Atrium: Bootstrapped and built to stay that way
Atrium: Bootstrapped and built to stay that way
TIM LEEMASTER
Atrium co-founder and CEO Chris Heineken
Atrium, the Bozeman, Montana-based AI consulting company, plans to stay in the hands of current shareholders as it targets USD 25m in revenue in 2020, says co-founder and CEO Chris Heineken.
“We have a long-term orientation for this and want to have the discretion to control our own destiny,” Heineken says.
The company is profitable and has a 20% operating margin, he added. It generated about USD 14-15m in revenue this year.
Atrium currently has about 100 employees in Montana, Indianapolis and Jaipur, India with about 20 employees in each location. The remainder are “sprinkled throughout the US”, Heineken says.
By the end of next year, it could double headcount across data science, data engineering, analytics and customer strategy staff.
The company is finding most of its new employees right out of college with campus recruiting, Heinekin says, adding the bulk of the work is ‘operational’ AI, or taking the math and statistics out to scale.
About half of the company’s clients are just starting out on the AI path and setting up the systems, structuring data to make it more presentable and analyzing and processing data for insights. The other half, which Heineken says he is “most captivated by”, are companies working on customer retention through more advanced forecasting and predictive analytics.
Heineken sees companies taking an evolutionary approach where they start with small, incremental steps into machine learning and AI and eventually hit that moment when the technology delivers much more than what a novice to the technology might anticipate.
“It’s almost the complete reverse of IT software development when you ask where the pain points are and then make the business processes work faster,” Heineken says. “With machine learning the data isn’t the byproduct, it’s the center of the universe.”
The company’s main sectors of focus are financial services, healthcare/life sciences and higher education. Over the next five years Heineken said the company would target three-fourths of revenue from two or three verticals. It is solely focused on the US market.
The company launched in early 2018 and uses the Salesforce AI platform Einstein. Heineken and his fellow founders had spent their entire careers in customer relationship management with a front office focus and watched its evolution as cloud computing and data science took shape.
“Now you’ve got some real-world use cases [and can see] business transformation through the lens of AI,” Heineken says.