- Saurabh Gupta
SPEAKERS
Will Bachman, Saurabh GuptaWill Bachman 00:02
Hello and welcome to Unleashed. I’m your host. Will Bachman, and I’m delighted to be here today with Saurabh Gupta, who is the founder of Binocs.co, Binocs is like short for binoculars, B, I, N, O, C, s.co, Saurabh is a former managing partner at KPMG, I’m sorry, Managing Director at KPMG, and he’s built a pretty cool AI based tool that he’s going to give us a demo today. Saurabh, welcome to the show. Thanks all. It’s great to be here. So why don’t you go ahead and just first give us, like, the 50,000 foot overview to understand what the tool is about.Saurabh Gupta 00:42
Yeah, yeah. So will, as you mentioned, I’ve been a career consultant, and recently I was head of strategy for Verizon, what I realized was a lot of the work that I was doing in strategy could be accelerated through Gen AI. So that led me to building Binocs. At Binocs, we are using Gen AI to accelerate commercial due diligence, so industry analysis and company analysis through Gen AI, great.Will Bachman 01:11
All right. Well, why don’t you share your screen and sort of giving me a demo, and listeners who are listening on audio, I will narrate what I see, and we’ll also be taking some screenshots. And if you go to the permalink for this episode, which we will include in the show notes, you’ll be able to see the screenshots the what. So, you’ll be able to see what I’m seeing, alright? So we are now on the home screen. It says, Welcome. Click on the products below to get started, and I see three different options.
Saurabh Gupta 01:40
Yeah, we’ll click on commercial due diligence. That’s sort of the core function of this. This tool, it has, it has four different areas. So the industry analysis you can do a deep dive into a particular industry;investment memo is somewhere you can kind of do a deeper analysis of a company, whether a public company or a private company. Typically, we are supporting private equity clients, so it’s very helpful for private company analysis as well. Third is growth strategy. So essentially, this is a where to play, how to win, type of report, and you can put in the name of a company, and you can do a where to play how to win. You get a where to play How to Win report. And the final is a bit of a valuation analysis of a particular company. Kind of does financial analysis and gets you to a valuation. Today, we are going to focus just on industry analysis and investment memo. All right, so an industry analysis is something quite simple. We do a lot of that, you know, as as consultants. So here, you know, you just got to describe the industry. If you have certain focus area, you can provide the focus area at Binocs. You can run different geographies at a country level. But you can also run, you can also go very granular. So sometimes private equity companies want to focus on certain geography, certain states. So here geographies can go down at a state level, and you can build, analysis at a state level. Also, you can build analysis at a regional level. But of course, you know, country level analysis can be done. Our tool is being utilized throughout the world Australia, Poland, France, Japan, etc. Once you put in a name of an industry and some focus area, you will get some industry segments that, once you accept, you will get some key players that once you accept, you will get to upload documents in the upload documents, if you have done any primary research, you can upload the primary research if you haven’t done anything then, then you can just skip that. And that will lead to an industry analysis report.
at that. Yeah. So, company profile is a separate section which we call kind of the investment memo section. Okay, so in this investment memo section, you can you can run, let’s say, a company analysis. You can upload, let’s say, if you are working on a commercial due diligence deal, you can upload a sim, and we’ll do financial analysis there. So, all of that stuff can be done. So right now, this is a private company, just, I don’t have any data for it, I just know the website for it. So I ran a report. So this is kind of a report that you can get if you just put in the name of a company and their website. So something. So let me just skip the exact summary section and just go directly into the report. So here, you know, in the report side, we can give an overview of what the company does, what their geographical footprint looks like. You know, seems like very little geographical footprint, where they exist, you know, what do they do in each of the each of the footprint areas? What have they done recently? What are their products and services? You can kind of get a good understanding of their products and services. What are their distribution channels? How is their revenue split across the across the distribution channels? Who are their customers, who are their largest customers? And also, you know, it will give you a sense of, you know, where do they not exist? Where do they have moderate presence that will give you some white space opportunity as well. You know, what is their key purchasing criteria? So, how do customers buy their product? What buyers are asking, you know, what is the implication for the company? So, so you can get a sense of what the key purchasing criteria is. Then. What the what the system does. It identifies which industry does, the company operated, and then for that industry, it will, it will do all the industry analysis that you have seen already. So I’m going to skip through the industry analysis because you have already seen it, and go into something that we haven’t seen, which is, let’s say, financial benchmark. If this was a if the company had some financials, if you had uploaded its financial statement or sim or or any annual reports, or whatever, it would have shown its financials and compared it to the public benchmark. But we didn’t have that here, because it’s a private company, so that is not available. But then something like future growth strategy you can understand, and essentially the way that it builds it is you have already done situational analysis. You have done the industry analysis so you understand what the key industry trends are. You have done company analysis, so you understand what sectors is the company exposed to. Here is the competitive positioning, so you can kind of understand what the strength of the company is versus everybody else. So So you you kind of have done the situational analysis. Once you have done the situational analysis, now, the system actually goes out and says, Hey, where to play and how to win and and really builds out a organic growth strategy as well, as you know. So what should, what is the key insight, and what should be the action plan to achieve this particular inorganic organic growth strategy? So it can, it can highlight some of the organic growth strategy as well, and then it can also highlight inorganic growth strategy. So it understands what are the themes that this company needs to acquire on, that this company needs to grow on its strength, or, you know, areas where it needs to, you know, strengthen its offering. So what is the theme that it should look for? Why should it look for that? And who are the potential targets? So in that way, you can get an understanding of what the inorganic opportunities might look like, and then it will give you a rationale of why these particular opportunities are the right fit. So it will, it will kind of give you growth strategy as well as overall investment implications, as well as risk intelligence area. Now, all of this would be enhanced a lot if you actually have sim, you know, if you actually had CIM, you know, you can, you can kind of upload that. You can upload management transcript. So here, for example, if you regenerate investment memo, it will ask you to say, hey, upload files in this upload files. You can upload financial statements, CIMs, expert interview notes, management transcripts, all of that. And if you upload that, all of that will get included in the investment memo, and that will then show up in the final report. So this is a company deep dive that we have here.
Will Bachman 23:04
Amazing. Okay, great. And it would be great if we could, you know, did that sample as well, or a sample investment memo for listeners to to check out. So, okay, and is that the same pricing at $500 per company memo, investment memo, yeah.
Saurabh Gupta 23:23
So for this one, it’s, it’s $1,000 because it needs to run multiple industry reports and the company analysis. So just the, just the AI usage here is a lot more. So this one is a is a bit higher. It’s about $1,000 per
Will Bachman 23:36
report, because you’re getting the industry report and the company memo basically,
Saurabh Gupta 23:42
and sometimes, what happens is the company operates across different sectors, so you get multiple industry analysis
Will Bachman 23:49
in there. All right, great. In terms of proprietary data sources, like ones that your firm pays for, tell me about that. Is it just, not just, but is it primarily relying on the open web, things that a human could go and just find online? Or do you have any kind of proprietary data feeds?
Saurabh Gupta 24:12
Yeah, so you know, most of these proprietary data feeds do not allow you to kind of resell the data. So even if we actually had that, we wouldn’t be allowed to kind of share that with you. But at the same time, if you have some of these subscriptions, we can connect it to the subscription, and then all of that becomes part of the data sources that go inside this report. So if you have, you know, broker analysis, for example, you can just upload that. There’s a simple way is to just upload it and, you know, get it included in the system. But if you actually have a subscription and you want it, you want this system to kind of continuously work with your subscription, then you can also establish, we can also establish that connection that is pretty easy these days, with the MCP structure in the. AI space, okay?
Will Bachman 25:03
And so you can connect it to data sources, if necessary. You can export it to PowerPoint, and then you can save that to a PDF.
Saurabh Gupta 25:14
Yeah, yeah, that’s right. And sometimes I didn’t show you this particular functionality, but sometimes you know, even if you have a particular report you might want to have, you may have questions that are not answered yet. So we also have a chat bot here, and the chat bot, basically can can answer any other questions that were missed out here. And, you know, you can select the best sort of like chat bot here, and it could say, Hey, what is the recession? What is the recession impact? For example, you can write that. Or you can say, Hey, I am doing an expert interview right now, so I would like you to build me an interview guide. Or you can say, hey, I need to build a proposal, because I’m I am pitching on this particular industry, and it will build you a proposal also. So this chatbot that is there can actually run all of those things, and then you can either add it to the report, or, you know, just use the answer into whatever, whatever your use case is.
Will Bachman 26:13
All right, great, and then just tell us about your current state of your of your user base, like, how many firms are using your tool? What kind of clients are using your tools? So far, I know you’re just getting started.
Saurabh Gupta 26:28
Yeah, it’s been about a year that we that we have been focused on this. So at this point, we have, you know, couple of dozens clients. At this point, those range from consulting clients who use our system to sort of get started on a particular area, you know, they may be pitching on particular industry sector, or trying to understand a particular company. So they will subscribe to our system and get some outputs here that will get them up to speed very quickly. So the consulting companies are one, one base of our clients. Then private equity companies are using us for a bit of, you know, just pre loi research and also some of the some of the PE companies are working with us as they work through the deal process. So they first get a teaser, they can put that teaser in our system, get a high level view of the report. Then they get a sim so they can put the same in, then they actually try to put in an LOI, or whatever. So once they have the loi, they have more data. So they can put more data from the data room into our system. They can do management interviews. They can put management transcripts into our system, and our report keeps on evolving as more data comes into the so that so private equity is using us in that way. One other approach that private equity is using us for is the growth strategy. So essentially, on the growth strategy side, you know, these private equity companies have smaller portfolio companies. These smaller portfolio companies cannot necessarily engage, you know, large consulting companies to do the growth strategy because they just cannot afford it. So our system is allowing them to do growth strategy for smaller portfolio companies as well. It is much more cost effective to do that utilizing AI. So that is, that is the those are two of our primary customer base, but we do have some investment banks that are doing industry analysis or deal origination, you know, identifying which companies, which companies might be in the market to sell. So there are some investment banks that are working with us as well, and then, and then, some corporates also working with us for specific use cases around industry analysis or Company Research.
Will Bachman 29:06
Amazing. All right. Saurabh, thank you so much for showing us the tool. Pretty cool, definitely for consultants that are doing any kind of market assessment or strategy or diligence work, you’re not using a tool like this, you’re gonna get left behind, whether it’s whether using binoculars or a comparable tool. This is like, you know, this take two, three weeks for a full team to pull this kind of stuff together. And it’s, it’s pretty, pretty amazing. So thank you for sharing with us. We’ll include a link in the show notes to that permalink page where we’ll have the ability to download and take a look at these reports, and if you want to sign up with Binocs.co to get your own account and test it out. So Saurabh, thank you so much for joining Well,
Saurabh Gupta 29:55
thanks so much for having me on the on the show and appreciate your questions. Really hope that you know I can help your network of folks here, any way I can help. Just feel free to reach out.
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