Charles Wong & Aravind Kandiah (#050)
Don’t Forget the Mission!
Company: Bifrost
Headcount: 26
Stage: Seed
Tell us your story
CW: I’m Charles, the CEO and co-founder of Bifrost. I love robotics, AI, gaming, cars, and if I could I would love to spend all my time in a workshop!
AK: And I’m Aravind, the CTO and co-founder of Bifrost. I’m into filmmaking, 3D art, and I currently spend most of my time figuring out how we can get AI to solve problems in the physical world.
CW: We met quite serendipitously during our freshman year and immediately realized we saw the world in the same way. While there, Aravind tore through hackathons, experimenting with augmented reality and computer vision applications. I joined the school’s EV team and built race cars. But ultimately this wasn’t enough for both of us. Ultimately we were dissatisfied with the pace of our learning. In 2017, we both decided to take a gap year with one objective: unbounded experimentation.
AK: We thought we could build a state-of-the-art conversational chatbot. Looking back, we were probably 5 years too early on that one. Charles decided to spend some time doing an internship at an autonomous vehicle company called Nutonomy as an engineer. I stuck to hackathons and AI research. Towards the end of 2017, we came together and wrote an essay on a hypothetical Level 5 self-driving car that could service passengers, charge itself, repair itself, and build out its fleet, without human administrators. The main goal was to inspire people and get feedback.
CW: That essay got us selected for the UN Climate Change Conference hackathon. We were flown out to Bonn and spent 4 days on a hotel boat with buffet breakfast. It felt pretty different to coke and pizza 24 hours a day which is what we were used to. We ended up building a proof-of-concept using a Tesla that one of the participants brought and we ended up winning! Now at this point we would have loved to drop out and start building full-time but we had to return to school mainly from fear of death from our parents. But we neer stopped hacking away at things. Later on in 2019, we built the first prototype for what would become Bifrost. We’ve never looked back since.
Tell us a story that has really resonated with you
CW: I met a veteran officer a few years ago before starting to build Bifrost. We met at a start-up conference and hit it off chatting about AI. We grabbed a coffee and he told me that he noticed I was pushing myself hard but that I didn’t seem happy or wanting to celebrate success. This was true and a good observation. He followed up with a story of his own. He was a young officer in the army: ambitious, proud of his country and dedicated to the service. He had an idyllic home life and family. One day he was posted to Afghanistan during the war to help with humanitarian relief. At the time he considered it a huge honour to be sent out to the front line and be able to help.
While he was there, he witnessed 2 of his comrades dying in front of him which was an experience that he said fucked him up immensely. He returned home and went undiagnosed with PTSD for 2 years. He had to leave the service and had trouble with work, friends and family who didn’t understand what he was going through. He ended up in an incredibly dark place but eventually found the courage to pick himself up and find a way out. He discovered start-ups, technology and entrepreneurship and threw himself in. Today he’s a founder himself and loves mentoring and sharing experience with young people. He reflected that life really is too short and that I needed to celebrate every little victory, no matter how small.
As we got up to leave he slipped me $50 and told me to go buy a nice dinner. I told him I couldn’t accept it but he refused to take it back. I ended up spending it on dinner with Aravind and some of my closest friends during which I told them the story of this veteran and explained why we were all here. It remains one of my most formative experiences. Thanks to the kindness of this man.
AK: I previously worked at a start-up called Medios as the first engineer at the company. We were building an AI model to help prevent blindness by diagnosing diabetic retinopathy and used low-cost smartphones to take a picture of patients’ eyes and diagnose their risk of going blind. This was such a huge problem in India, which is the world’s second largest diabetes market, that Google set out to solve this problem using AI. They had some of the best AI engineers & researchers (incl. PhD’s) and large budgets for compute and training data. Most VCs didn’t want to fund us as this would represent a bet against one of the best AI teams at the time. Interestingly Google had to shut down the project, as their models were failing in production and were struggling to generalize across hospitals. And despite the odds, we (Medios) managed to build and ship an AI system to over 100 different health care practices across the country and achieve 98% accuracy in blind clinical trials. This led to Medios being acquired by a pharma-tech company.
This was a formative moment for me as it showed me that we are still so early in this journey. We have the opportunity to shape how we build intelligence. And decide how we want to bring that into the physical world. We have spent the last few decades building and shipping bits, but we’re now transitioning to shipping bits into the realms of the physical world. With it comes a whole new set of challenges and the opportunities to build a whole new class of software, where the rules are not written and the paths are not defined. That feeling of discovery and the unknown was really exciting.
What can't you stop thinking about?
CW: We’re constantly thinking about the bigger picture of what our team should be focusing on at any given time. In our efforts to execute quickly day-to-day, we are constantly re-evaluating if this is the most important thing we or any member of the team could be working on right now.
AK: We have an obligation to our users to bring them as much value as possible, so they can build applications that impact humanity. We are obligated to investors to be good stewards of their capital, given they put their faith in us as a team.
CW: And we have an obligation to our team also. They chose to spend the best years of their lives at Bifrost, directly providing a genuine impact on the world. One of my jobs is to make sure their choice is a good one.
If I could tell you just one thing...
CW: Don’t Forget the Mission! As a deep tech founder, every challenge you face is exacerbated by the fact that you are building in deep tech. On a personal level, that can be incredibly exhausting. You feel like you are being punched in the face every single day. But you wouldn’t be trying to solve such a hard problem if it didn’t mean something to you. So don’t forget the mission.
AK: The mission does not mean being married to an idea. It means holding the vision in your mind and trying everything in your power given the means you have to find a way. Also, celebrate and take joy each and every day. Life is short. Enjoy the process!
A little space for shout-outs
CW: First of all, Techstars and Hustle Fund for being the first checks in our company and believing in us. We also have to thank all our other investors including Wavemaker, Sequoia, Cap Vista, Lux Capital, Champion Hill for allowing us to go on this journey. And last but not least, the whole Bifrost team. You are all incredible.
If you could get a warm intro to anyone in the world, who would it be and why?
AK: We thought about someone dead like Nikola Tesla, a true visionary who predicted the wireless future decades before anyone else. Perhaps Ben Franklin, a polymath who, through his countless exploits, taught me that life is a colorful tapestry, not a linear path.
CW: Ayrton Senna a brash, young racing driver whose raw talent and love for humanity inspired a generation!
But we think we would have to go with a living legend in Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of the World Wide Web! He made the brave decision to release his seminal work on HTTP to the world instead of patenting or close sourcing it. The work itself was legendary, but the decision to release it publicly is probably one of the most momentous decisions of the last century!