Stuut raises $29.5M Series A led by a16z to automate accounts receivable with AI phone calls and emails

I'll be a DAOU of this in a month. I'll I'll need to test it out. Um, but we have our next guest in the restroom waiting room.

Tar from Stout here in the studio. [music]

How are you doing?

We're saying it correctly, right?

We Yes. I mean, first off, we have to say we love the brand because we love Day Job. Um, Legends. Thank you for supporting them and excellent uh excellent taste in branding agencies of course. Um but please introduce yourself and introduce the business as well.

Hi, I'm Tara Kari and uh you got it right. It is uh it's actually played rugby after college and it uh it means prop in South African.

Okay. After college that means you were on the on the pro track or

No, I was I was like just guy who wanted to drink some beers every now and then.

Okay, [laughter] let's go. Let's give it up for those guys. Anyway, underrated guys.

Thank you. I'm I'm here to announce our series A led by Andrea Haritz for $29.5 million.

Boom.

Uh, also participating [clears throat] is Activan and Coastal Ventures. Um,

there we go.

There we go.

We we actually saw a preview of this uh of this brand design uh when we were hanging out with the day job folks. And what I thought was interesting was the positioning of how AI comes through in the messaging to the customer. So maybe let's start with like the problem, the solution, what you're actually building, and then how you message it to, you know, an audience of investors or what you're building, but then also how you message it to the actual end consumer who might not care that much about the particular technologies that you're using.

Yeah. Yeah. And I think there's a lot of slop in AI are thrown around with brands and that's why we use day job similar to you.

Um you know our customers just for context what we do is we help with accounts receivable.

Uh so if you don't know what that is we help collect what you sold

and most of our customers are the kind of like Perk and Elmer Bishop Lifting organizations you might not know but they're flyover states kind of where I'm from which is Indiana. Uh, and what we do is we use AI as a platform and we help customers collect 40% of their overdue invoices in the first 6 months of using our our tool.

Mhm.

And it's not like a traditional software where, you know, they're promising you more seats, more people. Uh, we're live in 3 days for large Fortune 100 companies, which is crazy. Most people don't believe us.

Uh, but then they start seeing the results. And, you know, most of these people we work with, you know, they have a 9 to5. you know, they're not a startup hustler, they're not grinding, they're not, you know, working in New York on Wall Street.

Uh they want to go see their kids game. And so we plug in at 5 to nine so you can punch out and go to that game. And that's really the, you know, what we're about here at St.

And then on the messaging side, do you feel like your customers uh want to know details about the technologies that you're implementing? Do they care about that? Well, you have everybody claiming AI. Like, I'm not Matthew McConna, you know? I got a bad crush on Matthew McConna. Yeah.

And I I have to compete with an AI technology versus Matthew McConnA. It's almost impossible.

Uh and so, you know, our branding reflects our customers.

Sure.

Uh you know, think Clippy, which Day Dog did a great job with.

Yeah. Totally.

And really helping Yeah. helping them be nostalgic, but it's like what software first promised you. It was going to automate things.

Yeah.

But instead, 40 years later,

you know, you need professional services, consultants. it just doesn't do the job.

What's the best uh business model for this type of business these days? Consumption based, seatbased,

success based,

success based, percentage based.

It's almost like you talk to the team at day job to team me up with these questions, but

we did. We actually did.

Yeah, we actually didn't talk about business model with them.

You all I mean, you all buy software. It's so confusing. I'm not a smart man. And I go on and they got [laughter] multiple spreadsheets.

You got a various version. You got like a pricing guide. My head spinning. We just charge a monthly fee like you would a co-orker. The average accounts receivable person in the United States has paid $60,000 without benefits and it takes three to four months to hire them.

We can plug in the next day.

Mhm.

For a fraction of the cost.

Sure. That makes sense.

Uh what what h how does it uh like how how is the actual like product design work? Is this like an agent that gets integrated into communication channels? Like what what does it actually look like? Yeah, I'm glad you asked. Uh, so we do audio, so we'll actually place AI phone calls. Uh, we'll we'll do emails, we'll, you know, even do SMS and WhatsApp in different areas of the world.

Mhm.

So, you know, the way I always tell customers is we have two forms of communication, which is like outbound, hey, you need to pay me or inbound. If you're a bigger customer and somebody calls you and you work in the finance team and you're like, hey, I got a question about invoice 234.

Mhm.

It's pretty hard. uh you have to pull up multiple systems, you have to answer questions. AI is great to live behind that IVR tree and just answer it immediately. On the flip side, if we reach out to a customer and they might have like their generic invoice template that goes out, they'll have a question, hey, where do I send the check to? AI can instantly reply without a human being and even sit in the flow of funds where we'll send them a payment link.

Yeah. Uh, I wanna I want to dive deeper into your what I think is a hot take uh about um basically sticking with a seatbased pricing model. Uh Alex Karp was on the show and he was saying like in the future all companies will be paid on the value they deliver. And I'm just wondering what the difference is if you wind up going to a company that has a thousand times as many invoices, you collect a thousand times as many payments. you deliver a thousand times as much value. Should you not get paid at least a little bit more?

Well, I mean, Alex is an amazing entrepreneur. Uh, and they're an established brand. Hopefully someday, if we keep winning each day and executing, we'll be where Palunteer is.

Okay.

Uh, you know, right now our customers when we talk to them,

you have companies that have been around since 97 saying they're AI now.

Yeah.

And so, you know, we have to differentiate ourselves. Mhm.

And one of the ways we differentiate ourselves is with something very simple, very easy. It's like if you went to Chipotle for the first time.

Yeah.

You line up, you get a burrito, you're like, "Wow, this is amazing back in the day." Not anymore.

I know.

So, [laughter] we we want to make things as simple fall off of all time.

I mean, look at me. It's brutal, right? I love Chipotle.

I know.

But the the the tough part is a lot of the stuff our customers are looking at isn't simple. Yeah. and they're looking at evaluating multiple days of presentations. They're getting grilled by salespeople.

Yeah.

You know, we want to get in, demonstrate value, and see a really quick ROI with these customers. And that's what we're helping them achieve. So, great example is one of our customers, Bishop Lifting, reduced their invoices by 35% past due

and have been able to free up that cash flow for other things. M

it could be like the holidays around bonus time, you know, and they have these people across America in locations and AR is not or receivables isn't their first job. And so being able to offload that and get them a little more money in their pocket is something we try to achieve for our customers.

Yeah, that makes sense.

That's amazing. Well, I got to say the chat absolutely loves you. Say, "This guy is great. This guy Midwest Sensibilities in Manhattan is extraordinarily powerful. He's even drinking yerba mate. What a freaking legend.

I'm liking the sound of this sto.

We Let's give it up.

No, I love it. I mean, I I love an idea that uh that when you hear it, it's just totally obvious. It's like applying, you know, the same there's like the capital war happening in like uh customer experience right now. They're using a lot of the same technology. You're applying it in a very

uh clear way uh in a different part of the org. And uh I'm bullish. So, thank you. Thank you so much for joining.

Really appreciate you having us on and

uh have fun on the show.

Have fun out there. We'll see you back for the beef.

Yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Have a good day.

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