to co-founders and other investors and then he pitched this idea to me i was already working in the student housing space so i knew that this problem really is is something that we should be solving and then our third co-founder visek who is the cto uh he also joined in because he was working in a large unicorn company in india in the tech space uh so we all three came together and the rest is the history after that.

3:14Amardeep Parmar:So you've been together for some time now, right? What about that relationship works really well between you? So me and Santhan, first of all, all three of us come from the same college in India. So we all graduated from a college called Indian Institute of Technology, Rurki, IIT Rurki, the most premium tech institute in India. We had overlap of our years. Like I graduated in 2013, Santhan dropped out in 2016. Sorry, I graduated in 2015, Santhan dropped out in 2016. abhishek graduated in 2013 so we had overlap of few years that's how we know each other and me and saintan were also one of the co-founders i mean there were four co-founders in our previous company in 2015 called felloms which was again in real estate space and at that time we were helping working professionals to find accommodations in indian metros that's how we knew each other so we sold that company in 2017 then saintan moved on to start uniaco i moved to uk to do my mba so you obviously that like long background i mean do you know how each other work you don't it is very important if you don't have that it becomes very tough for you to understand because startups are literally like you are getting married to that person right so it's literally i mean that's how i treat it and if you don't know each other very well you just are not going to be there for each other in that time when the time gets tough easy time happy time everyone loves it the the it comes to test when you are going through the tough phase which every company go through at some point of time and you said obviously you had the first company 2015 to 2017 you sold it then when you're coming back to this again and like founding company again what did you do differently because of your experience first time oh my god a lot of a lot of things i mean i i mean there are so in 2015 we were fresh out of college santhan was still in college at that time when he dropped out when we started this so we didn't know how to manage our investment right so we raised two million in seed at that time which was like quite a big round for Indian standards at that time we are talking about 2015 we didn't know how to manage the cash well like where to put the money in we were just making some random decisions based on our gut feeling rather than data back right though we all were very enthusiastic we had good IQ so we knew exactly the problem we wanted to solve the product was very good but we didn't have very good control on the finance function at that time right so that was one problem and second was hiring we were hiring left right and center at that time and we didn't know exactly how what were the going to be the repercussions of that which we learned so we we learned what we are going to do and what we are not going to do uh when we start next and plus we were very sure that we are going to always go into a b2b business not a b2c business so i think these were the three core learning from from that one there are a lot more but we can keep on talking about them for one hour and then when you started this company right because you've like you had different experiences beforehand did it make you more ambitious like with the goals when you first started because you're like if we're going to do this then we're going to go big or what were you kind of dreaming about at the beginning 100 % more ambitious for sure uh but we also wanted to i mean i took my own sweet time of about six years of a break where i did my mba i moved to a new country settled in uh worked in the industry to understand exactly how it works and once i was sure enough that okay i understand the industry well i understand the new geography well i think we can do something good that's how we i mean that was my story for saantan he was already in this country and industry for about seven years though he was based in india but he was traveling very frequently to uk so for him most important thing was that he wanted to build something which he could scale without adding more human count into the organization that was like the core thing that he wanted to solve so i think we had a very similar things that we wanted to achieve and i mean it worked really well for us and then when you started out right so talk us through like how did you get your first like say 10 customers 100 customers like what was that journey like right beginning so our business is very different uh 100 customer is probably we are going to reach that in year two right because all these customers are very large operators so before i go there i think i need to explain what our business is right so we build conversational ai agents for real estate industry and our typical market is anyone who manage more than thousand units under their portfolio right so anyone with at least two to three buildings it could be across multiple geographies it could be in one city in one location doesn't matter uh the largest customer that we have they manage 67 000 units across i think 280 properties in about 100 cities yeah across europe right so so that's the scale i mean the smallest one we have is probably three buildings in three uh cities uh and about i think 970 units or so so that's the smallest customer we have so we we have a big range of that our sweet spot we have seen is anything around five to eight thousand units being managed under one portfolio across uh sometime between 10 to 15 countries and about 10 to 15 properties sorry cities and 10 to 15 properties now these operators are always going to be limited there are limited such operators on the planet etc right so if you look at our overall market size it's about 40 to 50 million units on the planet out of which about 40 are in europe about 40 45 % are in North America and then some in Middle East and Australia combined together.

8:25Southeast Asia, we don't count it because it's a very fragmented market there. So we don't count it in how we calculate our market size. So we focused on that we are going to capture the Europe first, and this is our primary market. And I think we are doing pretty well here. I mean, we are the largest player in Europe right now in this space. And hopefully, we will be the largest prop tech also in next two years.

8:45Amardeep Parmar:So when you're trying to get customers on that kind of scale, right? There's obviously a huge risk involved for that customer. They need to really trust you to be able to decide that, right? Yeah. How did you build that trust to them? It all comes from one, your understanding of the industry, your previous reputation in the industry. If you have done something well, then only they are going to trust their properties with you because it's a big decision for them also. So what our product is doing for them is basically becoming the front face in front of their customers, right? So if a student or if their parents are looking for accommodation or if there is a family who is trying to find a new home in, let's say, Darby, we are the front face.

9:23It's our agent they're talking to, whether they're calling, whether they're sending a WhatsApp message, an email or going to a website. We have to make sure that we are first talking about the brand itself. So every agent that you will find that we have developed for these operators, they are very different because they've got their own personality talking about the brand. And the way and the nuances of each of the operators is always going to be very different. So we have to go into the details and we work like we deploy a proper two, three people team with every operator that we work with so that they understand their business and then build the whole agent for them.

9:56So that's why you won't see our business doing like 1 ,000 customers or 1 ,500 customers. As of now, we are live with about 51 operators across these 12 geographies.

10:06Amardeep Parmar:And yeah, I guess if you're interested in that model as well and how it works and obviously because of your previous background. did that just make you kind of know some of these players already or they heard of you from a previous reputation exactly and we knew them right yeah so we knew them and that always helps because you are so the good thing in our case was since we came from the industry we always knew what we wanted to build and we didn't had to wait for wait to find the product market fit because coming from the industry we knew this will definitely work so let's build the product and deploy it and that's what we did so we started on i mean we incorporated on in october 2024 we built the product for about four months once it was ready we launched it and literally it was a go live with our first customer on 3rd of february 2025 so we didn't have to wait for the product market fit and then one customer takes it then other one says that okay you guys are being used by them let's so someone had to take a bet on you and that we we were lucky enough that someone took a bet on us and they in fact become one of the investors also later on so and well you lose my investments before you came in as well about how you've had a really good hit ratio when you go to events and meeting investors right and when you're looking at investors like how are you able to convert them so quickly and like to make those relationships i think that is all about the business to be very honest i won't say that it is our skill set of raising the funds it's it's more about the business is doing very good uh i mean if you talk to anyone in the residential real estate industry in uk uh you would always hear good things about us because we have like done a massive amount of work for the industry we have saved them like millions of pounds and we have made probably tens of millions of pounds for all of the the customers that we work with combined together right so they always have a good thing good good things to say about us and that always lands well when someone sees your attraction and they're saying okay you are managing these many units which is fine but what are these customers saying about you are they really liking you or you are just going to be another replaceable ai solution and when they talk to them like these you guys are like so deeply entrenched in their whole tech infrastructure so it's not that you are just a add-on layer now you are actually so deep in their workflows and everything that they are doing right now i mean most of our operators when they plan their whole budget verbal flow is already a key part of that along with any other major tech stack that that they are working with so that is the kind of level you have to reach to uh be be able to become the uh that i mean the kind of provider that we become now and then obviously if you're a ceo as well what keeps you busy like where does most your time go like in the average week i am obsessed with our customers my job is only to look after the customers so obviously uh the team will bring in new deals i'm sometimes involved sometimes i don't but now the organization is big enough that we have enough uh departments to take care of so my job is to take care of all the customers starting from the time they are they have signed the contract with us it becomes my responsibility to take care of them then it starts with the onboarding so there is an onboarding team that i manage then there is a customer experience team then there is a customer success team so all three combined together is what i take care of and which part of that is like as you've kind of grown this out right so you've got experience in this market already but is there anything that when you like launched verba flow that you had to learn was like maybe you didn't quite understand the beginning and you've learned throughout this process oh a lot of things and learning literally on the day like every day we are learning something new so for example one thing our initial speed of going into the market was very very quick in terms of landing the deals because it was a new solution everyone was thinking like okay this is nice let's try it these guys are also not costing us much so let's do that now after we did that we also understood that we are selling our product way too cheap when i say way too cheap probably like 120th of the anything available in the market like that cheap right so we also had to make money because obviously we were raising investment and we had to prove that the unit economics is there and we had to hire more number of people and justify the expenses that we were doing so when we started doing that obviously the the deal velocity automatically slows down because now your ticket size that your customer is buying is higher so they have to take longer time to do that but the revenue is very sticky so we are happy to wait for a longer period of time but the revenue that we land now with the new customers is always more than what we used to make earlier i mean that is like probably one of the biggest learning for us and like actually look forward as well right what's the ambitions what's the goals like what are you setting yourself uh the biggest goal as as of now is that we have to become the largest product company in all of europe in next two years we are on on the path in terms of scale we are already quite huge probably i mean we would already be in the top 10 or maybe eight to ten companies in europe in terms of the scale that we manage but in terms of the revenue obviously we we need to to catch up a little bit and the only reason is that we we educated the market a lot in the beginning right and we didn't want it to become an extra cost center for them so we were trying to cut down their cost and then replace ourselves with that now people have started seeing the value which is a very good thing for us so now we don't need to like hello hello i hope you've enjoyed the show so far i'm amadeep palmer co-founder of bay hq and the host of this show for those of you don't know bay hq is the community for high growth Asian heritage founders and investors in the UK over 7 ,500 people have attended our events 200 people have been for our impact programs and obviously there's been over 250 episodes of this podcast if you want to join us and take part in the programs and come to the events go to bahiehq.com forward slash join we also just released our first ever book called startups for outsiders which you can get on amazon now and the link is in the bio hope to see you soon at event hope you enjoy the rest of the episode think about that we need to sell very cheaply to to this customer people know that these guys are going to create really good value for us so so that's the direction that we are taking now and you said about the team growing as well and you've got the different teams underneath you and with your previous experience of hiring and what you've learned there what are you looking for in those people you're hiring for your own team very ambitious people we need right i mean we don't need like 200 people to run anything uh we i mean right now our team is about 50 odd people right are spread across uk india and us the one major thing that we always see is that if i mean depending on which department they're coming into if they're coming on the business development side right we always expect they should come from the industry right because they will carry their connections and those connections always are helpful to land the deals and you understand the industry also how it works right if you bring someone from outside typically they would not know the pain points of the customers and or they will take a long time to learn about it similarly on the ai side and the tech side it's a very different thing we need people who are very ambitious who wants to do something and and we we offer options to to most of our employees so that is always a very helpful thing for them when they see that the company is growing and i'm growing with the company and you said like a lot of teams play second different place around the world so you've got a smaller team in the uk right yeah how are you enjoying that kind of element of it and how do you kind of make sure that the culture across the different regions is like so we try to keep on bringing a lot of people i mean for example the back-end team uh the ai team the back-end team uh the uh operations team a lot of those people are based in india so we keep them flying them in so they keep on sitting and meeting all our customers in fact that's i mean it's the concept of what is what do we call as a forward deployed engineers right now we don't call them that but exactly this is what they're doing so they are actually going meeting and sitting in our customer's office for two weeks three weeks time trying to understand what they're doing trying to solve the problem on the go and becomes very very quick also for us plus they get a lot more exposure and they get also get to enjoy the UK and so you moved to the UK after your first company right or when did you move I moved in 2020 to do my MBA okay yeah and once you obviously did the MBA what encourages kind of stay in the UK and think this is a good place for you to build a business when i was doing my mba i landed a job with the pms company i was in edinburgh at that time so i moved to london for that started working with them at that time i i mean i came from the real estate industry so and i could understand exactly how the real estate functions i didn't know about anything about the pmss at that time so that was a really good insight for me and i think i did a very good thing i mean when when i look at it like what i did five years back if i would not have been in a pms company probably i would not have been doing what i'm doing right now because the learnings i was able to acquire over the period of last four years i was able to use them to build what what i'm doing right now and looking at like so you said the expansion rights be like the top in europe right and as you look at that too so you what do you think steps do you think you need to take to be able to get there so so as of now in uk we are powering about 35 of the whole residential rental units that are available of the whole market not just when it's any specific market right about a million units and we power about 300 000 so about 30 of the market so to go into europe one thing that you have to be very like aware of is that language is very different in all the the markets the laws are very different in each of the markets right though the laws are not going to directly impact us uh severely but there is still still an impact of that and you have to be very careful about that those are the two things that we are already aware of and that's how we are building our team so we are trying to build a team in each of the countries where we are launching and rapidly expand expanding earlier all of that used to be run from uk now we are going there and actually like deploying our people who are going to be present in that market and come from that market and understand that market very well initially i guess as well do you have the challenge of where when you're kind of pitching ai agents where they really say is it considered a market which is like less tech dependent than other markets right that's right was it hard initially to convince people was it the benefit of because you had the initial knowledge and you think that's kind of the wedge that nobody else could replicate uh it it was a wedge for us but you are absolutely right that it is always very tough to sell tech into the real estate because real estate people are always going to look at tech as a cost center so the first thing we had to prove was what is the ROI on this and we had to do it very very quickly if we didn't do that we would not have been able to scale and how do you prove ROI you have to either cut their cost or you have to make them more money we did both of them together right so we we were able to cut the cost on all the tech solutions they were using because our product started as a communication platform and then we built the whole operating system around it by merging in small point solutions into it and build one single platform which are combination of all the point solutions powered by AI so you You don't need to log in into 10 different platforms and you don't need to pay licenses for 10 platforms.

20:38You can just buy one single platform, which will probably cost you about a tenth of all the things. And then it is powered by AI, which means you don't need to spend human capital on running those individual solutions because they are being powered by the AI.

20:50Amardeep Parmar:Right. So that's how we have saved the money. Plus, the biggest thing in the real estate industry where we have a very huge leverages, real estate industry, I mean, you hire anyone, they're going to work nine to six maximum, like nine hours, not more than that. now what happens if an inquiry lands at 7 p.m on a friday there is no one to take care of that people will come on monday then they will go through the whole inbox everything gets prioritized and then they are going to deal with it probably by the noon of monday by that time that person would have already left their inquiry with maybe five to six other operators so when you are coming you are actually competing with six of your competitors to land the same customer the wedge we have is we are going to deal with them on instant basis so if they are let's say sending your their inquiry through right move into you we are going to literally dial them a message give them a whatsapp message or call them immediately asking about their requirements or maybe book them a viewing or whatever they need right so that thing lands very very well with the real estate operators because this is the problem they have never been able to solve never been able to solve and they cannot afford to have a 24-7 team because the cost of having a 24-7 team is way too high to be able to justify anything on the investment side so this is like a big big wedge and one interesting insight is in the student housing space about 62 percent of inquiries land outside working hours and in the btr and the multi-family space that's about 50 which is a huge number and like in that tech space as well in terms of like keeping that wedge and keeping ahead of like the competition right and i'm guessing you're getting like unique data other people don't have but how do you keep ahead of people and i make sure that that stickiness is there and i guess related to that too i guess other contracts tend to be quite long term and that kind of once somebody's there it doesn't make sense and switch to okay uh an interesting thing uh generally all the tech vendors or tech providers in the real estate industry they would always depend on very long contracts one thing which we broke was we're not going to sign for longer than a year it works for us as well as against us for us in a way that we have the leverage to be able to do an upselling and increase the prices at some point in the future right negative in a way if they don't like us they can throw us away in a year's time we've never lost a customer so we are very confident that everything is going well so we are we are we that's what we are doing but now we are we keep on coming across a lot of our customers who are themselves are asking that can you give us a three-year deal or a five-year deal because it makes more sense for us they've seen the product works really well for them they just want to lock in the price so that the price doesn't go up right and so i hope that that that answers what you are asking how does the pricing work for you is it like enterprise deals it's very bespoke customer or is it more general yeah it is it is a little bit bespoke there is a standard pricing that we have but then uh there is so much configurations that can be done for each of our customers that the pricing generally tends to be a little bit bespoke for every customer because depending on their requirements depending on their use case what they're trying to achieve there are a lot i mean for every customer we do anything between 300 to 400 different customizations when we do our implementation 300 to 400 customization for every operator that we work with so the pricing depends on what what do you want us to achieve yeah and is it is a usage space is it locked in for like time how does that work yes so it is on a per unit basis that's why the unit is like a very important metric for uh for for us in the real estate business which is a unit can be a bed in a student housing it could be one apartment in a multi-family or btr it could be one house in a single family housing so it depends on what that unit is and we charge on per unit basis it's a flat price that you pay across the year so obviously you had the unlock with like the ai and being able to do the conversational stuff stuff right how do you see that technology evolving in the future like what could verba flow eventually evolve into like as the more unlocks come and like the technology you're working on i mean we are such a good example of that already we started as a ai comms platform so when if i mean if you ask some of our early stage customers back from early 2025 they would say that we are a web chat company we used to build a chat bot which was powered by ai that would pull all the dynamic information from your website your pms and everything and then it would help you in making the bookings that's it that's what we used to do now we have got about 16 different products within that line right this part is probably half of our product now like uh half of one single module is what that initial product was so we have been able to keep on learning from the industry and keep on building and delivering from them which we know that the things are going to work for them and the so the biggest realization we had was when we started working with the the operators we could identify that all of these operators were using anything between eight to thirty different individual point solutions you're using a telephony system you're using a crm then you are using a help desk tool then you are using a marketing tool to manage something on your website then you're using a cms xyz there are so many things right we thought i mean all of this can be done by one single place and with ai you can build a lot of these things the problem is not the building problem is sewing them together so that they work with each other plus if you are powering it with ai then ai needs to work on it that is what we did really really good which no one has been able to do so because you mentioned about how a lot of the other operators there are like long-term contracts a lot of people in when you're trying to get them people to switch to verbaflow how do you kind of navigate that if somebody's locked into a five-year contract or a 10-year contract how does that work we are the pioneers in in in the european market so there is no one who has signed up with anyone on on a long-term contract because we are the first one who actually started doing this in in uk especially especially in the student housing segment right so there are no contracts there plus now everyone knows us in the industry everyone literally knows us now so we don't need to worry about that if they are signing a long-term contract they need to be aware of that they would not be able to come out of it if that platform doesn't work for them and we always say that you don't need to sign a long-term contract with us just start with the one year if you like it then you keep on growing but make sure that you are not signing longer-term contract with the other platforms also because then you won't be able to come out of it yeah that is a that is a problem we see in the u.s market where a lot of our prospective customers are logged in in a longer term contract with some of the large players in that market and they are stuck.

27:03They can't do anything about it now.

27:04Amardeep Parmar:So we're going to hit about the wrap up questions now. So the first one is, who are free Asians in Britain you think are doing amazing work and you want to shout them out? My dear friend Ashish Ranjanja of Native. He's doing something, something really good. Then we have one of the college seniors, a couple single who is trying to build win intelligence I don't know whether they pronounce it as wine or when they're doing pretty pretty good then if the NASA from vested we are we are their customer also we invested for our own stock options and I think he has been on your podcast also right so he's doing pretty good yes if the investor like one of our back is they support a lot of the work we do as well so shout out to ifty and if people want to find out more about the flow and like more about you where do they get it reach out to me on LinkedIn reach out to my co-founders on LinkedIn we are decently active on social media also like on LinkedIn our website we keep on doing a lot of white papers and research also so which we keep on putting on our website so feel free to read through them or I mean just give us a nudge and we'll be more than there we will be there to help and answer anything and is there any way that the audience listening today might be able to help you 100 % if you know anyone in the real estate space or anyone who are complementary to the real estate space and if they if they think that they need to use AI I mean we are their go-to solution so so connect them to us so I really enjoyed this like learn so much about that market as well have you got any final words I mean just one advice for anyone who is trying to get into entrepreneurship we have learned it obviously the hard way but you have to be very cautious about like what you want to do so so why I'm saying so is in my first startup my biggest learning was how to how do you take care of the finances very well in my this startup we have learned if you are scaling globally then you have to be very very careful about how you if you understand that market where you are scaling well or not if not take your time learn about the market before just launching there