The following interview is a conversation we had with Hikari Senju, CEO and Founder of Omneky, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $10M Raised to Empower Brands With AI-Powered Ads To Maximize Performance
Hikari Senju
Really excited to be here, Brett.
Brett
So to kick things off, could we just start the quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background?
Hikari Senju
Sure. Yeah. So I grew up in Westchester, New York. My grandfather works at IBM. The IBM headquarters is based in Westchester. My mother also grew up in Westchester, New York, for that reason and really kind of grew up with this kind of tech centric every time. Spending time with grandfather was all about Moore’s law. Innovate or die. You have to always be innovating. The world changes every six months, and you’re always in the sprint for building the next product, even with the assumption that the product will go out of date in a year. And so it’s this never ending rat race in some ways for innovation, but building these world changing products. So that was kind of the broth that was incubated in growing know, definitely technologically know.
Hikari Senju
Growing up and going to Harvard, MIT, prince of these other places, ultimately chose to go to Harvard and study computer science there, but cross register at MIT. And it was really at MIT almost a decade ago when I was taking an early machine learning AI class at MIT, when I, Loki, saw some of the early generative models where basically you could have these massive neural nets and kind of hallucinate. They learned patterns in their embeddings through this kind of generative, adversarial process to generate imagery.
Hikari Senju
And my dad’s an artist, so I think it was combining that technological fascination and obsession growing up with the application in disrupting and kind of being an AI artist and AI can be creative was the most exciting and thrilling thing for me that really got me on this path, being like, I want to build these tools, I want to build these models. I want to learn as much as I can about this technology and ideally one of the people helping to shape this technology. And so that’s kind of a quick rundown in terms of my obsession with generative AI. It was kind of that moment at that class when all these things click together between then and now. I started a couple of venture back companies in college.
Hikari Senju
One of them was an online kind of ed tech business where it was actually a chat interface where it would connect students with tutors and help answer questions regarding their math homework and other kinds of homework. In a lot of that, the application there and the problems were solving there was about personalized learning. How do you connect the right students to the right tutors? How do you create content or create coursework that is compelling and interesting for, based on different students backgrounds and their learning styles and their understanding of different concepts, what’s interesting to them? And I think that kind of still ties in today with what we’re doing at Omneky regarding generative AI and ads. In many ways, advertising is education at scale.
Hikari Senju
And so kind of the early thinking we’re doing about creating content, personalized content for education purposes, threads itself into the work we do today. And then this ed tech company was good to a certain size, and it was acquired by another ed tech company where I led marketing. And so it was really there running marketing with all these pieces collect together regarding Omneky. So I saw this opportunity to use genderbai to solve this really hard problem in advertising, which is this infinite need for content. Right. Advertisers have this insatiable desire in appetite for content, tell better personalized stories regarding all the different skus that an advertiser may have, and also regarding all the different audiences they may be targeting and across all the different platforms who may be trying to reach that potential customer.
Hikari Senju
And so that combining that insatiable need with content with my obsession with generative AI, kind of got me enough conviction to start on Mickey in 2018 to generate personalized experiences at scale, and to generate personalized ads at scale. And, yeah, and really just been grinding away at that mission consistently since.
Brett
Nice. That’s awesome. And two questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder. First one is what founders do you admire the most and what do you admire about them?
Hikari Senju
Yeah, so this is kind of an oldie, but I think the Founder that really surpire the most is maybe also kind of cliche, but I have this personal connection with this Founder where I have alopecia, so I have this autoimmune condition where my immune system, I don’t have any hair, things like this. And so the J. D. Rockefeller also had this same condition. He also had alopecia universalis. And I just have incredible fascination and admiration for him. I think the way he viewed markets, the way he viewed opportunities, the way he viewed strategy. When I pitch Omnihi to some that were recruiting, say, executives from different kinds of industries and such, I pitch Omniki as almost being in the data refinery business. Similar to how J. D. Rockefeller was in the oil refinery business.
Hikari Senju
JD Rockefeller turned crude oil know products, whether those know at that time, it was initially like lamps for lamp purposes, but eventually fuel for cars and such. And I think likewise Omneky is in the data refinery business where we turn raw data, which in and of itself isn’t that valuable, into personalized experiences. This is the valuable output of data. And so we turn data into personalized experiences, just like J. C. Rockefeller turned crude oil into different oil based products. And so I’m interested in client J. Rockefeller feel like similar medical conditions and similar kinds of obsessions. And so that’s the Founder that admire the most. But to be fair, I am obsessed with Founder biographies. If you can get know, if I see a Founder biography, I’ll read it over a day, or like every single Founder story is a feature for me.
Hikari Senju
And the list can go on and on about founders, from Joe Kennedy to even Jar Hoover. These are lots of different founders in different areas that I am obsessed with and I learned from. But the one that I admire the most is JD Rockefeller.
Brett
I almost read Titan. I downloaded it on audible and it was like 32 hours long. And I was like, man, that’s a.
Hikari Senju
Big, got to read it.
Brett
32 hours.
Hikari Senju
You got to read it. Yeah. Rod Troda. I’ve read all his books. He’s so good. All his biographies are so good. But yeah, Titan is one of my favorite books, and it’s definitely one of my favorite biographies for sure.
Brett
Have you heard of the podcast founders, by chance?
Hikari Senju
Yes.
Brett
Nice. I just got introduced to that. I’m like, this is like a dream because I’m saying I love reading these books, but sometimes it’s too long for me. I want to know about the person, but I don’t. 20 hours want to know them. I just wanted to kind of understand their background a little bit. So I’ve been excited to see that podcast or listen to that podcast.
Hikari Senju
The thing with books, though, that I like is that there’s these kind of weird idiosyncrasies about these founders that you learn better when you read these books. There’s just so much more detail about what makes them tick. What were their motivations? I think sometimes the thing with the spark notes of Founder bios is you don’t really always understand where they’re coming from. When they made these critical decisions at these key junctures, you just know that they made these decisions. And sometimes that decision in and of itself isn’t that helpful because context change, environments change. But by reading the person’s bio and kind of understanding their story leading up that decision, I think that feeds better into making better decisions in similar situations.
Hikari Senju
Myself, this is like reading Founder bios in some ways is my own form of therapy, because I know that whatever tough times we’d be going through, I feel like I can kind of translate that into a similar situation potentially from one of the at this point, a lot of Founder bios I read and definitely gives me confidence that carbon tough times are some Founder went through some kind of similar situation and they overcame it. And so I do like the full context regarding some key decisions that these long bios, I think books are also valuable.
Brett
Yeah, totally agree. For me, there’s like this sweet spot where it’s like I want to know about the person, but I just don’t want to spend that many hours. So if the alternative is I’m never going to learn about that person, I’ll take the hour long podcast for the consumption sake.
Hikari Senju
What I do is the cheat I do here is I do listen to them at two x speed. So I definitely probably miss a lot of information as well. But I get enough of the key kind of trends in that person’s background when listening to the event to xpeed. So you’re right, I’m probably not ingesting the full, picking up every single little detail about this Founder’s background. But by listening to Xpeed, you can see recurring themes regarding this person’s motivation and kind of way they think about the world that just through repetition, you hear through the course of, say, an eight hour book. Also, I think the value of a book is the structure that a book provides. It tends to be clear arguments and supporting arguments, and that kind of drives home team form points more strongly.
Hikari Senju
Sometimes podcasters kind of briefly might touch a point, but yeah, there’s definitely also an option of listening to a quick podcast about a Founder, and then if it’s interesting, reading the book or something like, yeah, I mean, any form of information is good.
Brett
Yeah, totally agree. And outside of Titan, what would you say is your number one favorite entrepreneur biography or Founder biography?
Hikari Senju
Yeah, so the book that I love the most is a soul of a new machine by Tracy Kidder. This is an oldie, but it is one of the best books I read about software development and engineering, building technology products and being a builder of technology products. The soul of a new machine by Tracy Kidder. And it is a book about this data general. It’s a data general in the 1970s, 1980s, as they’re working to release this new computer. And the recurring theme actually of this book is that in many ways, software development and technology, all this like a game of pinball, right? You work so hard and the reward you get for working so hard and winning is you just get to stay in the game, right?
Hikari Senju
And it goes back this theme earlier as well from my grandfather idea of like, you have to keep innovating and you have to keep winning and build compelling products just to stay the year of your technology. That you can’t have these technology trends pass you or else your business becomes under threat. And so therefore your business is constantly under threat. Every couple of years, the indie grove only the paranoid survive kind of mentality. But the great thing about the soul of the new machine is it’s the narrative of the soul of the new machine. You feel this paranoia. Incredibly young engineers, young teams, straight out of college, essentially locked up in this warehouse, working their life depends on it, like 24/7 dedicating their soul into building this product just to remain competitive because the competitor is releasing a similar kind of product.
Hikari Senju
And the leader of this project goes, I think Tom west goes in and kind of launches. It takes a big bet regarding the new technology to kind of bet the company against in terms of this new hardware that they’re building. And it’s kind of the ramification of that. But the idea of these super young engineering teams working their hearts out to build these tools 24/7 you’re basically living in the office, scrambling, making these trade offs between speed and quality all the time to get this product out in the short time frame is, and then the reward for that is you just get to do it again, is, I think, one of the best books, frankly, regarding developing technology products and the software industry and technology industry. And it’s one of my favorite book.
Hikari Senju
It’s definitely my favorite book as a Founder that however, yes, there’s bugs and there’s issues and there’s always this constant trade off between having young, energetic engineers and quality of code and time and training and keeping everyone organized, motivated, and some things don’t change.
Brett
Nice. You’re the second Founder to say that book. The other one was really this guy named TJ Jermalik. So he’s the Founder of beyond identity. They’ve raised like 200 million in funding, but he’s like a Silicon Valley Og. So he was there at Silicone Graphics in the early stuff, and then he had that as his favorite book as well. So that’s all I need to hear. If two people say it’s their favorite book, I’ll read it, so I’ll order a copy after the interview.
Hikari Senju
It’s my favorite book.
Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s talk a bit more about the platform. So I think we really covered the origin story quite well there, but let’s explore what the platform looks like. So can you just talk us through the platform?
Hikari Senju
Sure. Yeah. So Omneky generative AI and data to generate ads. So we use computer vision and other kind of reverse album engineering to modify the designs of ads, what kind of keywords, what kind of visual elements are in the ad, and also just describing what’s in the ad. GPT four, for example, has got really good at quantifying images and videos and what makes the image compelling in combining that with marketing data and advertising data with return on ad spend data to then say, okay, so these are the types of stories that drive the highest sales when it comes to a certain audience or certain platform. These are the types of creative and content that gets the best distribution on certain platforms with targeting certain audiences or for certain types of companies or certain types of products.
Hikari Senju
And then we use those insights to then generate content with generative AI, generate images, generate banner ads, generate display ads, increasingly now generating video ads. The customers can then provide feedback on through our workflow tool. And then that’s human feedback, that then if the ad isn’t good enough, they can provide human feedback on the platform, what could make the ad better. And the moment they approve the ad, it gets automatically launched across all the different platforms that they want to launch their ads against. And we have integrations with all the major advertising platforms.
Hikari Senju
And so it’s this generative AI, data driven product with an element of human feedback to constantly build our own AI that generates compelling content and ads to help our customers, our business customers scale their businesses, whether that is the biggest brands in the world or an entrepreneur that’s just getting started and wants to connect with their initial set of customers.
Brett
And who is your ideal customer today? Is it a small business? Is it enterprise mid market? What does that look like for you? Yeah.
Hikari Senju
So the vast majority of my customers today are SMB. We’re breaking into the enterprise and mid market, and we have a smaller kind of agency business as well that’s being built out at scale. I’d imagine it’s going to be a quarter breakdown between agencies, SMBs, mid market and enterprise. But the initial traction has been amongst SMBs. I think the classic kind of innovators dilemma where you kind of come into the market with an inferior product at a cheaper price and then as the technology improves, you kind of displace the incumbents, is kind of the play that we’re achieving as well now, especially our enterprise businesses have been growing a lot faster in the last couple of months.
Brett
And as I’m sure you’ve experienced, finding product market fit and reaching product market fit isn’t easy. So where are you in that journey and what have you learned along the way?
Hikari Senju
Yeah, so I would definitely say we have early sides of product market fit. So we are several million dollars in revenue, recurring revenue. We have customers who love the products that are sticky customers. And overall our net revenue generation is pretty good. So it has gone good over time. So it was not good when we launched the product 2020, but it’s definitely gone a lot better and it’s becoming very sticky in terms of what we’ve learned along the way. I think it’s this constant loop of human customer feedback on improving the workflows. Right. I think thesis when we launched the company was these generate AI models, these llms, these foundation models are going to improve on their own because there’s so much energy at the research institution level, internationally, by the big tech companies to improve these foundation models.
Hikari Senju
And so the focus was always about building the best workflow product, the best customer facing product, and then kind of switching in different models as the technology progressed. So initially when we launched the product, it was just GPT one and stock images. So they begin Lynch GBD two, GPT-3 Dodge four, and then regarding the image generation with stock images, then it was Dolly, and now it’s our fine tuned kind of stable, diffusion based models on our own, hosted our own gpus. And so that kind of obsession of the customer, building the best, stickiest product for them to really provide consistently value for them, has been kind of the obsessive focus and orientation regarding product market fit and building the best product.
Brett
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Hikari Senju
Be thinking, I don’t have time to.
Brett
Host a podcast, I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do.
Hikari Senju
You show up and host and we.
Brett
Handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. Now back today’s episode. And how are you thinking about your market category?
Hikari Senju
Yeah, so our market category, I think is in generative AI, the applied to advertising and marketing. There is so much growth opportunity for us. It’s almost like what to focus? It’s so critical to figure out what to focus on and make sure we stay focused because there are so many interesting applications of utilizing llms, agents, generative models, data to just superpower all these different functions within the demand generation and customer facing side, customer relationship side of the business. And so I would categorize ourselves as like a marketing advertising generative AI company.
Brett
Nice. And what type of growth are you seeing today? Our audience loves to hear metrics, so any metrics or numbers that you’re able to share would be awesome.
Hikari Senju
Yeah, we grew two x year over year, and we’re on track to growing faster this year.
Brett
Nice. And what do you attribute to that growth? What are you getting right?
Hikari Senju
Well, I think this goes back to the early days of the way we kind of set things up. I think first off, we built a great brand in generative AI. When I started the company, I saw that there would be increased competition. I thought that this, in 2018, I thought that generative AI would be a massively huge thing, like kind of this excitement I had when I was watching this lecture. I knew that if this technology is exponentially improved by a couple of magnitudes, the applications are pretty ginormous in a variety of industries. And so I wanted to start really building this spread. And so just consistently communicating to the market that we are the leading generative AI company for advertisers year over year. Not really deviating from that message has helped. I think that’s starting to kind of now seep into the market.
Hikari Senju
The market started to understand the messaging and the value problems. We’ve been communicating consistently for the past several couple years, especially now with Chad GBT bringing awareness on that. I mean, were last year the only generative AI company to pitch as a finalist at know. We were boomer on all the different market maps from CV Insights to NFX, as one of the hottest area of AI companies. And a bunch of industry leaders have highlighted us in different settings as one of the companies to watch for.
Hikari Senju
So I think these are all the fruits of the labor curve, just even when it was an AI winter or 2010s when AI was kind of viewed as this kind of thing that was always in the future, that was always kind of over promised, whatever kind of always kind of over promised, under delivered right in the late two thousand and ten? S and kind of grinding through those moments, working through those moment, just not deviating from our focus today. I think the market is finally understanding the vision that we’ve been communicating consistently for this time. And I think the other big thing is we just built a great product over time. Building data integrations with all these different ad networks and platforms take time. Not anybody can get access to these ad networks.
Hikari Senju
You need to have a track record of running ads before they give you access to these platforms, each of these platforms. And it’s building a great sticky product that customers love and find joy from in terms of signing up and connecting their different ad accounts and connecting, uploading all their different brand assets and generating the content and improving the content and seeing it launch magically is I think also just again a labor of love of many years. It takes years to build a great product and I think it’s just a fruit of all those years spent on just building and focusing on building the best product.
Brett
And as I mentioned there in the intro, you have raised over 10 million in funding so far. So from that fundraising journey and that push, what are some of the lessons that you learned along the way that would be interesting and helpful for other early stage b, two b founders listening in?
Hikari Senju
Yeah, I mean, you can never time the market, right? So you raise the money when you can raise the money when you’re hot, you raise money when you’re not hot. You got to survive. I wish there was an easy way, but sometimes the market is in more control of the process than you are. I think for the first couple of years were very lucky. We got some early funding from Village Global, which is like a seed stage, pre seed fund. I met the partners there through my previous company and then Richard Socher, the chief scientist at Salesforce at the time, who also co-authored was one of the co-authors for Imaged ad and global vectors regarding word embeddings and such. And so was very lucky early days, receiving some key backing from certain investors, but still very bootstrap lead times.
Hikari Senju
For the first couple of years, most investors were definitely skeptical, advertised the technology and then definitely somewhat skeptical of even AI technologies at that time. It was kind of viewed as this far off thing that made, who knows the time frame which these promises would have been delivered. And so during those time periods, the focus was on staying alive and just focusing on building the product as scrappily as we can and just staying scrappy and building the best product with the limited resources while keeping the company. Then, you know, late last year, definitely the two changed. You have Dolly, you have stable diffusion, and then you subsequently, after you have chat GBT. And that just exploded the interest and demand for generative AI and validated our initial thesis.
Hikari Senju
And so that made it a lot easier to raise the 10 million at the end of last year. And then from there, it got really key backing from John Donovan, who led that road. He’s the former CEO of at and T Communications, on the board of Lockheed and Palton Networks, and just key backer and believer in us early. He also invested in this earlier round two years ago, and he really helped kind of get the investors together as well as some funds. And so I would say, yeah, like giving up, keeping at it also just developed. At the end of the day, fundraising is a function of trust. And I think that just trust is a function of building relationships based on trust.
Hikari Senju
And so doing what you say you’re going to do, and consistently just doing what you’re saying you’re going to do, day over day with the investor community, the first time you meet with investors, they might not invest, but if you tell them what you’re going to do and then you keep executing against it, they’ll believe you a bit more when you say, I can achieve this bigger thing now, and we’ve achieved these earlier things. So just developing track record, developing reputation of being a person that sticks to the word having honor, delivering at whatever cost the promises you make, and making both bold bets, but then also executing is that, and developing that track record, I think, is also key for fundraising. So that’s just hard work as well.
Brett
Yeah, that’s super helpful advice. And it sounds like you really got that validation for everything that you believed and everything you were pushing for last year. Right? Or that’s at least like, when the market really started to get it. So from between 2018 and last year, when the market really started to get it, were there ever any dark times in that five year period where you felt like you had this vision, but the market just didn’t understand it, or didn’t believe in it? And if so, how’d you keep going? How’d you persevere through those times?
Hikari Senju
Well, I think partly I’m like a massive nerd for the technology, and so I actually didn’t really care if the market didn’t begin because I was just having so much fun learning about the technology. For me, it’s a dream job, whether I’m being paid or not. If I get to spend twenty four seven playing with all these generative models and making art with AI, right, it’s so intrinsically fulfilling for me that I didn’t really care were making money or not making money or we definitely were making money very early on. And so we had a good business and we had good margins from the very beginning, partly because were profitable within the first year. So we had a good business. And so there was no existential concern of the company dying immediately.
Hikari Senju
We had structured the company in a way where it was profitable and had good mortgages and good cash flow from very beginning. So there was less of an existential concern there. And then for me, then I didn’t care what the rest of the world thought. As long as the company is alive and it’s doing well and it’s not going to die immediately, and I get to do what I’m obsessed with, then that’s the best. And so I was just focusing on building the best product and integrating all these cool technologies in the product and creating my life for customers. And that in and of itself was fulfilling. Obviously, it was painful to be rejected from investors and such, repeatedly all the time, but that’s part of being an entrepreneur, I think, is being rejected.
Hikari Senju
So the time would be that you just have to, every entrepreneur has to develop a thick skin, especially not just the right of passage. And I think also reading all these books also provided context that, hey, fundamentally you become a successful entrepreneur because you saw an opportunity before anyone else did. So almost the recurring theme with every one of these bios, right, these Founder Bios, especially these very successful founders, is initial rejection, because by definition they were early into a market. And so therefore, by definition, they spent the first couple of years being rejected. And so that also provided confidence for me as well, being like, well, yes, it’s painful that I’m being rejected, but this is also normal for entrepreneurs, especially when you’re right.
Hikari Senju
And so I think that’s why reading these books provide some form of therapy to me, because as much as those times are tough, I knew that it was still like a normal process of being an entrepreneur.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And final question here for you, what’s next for the company? Let’s talk maybe three to five year vision. Can you just paint a picture of what that’s going to look like?
Hikari Senju
Yeah, absolutely. So I think the vision for Omneky is the vision that we’ve communicated from day one, right, which is generating personalized experiences. I think we’re in a very interesting moment where the creation of digital experiences, right? Whether that’s content blog, but also code landing pages. We’re going to see the explosion of single person entrepreneur. We’re going to see single people, companies become unicorns, right? We’re going to have Instagram when it was acquired for a billion dollars with four people. We’re going to see a lot more of those. Because what these generative models enable and empower is that kind of leverage for brilliant visionaries. They don’t need necessarily to raise tons of venture to get their products out, to get their products built. And so that said, though, there’s still the need for distribution, right? Every great compelling product still needs good distribution.
Hikari Senju
And so if we can be the platform, the product that they utilize to scale their businesses. And this has always been the mission, right, to democratize growth, to empower entrepreneurs, empower human creativity. And by the way, going back to kind of a key advice here for founders is have a compelling mission. And because that’s what attracts the team, that’s what attracts the quality of the team, is the compellingness of that mission. Our mission is to democratize growth and empower human creativity. And I think that’s part of why we’ve been able to attract great talent. So these entrepreneurs are going to need partners to help scale their businesses. And when you’ve built a product that helps them go to market scalably, we’ll generate the content, we’ll do the media buying. We’ll eventually generate landing pages using the data that the database we have.
Hikari Senju
We’re going to generate all other customer touch points. We’re going to generate personalized experiences, omnichannel, and also cross funnel powered by data to help these businesses, these entrepreneurs, achieve their vision of connecting with customers and scaling their different product offerings. And so this next wave of entrepreneurs we’re going to see powered by these generative AI GBT LLM models, we would love to arm them and help them connect with their customers faster and help them scale their businesses with our platform. And so, yeah, we’re just getting started.
Brett
Amazing. I love it. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you continue to build, where should they go?
Hikari Senju
Yeah, I mean, follow me on Twitter at aji soji. Follow Omneky on Twitter Omneky. It’s just at Omneky. Connect me with me on LinkedIn and go check out our website, omneky.com. Follow us on other social platforms is best way to stay up to date. And yeah, don’t be shy. Feel free to reach out LinkedIn or Twitter. Those are some of the good ways of staying in touch and connecting.
Brett
Awesome. Well, thank you so much for coming on, talking about what you’re building and sharing some of those lessons that you’ve learned along the way. I really enjoyed this interview, and I know our audience is going to as well. So thank you so much. Really appreciate it.
Hikari Senju
Thanks, Brett. Really enjoyed this conversation.
Brett
All right, let’s keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, Silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a P two B Founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
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