In the midst of the coronavirus pandemic, an opportunity found a founder.
Brian Nutt was contacted by Brandon Bass, someone who was crucial in the early stages of Codigo, the Louisville company that Nutt had founded and exited when it was bought by Spectrio via Bertram Capital in 2018.
“I took a few years off,” Nutt said. “Of course, Covid hit, and I didn’t really have any intention of doing another startup, frankly.”
Bass — who began working at Codigo in 2005 as its creative director, according to his LinkedIn profile — had decided to quit Spectrio where he worked as director of products from 2019 to early 2021. He proposed the idea for them to work together on what would become Adificial, which became an incorporated business in November 2021. Bass serves as the chief product officer of Adificial.
“By and large, we’re using a lot of the experience that we gained with building Codigo,” said Nutt, the company’s CEO.
For a refresher, Codigo was a digital software signage platform that used interactive/video content and real-time communication, “which was new back then,” Nutt said. It also enabled users to schedule user content to be shown on a specific screen or kiosk display. Nutt said that Codigo grew quickly in the mid-2000s by being bolstered by the rise of retail stores as well as banks and credit unions.
“Digital signage was built to support the personal relationships that were being cultivated for the person in a retail location,” Nutt said. “Since the decline of that opportunity, these brands are in a bit of a panic: If you’re not going to see these people in person, how are you going to communicate to them personally?”
Where Adificial comes in, Nutt said, is to create video content that is individually tailored to each customer that can be sent to any screen, as opposed to the designated screen system that Codigo used. Furthermore, it can create this video content almost instantly through using information on the clients’ customers — such as a bank customer who started in auto loan. The videos are typically around a minute in length.
“Whether you have 1,000 customers, or 100,000, our platform that we built can create variations of content, based on the data we know about you,” Nutt said.
And the company’s current speed? About 25,000 videos… a minute.
“We’re still scaling,” Nutt added. “We haven’t reached that [maximum] volume yet.”
Nutt iterated Adificial is not a marketing automation platform. What it is, though, is a video automation platform.
“We’re not sending out emails. We’re not sending out these videos,” he said. “We’re creating [videos] really, really fast and getting them back to [clients] for [clients] to send out in an automated fashion out of the systems [they] use.”
Adificial, which built its minimal viable product between the summer and fall of 2022, is also working on the latest technology powered by — say it with me, class — AI by refining a version of OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform. Side note: We have made the decision to refer to all artificial intelligence as AI on first reference, given how embedded the term now is in our collective societal vernacular.
The AI arm of the operation will be able to not only write up a video script in an instant, but it can also pair that script to one of 50 AI voice actors that can translate the script to approximately 100 languages.
“A lot of [Service-as-a-Software] applications are ‘Do it yourself,’ and what we're trying to do is take it from ‘Do it yourself’ to ‘Do it for me,'" Nutt said.
As of a recent date, Adificial had 12 clients, all of which are financial institutions. In October alone, Nutt said his company created approximately 130,000 videos for his clientele. He is hoping to reach 200,000 videos by the end of this month.
To date, the company, which has three full-time employees, has been bootstrapped. Nutt declined to disclose any revenue figures, but he added he hopes that his company will approach $1 million in annual recurring revenue within the next 18 months.
