In this interview series, I talk to key leaders from rising startups that are in demand and have a stake in the future of technology. These companies are making an impact in their industries and are NextGen in terms of product, platform, and service.
In this interview, I had the pleasure to talk to Israel Krush, CEO of Hyro.
About Israel Krush:
Israel founded Hyro in 2018 with the goal of simplifying digital interactions for end-users by helping enterprises launch conversational AI interfaces at scale. Since then, he has raised over $15 million towards bringing that vision to life, building a team of 50 people in New York, California, and Tel Aviv who serve dozens of leading enterprises, including Carroll Property Management, Contra Costa County, Mercy Health and Il Makiage.
Before joining Hyro, Israel accumulated over 15 years of experience in the emerging technologies space, including a foundation built from Intel. Starting out as a software developer, Israel quickly moved up the ladder to manage engineering and product teams in various Israeli startups, eventually ascending to Head of Product at Zeekit, a computer vision company that was recently acquired by Walmart.
Q: Where did the initial idea for the company come from?
I met Rom Cohen, one of my co-founders, at Cornell Tech while I was getting my MBA, and he was getting his MSc in Computer Science. As two Israelis who are new to the US, we got exposed to the voice space with the proliferation of Alexa and Google Home. We got excited but almost immediately were very disappointed. After digging deeper and combining forces with one of my friends from 8200 – Uri Valevski, co-founder and CTO (at the time worked at Google as part of the Search and Duplex teams), we’ve realized that the main challenge is deploying and maintaining natural language interfaces (not only voice) at scale, and that was the problem we aimed to solve.
Q: What are the key differentiated features of your product or service?
Our main competitors, such as LivePerson and Pypestream focus on intent-based chat and voice solutions. Intent, within the conversational AI space, usually means “if X then Y.” For example, if someone says “red,” then stop. We know that conversations need to be more flexible than a rigid flow chart of intents, so Hyro invented a new language-based approach called Adaptive Communications, which uses a knowledge graph, computational linguistics, and natural language understanding to simplify and speed up deployment processes while scaling rapidly. Because of our approach, enterprises do not need to constantly update their chat and voice interfaces based on ever-changing content. It also means that typical challenges with conversational AI, including adding new use cases to existing deployments, are nullified with the ability to layer on new data without retraining the model. Ultimately, the time and cost saved by switching from intent-based to language-based are what drove Carroll, Weill Cornell Medicine, Il Makiage, URMC, Mercy Health, Wheel Pros, Novant Health, and plenty of other enterprises to Hyro during the volatile period of 2020-2021. As opposed to intent-based solutions, Hyro’s adaptive conversational interfaces can be deployed in less than 72 hours, are easy to maintain, and are completely scalable.
Key Features:
– No-code, effortless deployment, and maintenance that doesn’t require any playbooks or training data
– Adaptive text, voice, and touch capabilities that adjust to changes in context
– Fast automation of thousands of customized use cases and skills simultaneously
– Industry-leading understanding rate at an average of 85-90%
– Seamless live handoff between AI and live agents on Slack, Teams, Zendesk, and more
– Automatic 24/7 scraping of data sources including websites, CRMs, APIs, and client databases
– Real-time dashboard with insights (trends, keywords, and metrics) that helps to optimize digital services
Key Success Stories:
– Novant Health – automated 85% of all calls to their call center, helping patients assess eligibility and schedule vaccinations
– Carroll Property Management – automated 100% of all calls to their agents, responsible for 40% of all tours booked and saved them 80K minutes per month of live agent talk time — focused on lead generation
– Weill Cornell Medicine – increased booked appointments online by 47% and lowered bounce rate by 31% with automated physician finding and appointment scheduling
Q: How does the company market or plan to market its products or services?
Hyro is focused on educating enterprises currently evaluating conversational AI solutions on why this new approach, adaptive communications, will win over intent-based models. We’re currently focused on both healthcare and real estate, two verticals in which our impact is measurable and valuable. We’re leveraging buyer intent to understand which organizations are searching for chatbots and voice assistants and aim to intercept them at those critical stages in their buying process with ready-made demos using their own business logic and content.
Q: What kind of CRM software is your company using?
We use Salesforce as a main source of truth and supercharge it with features from HubSpot, which is also our marketing automation platform.
Q: What’s the first bit of advice you’d give to someone who’s thinking of starting their own startup?
Learn the market you’re tackling. The product can easily be changed, the team can change and will change as you grow, the market will stay in its place, and it will be very hard to change it – so make sure you tap into problems and trends that you already see (vs. only thinking about new ones that will occur in the unforeseen future).
Q: What is the key to happy clients?
Open and honest communication. There’s a subtle difference between a successful client and a satisfied client – optimizing for satisfaction might be easy for the short term (doing everything the client wants), but the more customers you have and the bigger they are – you want to make sure that the customer is successful, and in order to do that – you need to have open and honest communication with them and constantly ask – “if we’ll do that – are we optimizing for the metric that will show clear ROI?” – it’s hard to say “no” to clients, but it’s necessary sometimes to make him successful. Be sure to over-communicate your decisions as it comes to prioritization and tie it back to mutually agreed-upon success metrics.
Q: How do you strengthen your ability to focus on what matters?
As an entrepreneur – I’m opportunistic by nature. You’ll always want to keep experimenting and leave room for new, unexpected opportunities – the trick is to limit the amount of time you spend on those and realize the true cost of doing various things. There are various practical ways to do so, here are a few:
1- define the top priorities for the company with your management team. Make sure all are aligned, over-communicate them to the entire team, and revisit them at least once a quarter.
2- block time on your calendar to have opportunistic meetings (customers/VCs/etc.) – and make sure you spend the rest of your time on the top priorities you’ve defined
3- better define your ICPs (Ideal Customer Profiles) – make sure that your sales and marketing teams are targeting them and only them
4- say no. It’s hard. But have a framework that will clearly show you the value vs. the effort and how it’s compared to the focused alternatives. It should be easier to say no to “high-risk low reward” type of opportunities.
Q: What other companies or startups inspire you?
Gong.io has figured out how to win both on product and GTM in a relatively crowded space by creating a strong brand, a product that people are actually fans of, sales cadences that just work (potentially while demonstrating “eat your own dog food”), and a new category they took the lead on.
Superhuman had developed a “scientific” way to measure and track product-market-fit. They’ve developed a bunch of great principles around choosing their beta users, onboarding them, and making sure they are successful. Today, I can’t imagine myself going back to any other email client.
About Hyro:
Hyro is the world’s first Adaptive Communications Platform. Featuring plug & play conversational AI and natural language automation, Hyro enables enterprises to streamline their processes and messaging across their most valuable platforms, services and channels—including contact centers, chat solutions, SMS and more. Headquartered in New York, Hyro delights clients like Mercy Health, Novant Health, Carroll and Contra Costa County with conversational technologies that are quick to deploy, easy to maintain and simple to scale—conserving vital resources while generating better conversations, more conversions, and revenue-driving insights. Hyro was founded in 2018 by Israel Krush, Rom Cohen and Uri Valevski. Learn more at Hyro.ai.
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