#499 Accelerating Enterprise Innovation: Karan Jain on Rethinking Vendor Collaboration

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Mehmet: Hello, and welcome back to any episode of the CTO Show with Mehmet today. I'm very pleased joining me from London, Karan Jain. He's the founder and CEO of NayaOne. Karan, thank you very much for being here with me today. I know how much it can be [00:01:00] for a CEO like yourself, so thank you for making the time. Um, the way I love to do it, and this, I tell all my guests, I keep it to my guests to give us their, you know.

Quick intro, like little bit about, you know, your background, um, what you have done before and you know, little bit about what you're doing with NayaOne. So the floor is yours. 

Karan: Okay. Thank you. First of all, thank you for, uh, having me on your show. Uh, feel. Uh, privilege and excited to be here, um, and to be speaking to you and your audience.

Uh, my name's Karen Jane, founder and CEO of Naya. One my background's financial services and tech. Uh, for the last 25 years I've worked in banking, wealth insurance, capital markets. Um, I've previously run two businesses, um, and as I was getting to a particular 0.5 years ago, I realized that it's gotta be a better way for enterprises to collaborate with.

The tech ecosystem because the tech ecosystem was also going from [00:02:00] couple of hundred vendors to couple of thousand. So thought like it was a good opportunity to start. I one, um, I'm happy to share more with you as we have this conversation. 

Mehmet: Great. And thank you again for being here with me today, Karen. Um, it's a kind of a cliche, traditional question.

Uh, you, you just give us a teaser now, but I would love to know the whole story, be behind N one because I'm sure you've seen a lot of, uh, shortcomings. You've seen a lot of, uh. Problems that no one maybe have touched so far, or maybe they were not, you know, dealt with the, the way they deserve to be dealt with.

So kind of why you started at NayaOne and what are like the main, I would say, use cases that, you know, you try to solve with, with what you offer today? 

Karan: Yeah. Let me start with the problem that n one solves, right? So our, our, our core purpose is to [00:03:00] accelerate technology adoption by enterprises. What does that mean?

So, if I'm a leader and you know, a. A product leader or a technology leader in an enterprise, and I've got a problem to solve, whether that's like, I've gotta improve my IDV process or my payments platform or my, um, build a product for, uh, SMB segment. Typically it requires working with a vendor. Very rarely people build things from scratch these days.

So trying to build something, uh, with the vendor actually. Finding one is the first hurdle. Second hurdle is trying to see whether they're the right fit and what does right fit mean. It means do they actually do what they say they're doing? Does it actually solve question number two, does it actually solve the problem that I'm trying to solve?

And number three, if I was to work with this vendor, would it actually. Integrate into the current stack I have or not. So, you know, as an, as an as an ex technology, execut myself, those [00:04:00] are the three questions that I was, was trying to solve for myself. And then each question was taking me, each vendor was taking me good six to nine months to solve.

And I thought this, there's just gotta be a better way to do this. Um, and that's, that's out of that problem. I went to market to find a solution that can help me. Uh, I also ended up speaking to. Close to 50 different CIOs and CTOs in the journey to only realize that it was a problem, not just I was facing.

It's a problem that the industry as a whole, uh, is facing and, and we've become so numbed to the pain point that working with a vendor is so painful that we just accept it. And I think that's the status quo, that nine one one's changing. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. I can relate to this. I used to be sitting on the vendor side.

I understand. But I'm, I'm, I'm also like, uh, empathic as they say with, um, with the, with the client side or the enterprise side, because I used to sit there also as well. Now, just out of curiosity, is there any [00:05:00] vertical you see that needs this? Is this more than other verticals or is it something that we can say, you know, the problem exists across the board.

Karan: The problem across exists across the board. Um, it's definitely more painful in some reason. Some, some verticals, so for example, financial services, uh, highly regulated environment. Third party risk managements are real. Securities concerns are real. Data privacy, data leakage are all real. And those are some of the challenges that have.

Now you got 300 questions minimum that you've gotta answer and it's gonna take six months of review before we can onboard you. What if you could just change that and go, you know what, actually, why don't you get onto N one and we've onboarded N one and in their platform we can run that proof of concept or where we can have that collaboration in that platform.

So. So it's definitely more painful in financial service. Maybe because I'm biased, I'm ex financial, so always been financial. Mostly been financial services. I see application in health, see [00:06:00] application in legal as well. Uh, we have a lot of public sector, so ministries and government, again, regulated, uh, environments.

Uh, is is typically insurance. If you were to break down, uh, financial services within, that's, that's where we see the application right now. That's where our focus is as well. Makes sense. But again, having said that in, you know, sorry, the, um, we've heard. Large media companies, um, especially out of the UAE region, have a very strict procurement process.

So it actually applies to all enterprises. Um, and they're like, okay, well, all I want to know is. I came across this vendor in a, in a, in a, in a conference, feels like this is gonna solve my problem. But the mo from that moment to the moment, whether I can confirm this thing is gonna be helpful is 12 months.

And it's like, can you actually operate like that in 2025? 

Mehmet: Welcome to our world. I would say, by the way, it's painful from both sides. [00:07:00] It's painful from, from the vendor side and from the, uh, customer side. Looks like, you know, especially for the highly regulated. Uh, verticals, as you mentioned, financial institutions, healthcare, um, government of course, the biggest challenge.

And, you know, I'm kind again, little bit biased by this, uh, caram because as I said, like I lived on both sides. Mm-hmm. The biggest problem. Maybe I'm repeating some of what you mentioned is first yes. Like someone claimed to me something I'm not, okay. I need to do A POC. But the POC itself is, is is a painful process because I.

And this is something I tell people also, like as an advisor, like, like either you have a snapshot of what this might look like because you know, you need to test on, on kind of actual data, actual the same environment, but again, for the same [00:08:00] reasons you mentioned about mainly the data. And we don't want to give access to this vendor whom we might not.

Yet choose the ability to do this. Now, I'm curious how you are solving this like, 

Karan: perfect, great question. How, 

Mehmet: how, how is this solved? 

Karan: Yeah, so if I look at the platform, it has um, three main components. It's got the enterprise gateway, um, that basically connects you into. Hundreds and thousands of technology providers, and I'm basically talking about a YC company that just graduated to all the way to Nvidia to local, um, payments provider.

Stack that, that you'll find in the platform. And if we don't have it, we can bring them and, and bring them in. The second thing, a second leg in the platform is synthetic data libraries. And we have synthetic data generators that our customers use to generate synthetic data that is high fidelity, IE close to what they have, um, inside the UAT and inside.

[00:09:00] Production. It's, it's like if, if we, and then the third thing we have is basically the compute and the tooling. So you wrap that all up into a workflow. I can pick the technology provider, I can pick the synthetic data that is close to what I'm used to or is relevant to my organization. And I have, uh, all the tooling and compute I can ask for.

Then I can run that proof of concept challenge, a champion customer journey, transformation journey. Um. De-risk some of the integration with Medcor. Those are like top use cases that, you know, banks and insurers and regulators would do on the platform. Um, but that's how we solve that. 

Mehmet: Cool. So I understand, Carol, you have like, um.

Kind of two stakeholders. So, so, so you have the vendors, right? Mm-hmm. And you need to have also the enterprises. Mm-hmm. Now, how much I would say adapt, adaptability have you seen between these two segments? Uh, [00:10:00] maybe, let me give you a guess, and correct me if I'm wrong, I guess like the vendors would be more excited because, you know, also it'll give them a push mm-hmm.

For having probably. To your point, like, yeah, 12 months procurement cycle. Any vendor would love to, you know, fast forward this to even one month. Um, but from, from from the client side, uh, have you seen challenges? If I am mistaken, please feel free to correct me because I, I believe, you know, the vendors would love this.

Uh, it's, it's music to any, you know. CRO or whatever, like who's ever responsible for, uh, the sales to, to hear that. Um, but from, from the customer perspective, from the enterprise perspective, who would be, you know, are, are they, are they accepting the concept? And who would be your main, I would say persona.

Like who, who do you usually talk to? 

Karan: Yeah. Um, great set of questions. So the vendor side. You are a hundred percent correct. They love us because we accelerate [00:11:00] their sales cycle before they get stuck in. POC purgatory, you know, we can actually just accelerate that decision in a couple of weeks. Um, rather than them having to wait nine, 12 months and find out that their sponsor inside the enterprise has decided to change jobs so that they, they they love us.

You know, in the last five years I've had one vendor who basically is like, I don't understand this. Okay. I think they were early stage. They, they're not yet sold to an enterprise. Then the, um, on the, on the customer side, I think. I think the proofs in the pudding. I think when we first started, we were lucky that we had some of the.

Most conservative, very large institutions that became our customers and they're still customers and you know, five x, 10 x to what they do with us. We started, we started off as a sandbox, as a service, but where we are today is more of vendor delivery infrastructure. We basically helped 'em all the way end to end and get 'em as close to production ready as possible.

Um, and I [00:12:00] think both of those things are proof in terms of. Our customers seeing, uh, the, the value that it provides them in the current setup of how the industry is stacked between enterprises and and technology vendors. The other thing that I'll mention is, uh, there would've been banks that I spoke to two years ago.

And I kid you not literally, I'm getting emails on a, on a daily ba on a weekly basis. I was like, oh, we spoke two years ago. Um, our business is hitting into, you know, hitting up against the problem that they actually can't accelerate the delivery. They're stuck. They really need to test new technology.

They, they need access to open source technology to actually go ahead, move forward and compete in the market. Um, so we're seeing a lot of inbound. Again, proof of. I think it's a market coming to terms that they can't just suffer, delayed, go live timewise because it results in [00:13:00] them losing market share to their competitors, um, as well as losing talent.

'cause if you can't get access to the latest technology and the latest trends, you know, all your friends are testing out different new technologies in different organizations, and yours like still, you know, I'm not gonna name any tools, but like, you know, on a, on a age tool, then it's, it's a, it's a talent, talent train as well.

So we're fine. And to your point, persona wise, um, it can have whatever title, but it's basically executives either on the business or the tech side. Mm-hmm. Care about delivery, right. I find those people to be highly logical. They, they're able to, they, they're, you know, they're logical enough to also make a decision.

They understand the value proposition and, um, and those are the people we love working with. So it's, it's typically executives, um, either product tech could be innovation as well, but it's typically those places. 

Mehmet: Yeah, absolutely. No, that makes complete sense because I would believe what [00:14:00] we call them in the sales language, the champions, uh, yeah.

Yeah. So, so these would be the ones, and of course there will be some kind of, uh, sponsor, executive level sponsor, the 

Karan: typical sponsors. Yeah. So that's the other thing that's changed. You know, we've been business five years, and again, we're, we're, we're not, we're not trained sales professionals, but we're doing our best and we're learning on the job.

Yeah. And, and, and we find these guys, um, to be the best people to work with. Because they speak our language of delivery. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. Now, you mentioned something which triggered a question in my mind. Um, how much, you know, the, about, you know, adopting the technology moving fast, you know, uh, avoiding losing to competitors, avoid losing also the talents and so on.

How much do you think the AI gave. You know, this push and urgency for people to really finalize things much quicker, especially, you know, every, like I spoke [00:15:00] on the podcast and outside to a lot of, you know, um, you know, both startups, enterprise leaders and so on. And every time, you know, we talk about these initiatives on the board level.

Like we know we want to adopt ai, we want to have our own LLMs. Um. Do you think what you're currently doing is pushing, you know, giving them this push so they can avoid all the blockers? Because again, maybe we're repeating ourselves. The blockers usually comes from people who either they don't want to change and they will find, you know, bunch of, uh, reasons why they push back.

Or sometimes again, the reasons which are valid related to security, privacy and, and so on. But now with this initiative, you know, imperative coming from. The top of the organization, how was this kind of a, I would say, tailwind for, for uh, N one business? 

Karan: Yeah, so I [00:16:00] think what's changed in last 12 to 18 months is number one, you know, the dust has settled in terms of the market dynamics and people are starting to open up.

More transformation. Horizon one, horizon two. Um, and also enterprise AI adoption has become a board level priority, right? So you've got your core upgrades, you've got your, you know, major upgrades that, that are happening in the market, but you've also got people going, okay, well what does the next 10 years of business look like?

Which is gonna require investment once they've got, you know, and that is, both of those things have been a massive tailwind for one. And in terms of what we are doing and the activity we're seeing on the platform that these banks and insurers are doing. Um, I think to your, to your other point in terms of like, you know, the talent and people willing to change, I think what I'm finding is as there's been a lot of shuffle in the market in the last 12 [00:17:00] to 18 months, most.

People in the driver's seat of business units. So, you know, line of business leader or line of business leader minus one are actually working pretty hard to deliver the outcomes for these enterprises. And they need all the hacks and all the tools in, in the, in the toolkit to basically, number one, accelerate their outcome.

Number two, take the risk out of that. Number three, make sure decision making on the pro on, on the, on the, in the, in the journey is robust. So that's, that's what we're seeing. Dunno if I answered your question there. 

Mehmet: No, absolutely. You did. Thank you Karan. Um, one other thing which I wanted to ask you, like, uh, how, how much AI have you used in your technology?

Like, what's the use case for a. You know, solution like now one that can play a role in also, of course streamlining, you know, the whole thing. Like is [00:18:00] it, you did something more on the sales side, is it within the solution itself? Like just curious to, to understand like how you adopted AI yourself 

Karan: Ton and ton of use cases.

Uh, gotta be some of, some of it's, um. Commercially sensitive. So I'll try, I'll try a skirt around that as well. So, um, I mean, look, what we did was, um. In the early days we set up, we set up AI infrastructure for ourselves, and this is, I'm starting with internal use, um, where we made sure that our data was captured in the right way.

Um, it was secure, you know, model up, upgrade infrastructure was in place, uh, hallucination infrastructure was in place and that we were able to leverage and plug and play tooling. Um, as new tools came around, that's the first step we did. The second step we did was, um, basically make sure that a [00:19:00] champion from each function was part of a, a core team, right.

Uh, of, of, of this ai, um, initiative. Because what that meant was that they become like, like AI is the biggest change program that we'll all see in 10 years before and the 10 years to come. Right. If not, if not longer. So we wanna make sure that we've got actually people from within the teams plugged in.

So we're not rolling out product internally and basically telling them, here it is here, off you go. Let's start using it. So it's more about that communication and, and understanding the problem from their point. And then the third thing is, um. Upskilling, not just a few people who can build these products and tools.

It's empowering everybody slowly. We're not there yet, but slowly to make sure everyone's able to build. Um. Call it, call it chat bots, call it, call it bots, call it agents, um, in a safe, secure, standardized way without limiting what they want to do. So [00:20:00] that's kind of the, the three approaches we've taken, and you can, you can take that across sales, marketing, pie success, um, you know, product.

So that's, that's what we've done internally. Um, and there's more to do. Uh, we've consciously gone a little bit slower to make sure we've got the foundation right, make sure, and now, but it will actually give us a lot more, gives us a lot more speed now. As we start working through the use cases on the external side, there's a ton of stuff coming.

We actually haven't rolled out AI as part of our stack. 'cause remember a lot of our customers, most of our customers are banks, insurers, and regulators. Mm-hmm. And whether they through to the AI product you gotta go through, you gotta go through a next set of, uh. Onboarding, um, TPRM process changes the moment you have any AI related to you.

But we have, um, we have a bunch of product that's in the pipeline that's coming through that, you know, will [00:21:00] pass on the efficiencies to our customers. 

Mehmet: Great. Uh, to your point about. AI adoption. Like still, I know from some, uh, of the startups that I heard from, like if, if you have the a AI domain, uh, that's a problem.

That's problem. I open the website. Yeah. So, and this is, you know, surprising for me because like, uh, you know, the first question. And I hear this from, from, you know, my, uh, my friends, colleagues, ex-colleagues that I used to work with. So now if you go to any customers, actually they ask you the question, what kind of AI do you offer?

Right? And, uh, this is the question that comes to mind, but at the same time, oh yeah. You know, but like, security is still doing this. Like, uh, but anyway, this, I think it's a, it's a phase. Gonna pass it. 

Karan: Yeah. Where we, so the banks, so our customers. Are using the platform to bring in any kind of ai, but there's [00:22:00] just no AI in our stack that's currently in production.

Mehmet: Yeah, absolutely. It's, it's, it's like little bit contradictory, but I think we are gonna reach there. Now you just touched base on, on, on agents and agent AI and all this, um. Do you think there's a lot of hype here? Uh, are people's expectation, and maybe if you can, you know, relate this to what you offer at NayaOne and because, you know, you don't work only with your customers on like vendor evaluation, but you try to also offer kinds of additional consultancies and um, you know, guiding them.

So how are you seeing tech leaders now? Uh, reacting to, to this agentic AI thing. And, uh, everyone again, coming with claims that we can do this, we can do that. Uh, so in a nutshell, what separate, you know, the real capabilities from just the hype, 

Karan: the, the, the nutshell would be if you remember the initial coin offering moment [00:23:00] and the blockchain days.

Yeah. So 20 18, 20 19, it's not quite as bad as that, but there's a lot of. Agent washing going on in the market. Um, every week I'm getting a enterprise customer tell me. It's like I looked under the hood and at best this is an RPA that's getting called out as an agent. So, you know, this doesn't help the industry in my opinion, because people are already.

Vary off tech vendors to start with, no matter how lovely we all are. Number two, moment we start going, everything's an agent. That might work for the BC community. It definitely doesn't work for enterprise because it actually makes their job harder. And so that's, that's what I'm saying. Now, having said that, there's some actual good work that's going on.

So I'd say there's 70% hype, 30% real work, and 30% real work is way better than the ICO days. Um, [00:24:00] so that's, that's there is, there is work and you know, the typical use cases we're starting to see would fall under contact center. Call center type use cases, engineering, so dev engineering. So we are like, one of the biggest things people do on the platform is spin up dev.

Geni dev work spaces, which means you can bring in all the GII tooling you can actually want to do to accelerate your development. Try and doing that in a regulated enterprise. Very, very take change that. Yeah. Um, and then the other one we see is, um, anything to do with documents in the back office, right?

Mm-hmm. So anything to do with PDFs, handwritten docs. So those would be probably the three big categories where we're seeing, um.

Agents, bots being applied, whether they're native companies. Mm-hmm. So native companies or people building agents themselves. 

Mehmet: Um, [00:25:00] I would add like kind of my 2 cents here regarding this current, if you allow me, I think what happened, um, so either people were not. Informed about the capabilities of, of what automation can do.

Mm-hmm. And simply just when people started to plug, let's say, some workflows in automatic platforms like, uh, N eight and, and zapper and make.com. And funny enough, I was, you know, trying to tell people about these platforms even before chat. GPT comes out. And of course, when chat GPT started to came, I said, guys, look, now you can hook using the APIs and you know, so APIs Yeah.

Like, you know, people. I think that, but now, so, so as you said, 30%, 70%, which we wanted to become like the kind of opposite, uh, I think people are trying to make, uh, I would say, hmm. They're marketing [00:26:00] it the right way. Let me put it this way. I don't want to, to be more harsh on people. Uh, right. So I, I, yeah, marketing is nice.

I'm with marketing, but I mean, just use the right terms because majority of you know what they are saying. It's agents. It's something that really, you could have done it even in 2020 or 2021 using 

Karan: prison or Prism, whatever it's called. Yeah, exactly. And some 

Mehmet: api. I'm not saying it was easy. It became much, much, much easier now, but I mean it's, yeah, it's just automation.

Automation always existed and yeah, chat, GPT and other LLM tools. Gave us the edge to, to do much things in, in faster way. The real agent tech, ai, it's, as you said, Karen, still we are in the early days, like we just very early days. The surface very early, 

Karan: like 5% if that. Um, actual stuff. Um, the other thing or maybe a little bit more, the other thing just, just on your point made me think that's.[00:27:00] 

Helping the agent flow into these organizations is, which wasn't there in the RPA days, was the board level focus, right? Right. So the board level focus basically aligned everybody top to bottom go, right? We gotta be doing AI for not doing ai. We're losing ground right to competition. And by the way, top use case for all gen AI or enterprise AI adoption is efficiency.

I see less than 10%. That's top line. Everything's bottom line. Um, right. Which means, you know, it's an efficiency play at most times. Um, whether that's to retain customers or to retain the, the customer base. Um, the, so that's the other thing that's opened up the adoption of agentic ai or AI in general is because of that C-suite.

And it's the longest I feel. C-Suites been focused on an AI and on a [00:28:00] technology topic, almost coming up to that point. They were on the cloud for a while and they obviously, you know, got a lot of other things in the world happening, and then like AI has been focused off the boardroom for, you know, coming up 12 months now.

Mehmet: And I think the reason Karen is because, and I think this is where you are helping them also as well, and you mention it because you reach a place where if you don't adopt the technology, you might become obsolete. So I think ai, it, you know, uh, it allowed, you know, this bell to be, you know, loudly. Heard.

Yeah, it's right. Oh, like, look like this. AI can replace what we do as business and we need to do something about it. You know? Which is, which is which, which is good. 

Karan: Yeah. The just, just made me think another point. Right. Um, the other observation I have is, again, our client base, banks and I, insurers and regulators will typically wait five years.[00:29:00] 

To buy the product they wanted to buy. And the reason they will do that is like I would just wait to see who the clear winner is and then I'll buy the clear winner rather than taking the risk, you know, not in the risk taking business. Funny, um, when the whole business is about risk. So they don't want to take the risk on the technology vendor.

But here's the difference with AI making mistakes is part of the journey. Because what's gonna work in your business is not necessarily gonna work in my business. So I can't really just say, the core provider you got is gonna be good for me because my friend at another business bought and I'm comfortable with it.

Making mistakes. Exploration, education, experimentation is part of. AI adoption. And it's not just okay, whether we're a copilot shop or a Gemini shop or a, you know, uh, a GPT shop. It's, it's, uh, it's, it's, it's actually going through the journey that's gonna build the enterprise muscle [00:30:00] to adopt ai. 'cause it's gonna be different for everybody.

Mehmet: Yeah. And mentioning just, you know, I heard this also, uh, and I'm sure you know about it because first you come from this, uh, uh, sector, also kran, mainly in banking. You know, the way the first wake up call for them was when the new generation of banks started to appear like digital banks, neo banks, and Yep.

All this. And now they're saying, Hey, like, okay, we, we, we've, and I know for a fact some of the banks, at least I can talk about this region. They lost customers because. Uh, just as an example, uh, opening bank account, you know, like it used to take, I don't know. And until they could have changed and digitalized, I would say the whole experience, the neobank and digital banks were like way, way, way, way more advanced.

And now I still think they didn't catch up yet as big banks. I mean the traditional banks as we know them. Yeah, they introduced a bunch of good services. But the Neobank, I think it was a wake up call that. [00:31:00] Again, with this AI coming, they said, Hey, we, we can do the same mistake again. Like, we can't just, just jeopardize on, on, on this opportunity.

Am I right? 

Karan: You are a thousand percent correct. It was, you know, started with the neobank then, you know, the next big one was, um, uh, what's, what's the, um, having a mental plan, buy now, pay later type capability. 

Mehmet: Yeah, yeah, 

Karan: yeah. NPL. 

Mehmet: Yeah. 

Karan: Yeah. It is called that. So. That hurt so many credit card teams in the bank.

'cause all the credit card business went. Or to buy now, pay later companies. So that was the, you know, it was a smaller movement than neobanks, but it actually hurt the banks in the credit card department really, really, really hard. Right? So ai, now if, if you follow that thinking is very much, it's across the bank because you can actually have that level of efficiency and that level of uplift across the bank.

But also [00:32:00] anybody who's able to move and adopt ai. And is your competition. They're just, then, it's just like, you know, it's just 10 x them. If you can, if, if you're slower than that, 

Mehmet: absolute can 

Karan: please talk. I mean, you know, understand regulated entity, you gotta go. Um, you gotta go, you gotta go Measured.

Measured does not mean slow. 

Mehmet: A hundred percent measure doesn't mean to be slow. Like I think I, I hope that they will get it because otherwise, you know, someone else will go and do the, the job. One thing, I was just checking the website and, you know, the world itself, you know, I have some interest in that domain.

Uh, so I've seen like you can help, you know, companies in their CVC, which is corporate venture. I'm, I'm curious to understand this use case more. 

Karan: For sure. That's a good one. So typically when we work with a bank or an insurer, if they have a CBC arm, what would happen is the [00:33:00] corporate venture capital arm would actually load the platform up with their portfolio companies, right?

So imagine a world before an I one, where I'm A CBC, I've invested in 20 companies now first job I say is, okay, cool, let's get you onboarded onto the bank so someone in the business can have a look. I've just invested in you and I've just wasted your 12 months to try to get you onboarded into the organization where there may or may not be a use case, or there may be a use case depending on how the CC is tracked.

So now enter I one. I have I one. I'm gonna load up my 20 portfolio companies. Now I'm gonna distribute that without any friction to as many relevant business units internally as possible. Get the proof of value done. Then accelerate the sales. So that's the CC use case. That's number one. Number two, before I make investment as just VC use case as well, is we all know when we're investing in early stage companies, there's something's missing here 'cause it's an early [00:34:00] stage company, no problem.

But actually running a deep dive or a proof of concept or kick the ties, whatever you wanna call it, on I one for the thing you're about to invest in. GI just tells you a little bit more so you, you know, you're a little bit more informed, you know, there's something Now, you know what, it's, 

Mehmet: it's a very smart use case, I would say.

Yeah. Yeah, because, because, because like, you know, you, you and traditional VCs also as well, like, if they can themself, you know, use the solution that they are backing, that would be great. So in case of CVC, especially if they are bank, that would be fantastic also as well, to, to create the use case. We 

Karan: the same use case with incubators as well, right?

Mm-hmm. People who are incubating companies, whether they're part the, or just, you know, professional hardcore incubator incubators, uh, or venture builders in the region, especially. Wanting to use NY one because it actually comes with a lot of tech. Prebuilt comes with a lot of good data and you have access to [00:35:00] the, you know, the venture that you're building needs access to all these products, tools that is there.

And it accelerates and as it gets into early stages, you're actually able to use the NY one network to distribute it out as well. 

Mehmet: Cool. Very cool. Uh, Karen, I know like you're try, you're doing some, some, uh, business with. This part of the world where I am based in, in the MENA region. Uh, quickly two things.

How have you seen, you know, the adoption, uh, in general and second from regulations perspective? Uh, have you seen like something more easy here to do? Is it like more little bit complicated, like, and you know, the overall, I would say, um, how are you seeing the, the, the tech, uh, in general here in, in the MENA region?

Karan: Yeah, man, that's a whole different podcast on its own. So on its own, I mean, look, in general I'm pretty excited by the MENA region and, and what's happening in the region. Um, because [00:36:00] you've got something that's not common across the world, which is you have growth mindset. We have a lot of influx of.

Talent and brain into the region, but you also have top down initiatives by different governments to make this important that is not common across the rest of the world. So you actually, as a, as an ecosystem, the macro wins are super amazing in the region. Um, second thing I'm finding is that the, again, the banks and the insurers and the regulators in the region vary.

Proactive, like in terms of they're able, I'd say the region is couple of years in catching up to do in terms of the tech that's being built or what's coming out, um, locally. But equally the buy side is learned from all the mistakes that others [00:37:00] have done across the world to go, okay, I don't need to do that mistake.

I can actually, I'm just gonna leap frog it. It's not like I'm going from, uh, banking to WeChat. Actually, it's still in the banking space, but actually I'm just gonna leapfrog it. So I do see that, um, like the motivation's real, the top down's real, um, and, you know, ability to see that we can actually skip that whole chapter of problems and move forward so that, that's, uh, find that real, um, from a regulation point of view, I think.

Dysregulation, like, you know, um, we, we work with some of the regulators in the region. We, we speak to a lot of them. We speak to all of them. Uh, in, in one shape or another. The motivation is correct. Right? And it's just the rest is a journey for everybody. And that's across the world. 

Mehmet: Absolutely it is a journey and to your point, um, so the influx of of talent changed a lot, uh, from technology adoption perspective.[00:38:00] 

Uh, I've been living here in 20 years in Dubai, so Yeah, of course. Comparing back and then, yeah, human party is right. Huge, huge, huge. Like, I would say, of course, in the positive, uh, yes side, like, um, technology adoption is still, there are some work that need to be done, but I mean, compared to previous, even 10 years or even five years ago, we are in much better shape, uh, regulations.

You know, maybe I'm not an expert in this, but what I have seen, like, you know, uh, especially in the FinTech space, because Dubai, mainly Dubai, you know, majority of the startups I cover, you know. Uh, in my newsletter, like funding and, you know, who did what. So majority of the time, I can say Dubai, like they, they, they have the most, um, number or the, uh, you know, the most active when it comes to FinTech.

And they have done like. Great, uh, on the side of, uh, regulations, even with the very, 

Karan: very FinTech friendly, very, [00:39:00] very tech company friendly. Um, yeah. Yeah. So especially, especially on the 

Mehmet: digital assets and all the things Oh, yeah. Which is, you know, people tell me, like, even in, in some parts of the world still, they are not even talking about that.

But anyway, that is true. 

Karan: One thing I would just quickly say, because I think you, you, you, you, we've spoke about this in a few ways. I find. Uh, UAE banks in a, in an interesting place actually, because you've got UAE banks have grown, so they're all going through their upgrades and they've got, you know, we're growing, so we've gotta like level up and industrialize.

Then you've got, you know, a couple of banks who are already ahead. They're going, okay, we're gonna double down on growth and we're gonna adopt, and we're gonna move forward. And then you also see there's a, there's a, and everyone's working hard, so don't get me wrong here, right? But then there's this like, group of banks that are basically like, well.

We're making money. 

Mehmet: Making money. Yeah. 

Karan: Who will see you later? You know what I'm talking about? Like, we're making money. So what's the imperative to change? [00:40:00] Or, you know, if it's not the ceo, like who are the people in the middle who are responsible for the change? Like, why do we need to change? So I think I, I feel that, um, I come across a couple of those things and I was just like, oh, interesting.

Maybe you don't have the macro wins that the rest of the world does, but you know, you have, you, your, your region is now producing unicorns, so it's only a matter of time. The next offshoot start coming for your. 

Mehmet: Yeah. Yes. Right. Uh, yeah. So, so this part, again, I talk about it a lot. Um, there's still work to be done in that, not only in the financial sector, to be fair, you know, and actually some, as you mentioned, some of them, they've been like more, um, I would say advanced than others.

Um. So I tell people like in order to get a real healthy startup ecosystem, of course you need like multiple factors. I will not repeat all of them now, but mainly, of course you need the [00:41:00] money to back these startups. You need the talent, which is we have, you need, you know, many things, but one of the main thing that people, they don't talk about a lot is to have the early, early adopters, right?

Yes. And I refer people to. Yeah, I refer people to the famous book, which is Crossing the Chasm, right? Yep. So to cross the Cham, that means you need to have early adopters. People that you know believe you can, you know that they're gonna come back and buy from you, and then you go and take it to the next level, which is scaling up the business.

Yeah. I think this is where, this is why I think B2C did better than B2B in this region. Hopefully. We all of, you know, um, not only myself, bunch of people are trying to do is to push that, to have like more real B2B business that can be successful, have early adopters, and then take it to the next level.

But anyway, um, that, that's, that's again, like the whole region is still very new to this. Uh, we had the amazing 

Karan: progress though. [00:42:00] Amazing 

Mehmet: progress. Like imagine the first transaction, if not mistaken, happened 2011 or 2012 when Yahoo bought ub, which was like a, just an email service in Jordan. And then we didn't see anything till, uh, Amazon bought souk.com and then we start to see Uber buying, uh, Kareem.

So, but, but if you see the time it's getting accelerated, but still we are kind of slowish than others. But yeah, we are getting there. I would say. Um, yeah. Yeah. So, so. You want to add something, Karen? 

Karan: I was just gonna say the one thing I like about the companies and the products and, and this is what I like about working in the main region, is it's still maintained the culture and the local flavor of the products that are coming through.

So not everything's kind of, kind of vanilla, so, you know. Uh, I think there's something to be said about that, and I think that's, that's, [00:43:00] that, that should go towards the plus one section, uh, for the, for the local ecosystem. 

Mehmet: Absolutely. Absolutely. And as I said, this is work in progress. Uh, and this is for people coming from outside and you hit the nail on the head, Karen, about that.

It's, it's like, you know, the cultural aspects. So if the people who master that, who understand that even, you know, in MENA region and let's say only GCC region, uh, countries, which are like the six countries of the Gulf, uh, uh, here, like UAE, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, Bama, and Kuwait. So each, each has its own like flavor, I would say, of the culture.

And if you, yes. Just sort this out. You're good to go. Yeah. Um, Karen, I really enjoyed the discussion with you today. Like, as you said, we, we could, we could have done more and more final question where people can get in touch and, uh, find more or maybe if they want to understand about what you're doing with NY one.

Karan: Yeah, so ny one.com is, is, is an easy start, but you can also find me on, uh, on LinkedIn, usually pretty [00:44:00] responsive. Uh, get in touch if there's, if you are, you know, you asked you, you asked earlier, you know, do we work as a consultancy with the, with the tech vendors as well? We don't as much because, you know, we're a tech company, we wanna.

Focused on the tech product and actually use the product so that way we can help a lot more people. But we do have a lot of founders that come in looking for synthetic data or looking for, um, product feedback. So we are happy to help, um, if there's a particular ask from as they build their product. So it's, uh, it's not like we only focused on the enterprise.

We wanna make sure it's, uh. It's a healthy growth on both sides, 

Mehmet: founders and entrepreneurs. This one is for you because you know you need to try and test before you show something in front of your clients. So get in touch with Karan or head to NayaOne.com. Everything will be in the show notes. So if you're listening on your favorite podcasting app, you'll find all the links in the show notes.

If you're watching this on YouTube, you'll find them in the description. Karan. Again, I can't [00:45:00] thank you enough. Busy, busy, busy. I know how it can be busy for someone like yourself as a founder and CEO, and I appreciate all the, you know, insight that you shared today. I appreciate also the work you're doing here with the region.

And I'm sure you know, like, uh, there will be a huge interest hopefully. And, uh, wish you all the success. And this is how usually I end the episode. This is for the audience. If you just discovered our podcast by luck, thank you for passing by. I hope you enjoyed if you did, so give me a small favor, subscribe, share it, and uh, tell your friends and colleagues about it.

And if you are one of the people who keeps coming again and again, thank you for doing so. I can't do this. I can't run this show without you, the audience, the fans, um, you are doing fantastic job for the show for me. This is something really I'm proud of at the past three, four months. I'm repeating this at the end of each episode, but we are currently trending in multiple countries at the same time.

In the top [00:46:00] 200 charts of Apple in the entrepreneurship and sometime in the business category. But something happened in July, which where we are now recording and it'll be released in two weeks, as I said. So we are eight countries at the same time. This is something I never saw before. So eight countries.

In different continents. This cannot happen without two factors. First, you, the audience, and of course Karan, you are part of that. My guest, I'm very grateful and I hope that I can keep, um, you know, inspire, help in any shape and don't hesitate to reach out to me if I can do anything. Thank you very much for tuning again, and we'll meet again very soon.

Thank you. Bye-bye. 

Karan: Thank you.