The money for compliance AI is in cross-border adaptability.

That’s our main takeaway from this call with Gani.ai founders Bintang Hidayanto and Timur Nugroho, who themselves went on a call back in December 2023 to first talk about working on an idea Bintang has had over the last decade as a lawyer and founding partner of one of Indonesia’s leading law firms. It is an idea that he ultimately decided to pursue as generative AI technologies became more accessible and more widely adopted than ever before.

This fateful call led to the founding of Gani.ai, with Bintang bringing his 15+ years as a lawyer and Timur his 15+ years as a product leader to change the way people access compliance knowledge, resources, and support with agentic AI.

Join us on this call:

Timestamps

(00:39) Introducing our guests Bintang and Timur, how and why they started Gani.ai

(11:29) What makes Gani.ai different from your typical ChatGPT app or even legal tech giant Harvey.ai

(29:07) The perks of building compliance AI from Southeast Asia and optimizing for cross-border functionality

(33:52) Make or break moments in Bintang’s and Timur’s careers

(38:23) Special offer for those who want to try Gani.ai

Follow us on ⁠LinkedIn⁠ for more updates

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Directed by Paulo Joquiño

Produced by Paulo Joquiño

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal, tax, or business advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠Insignia Ventures⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ fund. Any and all opinions shared in this episode are solely personal thoughts and reflections of the guest and the host.

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Transcript

Meet the Founders: Bintang and Timur

Paulo J: Hi folks. Welcome back to Oncall with Insignia, where you go on call with leaders innovating the future of Southeast Asia’s internet and digital economy and beyond. Or we like to call it ASI innovation. I’m your host, Paulo, and we are back with another episode with two of our founders who are joining us on this call.

I don’t think we’ve had them on the podcast before, but I’ve had a chance to talk to them a number of times already since we first partnered with them. So I’m really happy to finally have them on the podcast to share, not just about their business, but also their journeys coming into this business and some of their learnings from growing this business so far over the last few years.

Paulo J: So we have none other than Bintang Hidayanto and Timur Nugroho, the founders of Gani.ai. Thank you Timur and Bintang for joining us on this call today.

Bintang: Thank you, Paulo. It’s good to be here.

Paulo J: I’m really excited to talk about this because it’s obvious. Gani.ai is, as the name suggests, an AI company. Who doesn’t love to talk about AI? But also with the two of you on this call, we’re gonna get some interesting perspectives. Both from a legal perspective, which is the industry that Gani.ai operates in, or is trying to unlock value in, but also from the product AI tech side as well, which is really powering the platform that you guys are building.

So first things first, for our audience who have not heard about Gani.ai. Bintang and Timur, you can share like a brief introduction for our audience about what you guys are building so far at this point, and what you guys have in terms of a vision for the future of law and the legal industry.

The Vision of Compliance Tech: Quality and Adaptability

Bintang: In a very short description, what we are building is what we call compliance tech. This is merging the boring compliance side together with the exciting technology, which is AI. What we’re trying to do here is primarily give access as much as possible to this originally gatekept knowledge that’s very difficult to access. I don’t like the term, but we’re democratizing that access.

We are also taking it a step further by supercharging this ability to serve corporate needs of large corporations, large companies that require very extensive data processing and reviewing everything beyond the usual individual use when you think about AI.

That’s what we’re building. In terms of the future, what we want to achieve is a world where access to compliance knowledge and service is not gatekept. That’s from the customer side, from the client perspective. When I say compliance, it’s the Bermuda Triangle of law, accounting, and tax.

At the same time, the tool is useful for the professionals themselves as well, to allow them to work and deliver service in ways unimaginable before. That will bring about, hopefully, an era where costs for getting these services are no longer based on rarity or scarcity, but on quality. It’s going to be a lot more accessible. If you have to pay a premium price, it’s not because of scarcity, but because it reflects the quality or the complexity that you need. That’s the future we’re trying to make.

Timur: What we’re doing is a very exciting AI-powered tool. It’s a technology that keeps changing. From the point we started building it up until now, there have been lots of changes in the industry. It’s a matter of picking one that is very scalable and at the same time resistant to change, because we really change the tech every month. That’s the exciting part of it.

Paulo J: I like what you mentioned about it being compliance tech as opposed to legal tech, because it points to the initial, immediate use case that you guys are building for and the value that is being created. The opportunity there. You talk about the whole Bermuda Triangle, the intersection between law, accounting, and tax as well, which is a really important use case.

The Journey to Building Gani.ai

Paulo J: I wanted to jump into how you guys got into building Gani.ai. I know, Timur, you have a product background in tech, and Bintang, you’re also a lawyer within the startup and venture ecosystem. You can share a little bit of how you guys came together. How long have you guys known each other? How did you eventually decide to make the jump, throw away the safety net and start building?

Bintang: I’ll start with this one. Timur, it comes from you. It’s a very interesting story. Actually, the idea of building something like this is something Timur and I have been discussing this since a decade ago. There’s always been this desire to inject technology, especially into this field, because logically you think there are a lot of areas where technology can make many things better. But somehow it’s always been very hard to apply that.

We’ve been talking about this for many years. Whenever I had a chance to meet Timur, we always discussed this. I was always under the view that, at that time, there was no technology that would allow for a significant solution other than just incremental increase or incremental betterment.

Paulo J: Really needle-moving kind of impact…

Bintang: Exactly. It’s not really the kind of thing where it makes a positive impact up until the advent of generative AI. That’s when the discussion started getting more serious.

We started really thinking about how to apply this. Of course, from the concept ideation until now, there has changed a lot. But that was the initial idea and the initial spark that led to this whole thing.

My background as a lawyer helped in understanding how the industry works, not just as a lawyer, but also as a business, as an entrepreneur in the legal business. But that would mean nothing without the capability of turning that vision into something that you can touch and see. Through a stroke of luck, I was able to be introduced to Timur and from the beginning we had… we actually didn’t have a proper meetup. We only met after we decided to work together. But from the first call immediately it wasn’t difficult to see that we both have the dynamics and we both understand what we’re trying to do and the kind of commitment that’s required.

Paulo J: When was that first call with Timur?

Bintang: That was December 2023, actually.

Paulo J: Wow. Okay. Not that long ago. Timur, for you when you got that invitation from Bintang, what were you looking for at the time?

Timur: I thought I was getting summoned by the law! No, it was really exciting. I’ve always been in technology as a practitioner, as a product guy, but predominantly in FinTech. This is my first venture in legal and I thought it’s such a far-reaching industry. It’s not something that anyone just comes in and innovates, let alone be in it for a long time. It was a really interesting opportunity to be able to be involved in and at the same time innovate the industry. At least that’s the aim in the world of compliance and tax as well.

We were going to build something, not as sizable as this originally was for the firm. But then it became a beast, if you allow me to use that word, that it is now. It’s becoming a platform that is being used multi-nationally. That’s where we got together and it’s been an exciting journey.

Paulo J: It’s interesting. I always find it great when founders solve their own pain points and are able to define ways to scale that to other use cases.

Challenges and Innovations in Legal Tech: Market Validation and Customer Focus

Bintang: On that point, that’s actually the most important thing because I don’t want to name names, but we’ve seen in the past and it is still going now in a lot of sectors where you have all these solutions coming up not because they’re solving anything, but they’re solving problems that they themselves created. It’s just coming from the perspective of the mindset of, “I have to identify a problem.” Then you go around and look for problems, no matter how artificial it is. Then you go into hacking mode. How do we solve this problem which is very inorganic.

With us when we started, the first thing we did was we looked into our own operations, the law firm, and then we said, “What are the things that we can make better, can make more efficient, we can enhance with technology and how do we do it?” These are lived-in experiences. These are real problems that we deal with on a daily basis. These are not just problems that we go out and try to find or research. These are actual problems that we believe everybody, almost everybody in the sector faces. It allows us to make a product that is a lot more grounded to reality.

It’s not the kind of product where you have to stop and think and imagine how you use this to solve your problem and then start thinking about artificial problems to use the product, because sometimes the tech comes first before the discipline. Before what you’re trying to solve. It’s not a bad thing, but we just want to try to approach this differently. We want to look from the business first, from the actual problem first, and then how we imbue technology to actually really solve problems.

Paulo J: It’s a much less risky way of building as opposed to the other way where you’re trying to figure things out and there are a lot more possibilities of making mistakes along the way. With a clear idea of what you’re solving in mind.

Bintang: At the very least you don’t have to worry about validation. Because I was putting myself as a customer as well. If I’m a customer with these problems and I’m presented with this solution, would I buy it? Would I use it? The reason why you also need to do market validation is either because it’s such a groundbreaking thing that no one’s thought about, like completely new things, or you’re actually solving an artificial problem. It’s a problem that maybe is not really a problem, but kind of creating it into a problem. I’m not saying it’s a bad thing, but it takes a lot more effort to then educate the market why you need this.

What Makes Gani.ai Different: Built by Legal Professionals, for Legal Professionals

Paulo J: Speaking of what makes Gani.ai different, I’m sure Insignia and Gani.ai have been on a lot of trips abroad and have been with you guys as you’ve been pitching Gani.ai as well to organizations and companies.

I was curious to know, how do you field questions on what makes Gani.ai different from other agents. Timur, you alluded earlier to the fact that this technology’s changing every month, pretty quickly. Obviously there are a lot of tools coming up and other players outside of Southeast Asia, outside of Asia, also building within this space.

What is your response to those kinds of questions? Bintang, you already touched upon one aspect of it, but Timur, you can expand on that a little bit more. What’s the difference between generalist agents and other AI agents that are also within the legal space?

Timur: Look, Gani.ai is built by us, for us. When I say us, it’s the legal compliance professional. We really know what the problems are, how the problems are solved even without the AI. AI is the tool. Prior to AI coming in, these folks already know what they do day in, day out. Every solution that we’ve built, every aspect of even the tech stack, we already thought about how this would solve the compliance and legal problems in the real world.

The thing that really gives the perspective of also the UX on how we’ve built Gani.ai. One aspect of it, if I can share this, is the sort of the versatility of how we design Gani.ai for these users. Some of these other platforms are mostly workflow-based, whereas Gani.ai is more versatile in how legal professionals use them. Like how legal professionals deal with problems. There’s no one legal problem that is the same with another one. Given that knowledge, that’s how we’ve designed the user experience for Gani.ai.

In terms of the changing technology, it’s really easy to get sidetracked and follow all these fancy new tools. Naturally, developers and techies would like to always play with the latest things. But again, we are grounded in the focus of our solution that we are really picking and choosing what we’re building and what new technologies we are choosing for Gani.ai.

Scaling and Adoption Strategies: Organic Growth Philosophy, Live Demos Over Sales Decks, Word of Mouth and NPS Success

Paulo J: I also wanted to touch on how you’re approaching scaling adoption for this, because obviously you have the product itself and you can talk online about it. And I know Bintang, you share a lot on LinkedIn. I highly suggest for our listeners to follow him on LinkedIn and he often shares some interesting use cases, topical use cases for Gani.ai. So it’s always interesting to see his posts.

But I guess there’s that consumer component of the product where you can just word of mouth tell people about it, but then there’s also the B2B kind of aspect as well, where you’re talking to both enterprises, you’re also talking to lawyers. You recently launched this kind of product within the platform called Partner Connect, which allows for more engagement with the legal industry.

Can you speak a little bit more to how you guys are thinking about the whole GTM strategy, especially on the business front and the legal industry front?

Bintang: From the beginning, when we set out to do this, we made it very clear that we want to do this as conventionally as we can, meaning that we are gonna focus on doing things more organically as opposed to inorganically. So we are not really concerned about. It is not really a rat race.

At the end of the day, if we think that if we believe that the product is useful, we do not have to tell people or give them a two-hour presentation about why this is useful for them. The product’s going to speak for itself. Of course, there’s this issue of reach.

How many people can we talk to in a day to get them on board? So there’s that part that needs to be supplemented with additional marketing efforts and everything. But we think that the number one GTM strategy for us is to make a great product that speaks for itself, and that’s what we do.

Whenever we meet with potential customers, we rarely give them our sales deck or anything. We just say, you know what, if you have half an hour, I’m gonna show it to you. I’m gonna do a live demo. I’m even gonna give you a demo account that gives you immediate access to Gani.ai without even having to go through “oh, this is a trial account” and stuff like that.

To our surprise, a lot of the people we spoke to are actually quite surprised by this approach. “Oh, you’re gonna do a live demo now? I thought you want to show us a presentation about why this is…” It’s easier for us to show how the product works, rather than for me to tell you how it works and then expect you to imagine it the way I want you to imagine it. I don’t want to waste your time doing this. So that’s how we’ve been doing and it’s been very effective.

We have a rate of almost one-to-one for every customer we speak to. Until now, it is almost always positive. So we want to focus on doing that and we want to be focusing more on creating a great product.

At some point we’re gonna have to do a lot more on the marketing front. Again, it’s such a niche product as well. Having billboards, it’s not gonna help that much. Rather than, actually word of mouth is the best GTM, but word of mouth only happens if you actually have a good product that people would recommend to other people.

We’ve been very fortunate that we do periodic NPS kind of reviews, and we’ve been very surprised with the score. And we’ve been very consistent. Our NPS is above eight, which is unbelievable when we ask a lot of people, especially in the software business. It comes back to the core of our philosophy, that is, we want to solve real problems and solve them gracefully.

PartnerConnect: Enhancing Legal Services and Solving RFP Pain Points

Timur: If I can probably add, we know our hypothesis is that this AI tool is not replacing anyone really, Paulo. If you talk about legal professionals, lawyers, compliance experts, this is a tool that empowers those people.

Back to the saying “AI will replace lawyers,” et cetera. This is not it. We have law firms as our client base, and you mentioned PartnerConnect before, and that is the true manifestation of that hypothesis.

We are bringing in lawyers as part of our journey. So PartnerConnect is a feature that enables users not just to interact with the AI, with Gani.ai by chatting, but it also then redirects the users into the relevant lawyers as Gani.ai sees fit. So Gani.ai will understand what the user is asking. Gani.ai has the database of all these lawyers that we have curated. Then the dynamic matchmaking will happen. So it’s not a traditional sort of marketplace, and there’s a bit more nuance to it that the user doesn’t have to repeat what he or she wants when meeting the expert.

Bintang: When we set out to make [PartnerConnect], we were really thinking about, okay, what would help the lawyers, what would help the users? One of the things that I, myself, as a lawyer, find very tedious is responding to RFPs. It’s such a tedious thing, but you have to do it.

Believe it or not, it actually takes a lot more time than you think. So clients, potential clients ask, “Can you do this?” You not only you have to say you can, you not only you have to say why you can do it, but also you have to justify why you say you can do it. So you gotta put in all these, like what you’ve done, all your accolades, your years of experience, and all these things.

So when we make this dynamic profile generator for the lawyers, we have that in mind. So the lawyers don’t have to re-explain to the potential customer or client why they are the best, or they have the best tools at their disposal to do what’s needed of them.

But also from the user side, going through response to RFPs, say a dozen or more, is actually very tedious also. Then having to make that mental imagery, thinking about which one of these potential service providers are better for you? Where they give all these very widely different responses with different styles and everything. Then you have to sift through all these, like looking at CVs. But at least CVs have a kind of structure to it, but proposals don’t have structure to it.

So you go through these proposals without really knowing what these are, and a lot of them actually have fluffs, a lot of fluffs and metaphors and everything. “We are the best at what we do.” What is it that you do and how do you know you’re the best? As a user.

So this dynamic profile also helps the user in making the decision or helping them in making a decision. So even just the simple process of finding a lawyer, and then selecting a lawyer from the user side, but also from the lawyer side or from the professional side, getting your name out there with the right context for the right potential audience. We already have that problem in mind when we make it, because it could have just been a very simple matchmaking, like a marketplace.

We tested it, and we see that okay from both ends feel that this is actually solving something that they all know is a problem. But no one really seems to think about how this can be solved? So that this approach is central to our product making philosophy.

Adapting to Different Markets by Building a Versatile AI System and Modular Agent Architecture

Paulo J: With the whole advent of generative AI, it actually provides a really efficient solution to this problem that perhaps in the past might not have been as readily available. Otherwise you would’ve just gone with the marketplace, and some kind of automated decision tree to help people get connected to what they need. But now with AI agents, that becomes a lot more efficient.

What I like about PartnerConnect is that you guys are already thinking beyond just a knowledge base or knowledge access, and thinking about the whole user journey. Beyond people asking “how do I address this type of compliance issue?” Then say you get some context and some answer like, “what do I do next?” Then you have PartnerConnect to supplement that next step of the process.

The other thing I wanted to talk about on our podcast is for Southeast Asia or startups coming out of Asia in general. The interesting thing is that from day one, you guys are already forced to deal with a lot of geographies and different market nuances from day one that perhaps say a company coming out from the US or China might not be as used to from day one.

So I’m curious to know, especially from a product perspective, you mentioned earlier how versatile Gani.ai is and how you build Gani.ai for that adaptability. Say you go to Japan, different rules, different laws, and all of that. How do you plug into their data and their contacts there and then, how do you do that efficiently without it taking up more time than is needed to do things properly?

Timur: We have a domain expertise here. Through his firm, we’ve got a lot of networks around the region, Southeast Asia and beyond really. Japan is a big market for us as well. Also Australia. So we’ve been able to get a lot of feedback and useful feedback from these regions not just on the sort of the law, the legal knowledge, but also in terms of the UX as well. Like how in particular each domain would like to use a certain platform. I guess they behave differently. So that’s in terms of the UX and the feedback.

But in terms of the information contained in Gani.ai itself, we’ve been able to build quite fancy and advanced AI powered by RAG. So we’ve been very fortunate with our partnership with AWS as well for their platform, which is robust and also very scalable.

Then, if we had built Gani.ai from ground up, line by line infrastructure-wise ourselves. So that really enables us to tailor Gani.ai in terms of their knowledge and its behavior per region. By assigning different agents to each one of them not just the regions, but also each specific task required to be done per those regions.

So again it is not a matter of time until we branch out to more regions and due to the way we’ve built Gani.ai in such an agent way, it’s not gonna be very hard to scale them quite rapidly.

Paulo J: So a lot more modular, I would say, in terms of how you use the agents. Really specific to the use cases and geographies.

Timur: It is really a powerful framework to think about when building an AI system.

Paulo J: I like that point that it’s not just a new technology, but also a new way of thinking about how to automate.

Competitive Landscape and Market Expansion: Addressing Cross-Border Compliance Complexities

Paulo J: I wanted to ask about Harvey, which is what a lot of investors use as a kind of comparable or a benchmark. Especially with the recent round that they raised and obviously, and not just Harvey, but a lot of US tech companies.

With a recent kind of resurgence in funding and all these things they’re looking at Asia and markets in Asia to expand to and I’m sure you’ve gotten this question before, what is the moat for Gani.ai and how are you guys building that? How do you see the competitive landscape evolve, especially with AI being accessible, especially for builders out there?

Bintang: I’ll start with the second question. Our focus is to build a product that we as a customer want to use. And in order to do that we have to combine not only vertical knowledge, like very deep vertical knowledge, not just in the discipline, but also in the business side of that discipline.

So for example, being a tax consultant and running a tax consultancy firm, two different things. So combining those knowledge with technology that’s available right now or maybe in the future to solve real problems that we actually deal with on a day-to-day basis. So we’re gonna focus more on that.

We don’t really think that much about looking at our other friends who are doing similar things as a threat. In fact it’s the reverse. We see it as a conviction that, you know, one, the market is steadily becoming more receptive to the idea. It always takes a few years for this part of the world to catch up with what’s happening in the west, in the US, in Europe, in the EU.

But you can see how dynamic the sector is, and it’s still a sector that is so enigmatic, and that’s why it’s drawing so much attention. You need to have the discipline and the understanding of the discipline that you’re trying to imbue technology with. Then you have to have the technological capability to actually deliver and then make the product that works.

Having that advantage for us is what we are proud of. In this region the wave hasn’t, it’s not a hype thing yet compared to in the US for example, but I don’t think it’s gonna take that much longer for the hype to come to this part of the world, and we want to be more than ready when the time comes.

Timur: Since you already mentioned the name Paulo, one time when we exhibited in Tokyo, we were called the Asian Harvey, which I don’t mind at all. Back to what Bintang’s saying, these bigger players paved the way. We want to be ready when the wave comes to us.

Even also the difference in the size of the two companies, our friends who have built solutions earlier. To be compared against them is actually something that we cherish a lot. Just imagine the possibilities in the next coming years when we grow into that size. The kinds of value and product compositions that we can offer. It’s gonna be super exciting.

Paulo J: One of the things that really differentiate a lot of Southeast Asia startups from the bigger companies in the US for example is really the distribution and the trust that you guys have built locally with the ear on the ground.

Bintang was alluding to earlier really getting to know what the pain points are for professionals and businesses in this part of the world, because it may actually be different than what might not be as generalized as people think. A lot of these small details.

I read this article before about the importance of taste, quote unquote, and how in an era of AI where products can be a lot more similar and built a lot faster. It’s really in the small things where customers are won over in the little details that you guys put in.

Bintang: Being Asian helps a lot in building a solution that focuses on this region. From the beginning, we have the mindset already. We know as a customer, how we would think of a solution or think of a product. So that helps. But also another thing that we are very particular about is that we shouldn’t look at this region as a separate entity. We have to look at it as a whole, as a region.

That’s the whole idea of making this cross-jurisdictional. Because when you talk about compliance, the complexity gets amplified whenever you do business in this part of the world. In the US you have 350 million people all speaking the same language, all operating under similar legislation. At least the basis of the law is similar. A lot of the basis of the accounting and tax treatment are also similar. So it’s a more uniform, uncoded kind of market.

You try to replicate it here, it’s very different. None of the countries in ASEAN speak the same language. Then if you go beyond that, actually no other countries in Asia speak exactly the same language. In fact, even in one country you have multiple languages.

That’s even more common than having a shared language. And then you have all the differences in the legal system. Some of them actually, a lot of them are byproducts from the old days of European governance. Indonesia, Malaysia and Singapore, for example. But there are countries that have developed their own unique legal systems that are not influenced or very minimally influenced by the western side.

Then you have other regions, I’m gonna put Australia into the mix here as well. Australia is very western, but it’s completely different from all the rest of its neighbors. So it’s a very dynamic region here. The gold lies in whoever is able to then streamline and make sense of all these complexities. We can see it happening already.

A lot of our customers use us for their cross-border operation too. Basically, if you are a, let’s say, general counsel, the head legal of a Japanese company operating in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam, Australia, and UAE. You just want to know the simple question, how do I or what are the rules around paying for overtime?

In a world before technology or before AI or before Gani.ai, you would actually have to go and find counsels, find lawyers to actually for each country speaking a different language. Let’s say as a general counsel, let’s say you speak good English, but then maybe your counterpart in another country doesn’t really speak that good English. So there’s that language barrier already.

What Gani.ai allows you to do is to ask about Japanese laws in Indonesia, laws in the Middle East in UAE that are Arabic, and then be given expert excerpts and citations from the basis, the source, both in the Arabic language and translated to Japanese language.

These things really help for a very select group of operations that we try to service. So that’s going to be where the gold is and that’s why it’s different. This market is very different to a more uniform and a lot more advanced regulatory market in the west.

Paulo J: The gold is in cross border. This whole idea of being able to bridge the ability for customers to operate across multiple jurisdictions, for compliance, for payments, FinTech. That’s like a huge opportunity now in this part of the world. Gani.ai is working on the compliance opportunity in particular.

Make or Break Moments in Careers

Paulo J: To wrap up our conversation I wanted to ask each of you as well an experience from your careers. A make or break moment in your careers, maybe not in Gani.ai, maybe in your previous work that is helping you now in your role now at Gani.ai with being a CEO and also being CPO and building a product. What has been a make or break moment in your career so far that you know is helping you today?

Timur: For me quite contrary to what most techies would prefer to do is to play with the latest tools. Working in Gani.ai, based on my previous experience, has been a lot more grounded, really. We play with the tools that actually are helping the business and helping us make good products.

In terms of instead of just bringing in the latest and the with the most bells and whistles because you can, these costs add up, and long gone are the days where new companies can just spend however they want and justify it later. We’re trying to scale pretty rapidly, but at the same time, very cautiously.

Paulo J: It is an interesting way of thinking and might be helpful advice for other product leaders who are listening in.

Bintang: I’m not just drawing from my own make or break experience, but also from what I’ve experienced practicing as a lawyer and I’ve seen a lot of situations where I learned a lot from that, and of course I can’t get into details.

But those experiences, like hands-on experience, especially around the tech industry as a whole, fortunately, or unfortunately, I was in a lot of the dramas. When things go wrong, people call people like us. So unfortunately we have all this information and knowledge that then helps me distill and get lived-in experience from all these things that happen. I was a lawyer for 15 years.

So that gave me a very different perspective on risk, on problems, what worked, what didn’t work, what happened. I consider that more valuable to my own just my own experiences as myself. So I’m using learned lessons from what I was fortunate enough to be exposed to during my professional career, to then help formulate what we want to do and not do.

Paulo J: The important thing is what not to do and actually catalyzes the pathway for you guys to build. We’ve talked a lot about how you being a lawyer and founding one of the, I would say well-known law firms in the ecosystem in Indonesia has helped. But I think the fact that you were involved in the startup and venture ecosystem has its own kind of meta value in building a venture-backed startup as well this time around.

Bintang: But I wouldn’t want to do anything else at this point of time, so we’re onto something. I really do. We still get surprised by feedback in a good way. Sometimes we question whether people who we met or we did demos to, were just being too nice to us. But then we think, why would they be nice to us? We’re not giving them, we’re not even bringing them cookies or donuts or anything. You know why? The responses are actually genuine.

So we’re still getting surprised by that on a daily basis, which is a good motivation. But then it also keeps us grounded to really more and more believe in and also continue on with the philosophy that we want to build a product that matters and we want to build a product that really solves a problem rather than artificially creates a problem to solve.

Free Trial and Organic Growth

Paulo J: We’re on this call virtually, but I can really feel how you guys are genuinely passionate about this product and really excited about what you guys are building, and that’s really one of the important things. To your point about you guys may not know, there’s a lot of possibility with this space, but with your guys’ ear to the ground and really talking to customers and all that, that will really pave the way moving forward for Gani.ai.

For our listeners out there who want to try it out. Very simple. Six letters, Gani.ai. Just type into your browser and check it out. You guys have a free trial kind of credits still going on.

Bintang: Immediately everybody gets 10 free prompts, if you email me or email Timur we are too generous sometimes and we give away extended trials, extended trials like Oprah giving away presents. You get free… no but our aim is to get people to experience this really, rather than having to imagine this, really just sit down with it and then play around with it and then see what we’ve been talking about and then see what, and then get a sense of why, in the very short time without aggressive marketing all organic.

We just launched very simply Paulo? So we launched officially around March. Now we have, I would say, close to 2000 users across multiple countries with very minimal marketing. The only marketing we do is through LinkedIn and occasional events that we participate in. But other than that, we don’t do any kind of more dedicated marketing and ads kind approach. So all word of mouth. It’s all people finding us out from social media that’s personal social media, LinkedIn, or and then to try it.

Paulo J: That’s really the best and if you guys can just rely on that to scale, that would be ideal. But we’ll see how things pan out.

Bintang: A hockey stick thing, it takes a while to go up, but then once it’s up, people will start looking for it.

Paulo J: I like that you guys are just really focused on building an excellent product that speaks for itself.

Gani’s Unique Approach and Future Plans

Paulo J: For those who are curious, who are listening in, you can briefly share where the Gani.ai name came from, what it means, if there’s anything special…

Bintang: We wanted to move away from the kind of typical naming of compliance or legal tech. Usually it’s a derivative of either legal law and some technology buzzwords, we wanted to move away from that. We wanted to create our own identity, but with a meaning. So we spent a lot of time thinking about and arguing about the names, and you wouldn’t believe the nonsense that we came up with during the process.

But Gani.ai was really a joke because we just asked, okay, what are our technologies? What are the things that are central to us? So the GA stands for generative AI. The NI stands for natural language, which is what we want it to be as natural as having conversation with anybody. The I is Ius, which is law in Latin. So Gani.ai is a combination of those three principles, we want to have the core technology, the ease of use, and the discipline.

Paulo J: That comes full circle to the technological context in which you guys started Gani.ai. You mentioned earlier that it’s something that you had been thinking about, talking with Timur about for a long time, but it’s only like just last year that you guys really put all in and started building this out and only launched recently as mentioned, and already have 2000 plus customers using the platform.

Bintang: One more thing. Gani.ai – we think that it’s a phrase that can be written and pronounced easily in most languages. So when we go to Japan, they can say “Gani” easily. When we go to Arabic-speaking countries, they can say “Gani” easily. When we go to European countries, they can say “Gani” easily. So that’s also part of the consideration.

Paulo J: That’s really smart. Global from day one in terms of the branding as well. Well, Bintang and Timur, thank you so much for joining us on this episode of On Call with Insignia. Really excited to see what you guys build next and looking forward to the next conversation.

This transcript has been edited for clarity and readability while maintaining the authentic voice and content of the original conversation.