"So, I'm particularly excited to do this Founder Fireside because we have a first for the Founder Fireside series. We are doing a big announcement on this podcast. We are announcing that Variance is co..."

">> So, Variance is building purpose-built AI agents for risk and compliance. We automate content review, fraud reviews, identity reviews at scale. We're powering some of the largest companies in the w..."

">> variance usually deals with really sensitive data and sensitive issues. And the phrase I like to use is that we're building the systems that are often used by the bad guys, but we're building them ..."

"about Variance is that even though probably no one who's watching this video has ever actually used the product themselves, they have used many products that under the hood are actually powered by wha..."

">> One of the customers, GoFundMe is a platform that you can use in order to build your own fundraisers. And GoFundMe is effectively a payments platform. And GoFundMe actually has some very strict com..."

">> Yes. So um GoFundMe is actually very crisis driven. So if there is any sort of large event or any sort of natural disaster, there's usually going to be a spike in fundraisers that occur on GoFundMe..."

">> What are other like products that people use that also are powered by variants and they don't even realize it? >> So, the scale has been um impressive the number of use cases that our agents can be..."

"to take a step back, I think it's really elegant how AI agents are built at the moment. There's really only three building blocks that you need. So you have the compliance documents, the standard oper..."

"other interesting technical challenges that you guys have encountered and had to solve in the course of making this work >> at scale? Um the data problem was was really the core hardest technical chal..."

">> Yeah, definitely. So, I think it's important to sort of understand how these problems were solved at scale before. So, usually companies are going to have a patchwork of different what I call deter..."

"and I think that fraud pattern came to be during the elections. Um we had one customer that is processing a lot of content and they're also there are Fortune 500. They're hosting large communities and..."

"like a lot of software to build. How how big is the team now? >> So, we're 12. Um, we have five software engineers. So, we've been we've remained very very lean. We have >> five software engineers bui..."

">> So, Michael and I both met, we were co-workers at Apple. Um, we were both engineers on the fraud engineering team and I was a data engineer. Michael was a machine learning engineer. And it was real..."

">> Yeah. So, our first customer was uh a company called IA. They're a publicly traded company. >> IA folks might not have know of IA because sort of like a parent holding company, but I'll bet they kn..."

"company. >> I think starting a company tests you in a lot of different ways. Um and we have a really interesting story. You know after I we got to on board a lot of great customers in the trust and sa..."

">> Yes. And if we go back to why Michael and I started the company, Michael and I had a very specific pair of skill sets in fraud and we understood what the industry looked like. We had a lot of issue..."