How Bianca Anghelina is disrupting corporate decision-making with Aily Labs

When Bianca Anghelina was a little girl growing up in Transylvania, she loved to play business.

“When I was just 10 years old, I would create reports and play with numbers,” she says. “We didn’t have much, so I would have to make my own entertainment.”

Her passion for business later took Anghelina to Munich, where she studied business and administration, focusing on finance, followed by a Masters in technology management.

“That’s when I realized that I wanted to create a company that combined technology and business,” she explains.  “But I wasn’t ready to found a company straight out of college, so I started building a career in consultancy, and later in the corporate world.”

“I disrupted my own role”

After her time in consulting, she spent almost 11 years at Novartis, the Swiss pharmaceuticals giant, where she used artificial intelligence to build budgets and crunch numbers.

“I always loved finding the business insights behind the numbers,” she explains. “I loved leveraging technology to make things simpler.”

She quickly moved up through the business and planning ranks to become head of Global Digital Finance.

“I disrupted my own role,” she says. “AI changed my life. It used to take months to get a budget plan together and suddenly I could do it in weeks, which meant my time could be spent on more valuable activities like business strategy.”

While the tech community scrambled to find applications for generative AI, Anghelina had found a use case where it was the natural solution.

“AI was a powerful tool within finance, but I realized that decision-making is driven by more than just that one function,” she says. “What if AI could be applied to every function?”

“We are the proud female founders of Aily Labs”

Imagine using AI to unlock all the data across an entire organization, making business decisions based on the whole, rather than tiny pockets of information.

“We do that with Aily Labs,” explains Anghelina. “We apply AI on top of that single source of truth. This is the very first app for business intelligence.”

She started the business in June 2020, just as the pandemic was tightening its grip around the world. “A crisis exposes weaknesses that need solutions,” Anghelina says. “A mentor told me that, and that was the little push I needed.”

In August 2020, she teamed up with AI specialist Sara Bisbe López, previously associate director of Data Science at Novartis.

“We are the proud female founders of Aily Labs,” says Anghelina. “I bring the business expertise, and Sara knows AI.”

The pair didn’t want to create some clunky tool that people hated. They wanted to take the same user experience that we all expect in our personal lives, when we order a taxi or watch a movie, and bring that to the corporate world.

“Our mission is to empower anyone in Fortune 500 companies to apply AI and get to faster, better decisions, whether you are an AI specialist or not.”

It took just eight weeks to create the first product. “Then we just kept on building,” says Anghelina, who bootstrapped Aily Labs for the first three years.

Unlocking the power of agentive AI

Early on to strategically scale revenue at speed — with low risk and resources — Anghelina tapped into her pharma network, where she had existing deep expertise and executive connections.

“In this industry, companies have to make complex decisions based on thousands of variables,” she explains. “Our first client was Sanofi, which remains one of our biggest clients so far.”

Clients wanted tangible recommendations that boosted the bottom line. Aily Labs’ platform uses AI to generate “snackable” insights on how to improve performance, but the next step for 2024 was to unlock the power of agentive AI.

“We created the Aily Agent, which sits with you at the table and helps you make complex decisions,” explains Anghelina.

“Our Agent doesn’t just give you a single recommendation. It runs hundreds of scenarios and provides both the recommendations and the trade-offs for a specific decision.”

The global autonomous AI and agentive AI market is estimated to be worth $4.8B today. By 2028, the value will increase almost sixfold to $28.5B.

“The impact of agentive AI will be significant,” Anghelina explains. “As humans, we make around 30,000 decisions a day. Most of these are made on autopilot. If you bring this into corporate life, it could result in billions of decisions per year. The more information we get, the more complex it gets…and we sometimes get into the decision paradox — taking a decision rather than the best decision.”

“Within corporations, we are seeing losses of over $200M each year because of decision-making inefficiencies. This is natural when human beings are making the decisions, but with Aily Agent, you remove those inefficiencies,” Anghelina adds, according to Aily Labs’ data.

Scale up your career: See all open roles at Aily Labs.

The investor POV

“Everyone was talking about the potential for generative AI to change the world, and here was a company with no marketing budget, no sales function, and yet when I saw the app, it blew me away.”

Aily Labs first caught the eye of Managing Director and eventual board member Hilary Gosher.

“When Aily first came on my radar, there was significant services revenue. It wasn’t a true SaaS business yet, but we saw the potential for recurring revenue as increasing numbers of users were adopting and using Aily every day,” says Gosher. “Truly understanding the potential required diligence and really getting under the hood to understand the value by talking to customers. This was why other investors had not yet called the company — it looked more like a services company, not a software company.”

“When I first met Bianca, Aily had no outside investment, yet it had achieved incredible scale,” says Alexandra Lundin, vice president at Insight Partners. It was one of the first times that Lundin saw a deployment of AI — at scale — for use cases with a material return on investment.

“Bianca is special because she saw the need for a technology like this, firsthand, while she was at Novartis,” Lundin explains. “She knew it would resonate with customers.”

Lundin met Anghelina in early 2023, and just three weeks later, Anghelina was reviewing the term sheet.

“Bianca was clear that she had a lot to execute on and didn’t want to waste time fundraising,” Lundin explains. By August of that year, Insight Partners had invested €19M in a Series A to help the business accelerate growth.

“We could have kept on bootstrapping the company,” explains Anghelina. “But the speed of innovation within AI was ramping up.”

“I knew that with the right support, we could achieve our mission much faster than we could on our own.”

Anghelina had three items on her investor wish list: “Someone who knew how to scale software companies in the B2B space, someone with whom I felt a connection with and could trust, and finally, someone who could move quickly. I didn’t have time to waste.”

“We engaged really quickly on her biggest challenge: hiring,” says Lundin. “There were two talented cofounders but, beyond that, not a ton of support. Before we had even invested, we connected Bianca to Onsite.”

“We recognized that Aily’s solution could be industry agnostic, and we knew we could support her to build a U.S. sales team, expand internationally, scale up her hiring of tech resources in Barcelona, and support her building a global leadership team,” adds Gosher, who also leads Insight’s Onsite team.

Accelerating the speed of scale

Insight has helped Aily Labs to build out its executive team “at speed,” says Anghelina. “We have also received a lot of guidance on structure — how you grow teams is almost as important as who you hire.”

Over the past year, Aily Labs has hired 175 people, taking the team to over 330.

“That would not have been possible without Insight,” Anghelina says. “We have been building out five hubs in Europe and one in New York.”

Anghelina also tapped into the expertise of Insight’s Onsite team — a group of over 140 professionals dedicated to helping Insight portfolio companies scale faster and more efficiently.

“Onsite really helped me better understand how I, as CEO, need to build the right team around me to help me really focus on my role,” she explains. “At this stage, what other talent should we be recruiting to take us to the next level?”

“Beyond hiring, we also helped Bianca focus on how to build repeatable platforms,” explains Lundin.

“We have a lot of experience commercializing software and scaling SaaS companies. Although she was generating revenue and had secured some incredible partnerships, she was just starting out on that repeatable software play.”

Over the last 12 months, Aily Labs has closed some “impressive deals with some very large companies,” says Lundin. “The professionalization of the business, the speed to product, processes, and go-to-market have all been exceptional.”

“We want to become the Apple of AI”

Users can get up and running on Aily in a matter of hours, saving customers money and time.

“We have purposely built something industry agnostic,” says Anghelina. “We focus on a few key areas such as supply, finance, manufacturing, and R&D. The details may change in different industries, but the decisions are very similar.”

The only challenge is that Aily Labs’ technology is truly disruptive. “We aren’t building tools that sit on top of a single function; we are offering an enterprise-wide solution,” says Anghelina.

“Companies are used to taking one step at a time, and here we are jumping three steps forward. But I see this as both a challenge and an opportunity.”

According to Lundin, customers are unlikely to leave once they see the impact of Aily’s technology. “It just gets better and better as customers use it,” she says. “It quickly becomes the first thing people open when they get to work in the morning.”

Anghelina hopes to reach one million users within the Fortune 500 by 2027. “Our mission is to democratize AI, and make it accessible and useful for anyone working in these large enterprises,” she says.

“That’s the big ambition. Everyone using our app will make better and faster decisions every day, creating a multi-million-dollar impact. We want to become the Apple of AI.”