Episode Summary
In this episode of Emerging Founders with Manav, we’re joined by Alex Marantellos, founder of Intric, a YC-backed startup building an AI-powered quality assurance (QA) solution for customer support teams. The conversation kicks off with a quick sauna-and-workout story, setting a lively tone as Manav and Alex bond over fitness before diving into startup life. Alex walks us through his global entrepreneurial journey—balancing life and business between San Francisco, London, and Athens—and details Intric’s unique approach to automating QA in customer support.
Alex shares the “aha” moment behind Intric: after years working in customer success roles at companies like Confluent and Navan, he recognized just how much customer interaction data went unreviewed—simply because legacy QA processes were manual, tedious, and only ever covered a fraction of conversations. With the advancements in AI and LLMs (Large Language Models), Alex and his co-founders (all Greeks, all close friends) realized they could review up to 100% of these conversations, turning a seemingly “boring” problem into a valuable cornerstone of business intelligence.
The discussion spans Intric’s business model, their product’s plug-and-play nature, and how it provides deep, actionable insights to operational leaders—supercharging team performance without ballooning headcount. Manav and Alex also explore broader themes around AI, including the evolving role of AI agents, the open-source versus API debate, and how automation is reshaping (but not erasing) human-centric roles.
In the second half, the spotlight shifts to Alex’s personal story: from Greek street art festivals during the country’s financial crisis (which taught him resilience and stress management) to the habits and philosophies that underpin his journey as a founder. The episode wraps with rapid-fire questions about books, habits, and lessons learned—the perfect blend of tactical insight and authentic storytelling.
Transcript
Manav [00:00:00]:
Hello everyone. Today on the episode of Emerging Founders with Manav, we have Alex Marantellos. He's the founder of Intric, a YC backed company. They're building a AI powered quality assurance agent. Is that a right explanation for your company?
Alex Marantellos [00:00:14]:
I would say probably. We're building, we're using AI to automate quality assurance for customer support.
Manav [00:00:18]:
Me and Alex had a really good workout in sauna before this and I, I. Okay, a quick disclaimer. I want to do more workouts and podcasts with other YC founders and I loved it. Alex's. Alex was really into callous 10x and now he's building companies from two different countries, London and San Francisco.
Alex Marantellos [00:00:37]:
That's right. And we also have a big presence in Athens, Greece. By the way, that was a great fitness check to see who, which guest you're going to bring to the podcast. It's kind of like the preliminary round.
Manav [00:00:47]:
So how do you juggle like between London, sf, tell me everything.
Alex Marantellos [00:00:51]:
Yeah, it's, it's something really new to me. Because we were previously based in London, we started growing the team. Obviously we got into yc, so we needed to be in the Bay Area for the batch. We really enjoyed it. We see the benefits of it. So we started gradually branching out. We started growing the team mainly in Greece because of the connections that we have there. All founders are Greeks and there is strong engineering talent. But also we did have a hub in London which we want to maintain with clients, with partners, and also there's a lot of talent there. And then eventually I decided to transition myself as a CEO to the Bay Area because of the ecosystem. There is a lot of people building a lot of cool stuff. So I think this is the right place for me to be. So I'm planning to split my time. Probably half of my time in sf, then some of my time around Europe seeing the team senior customers. But SF is my base and gradually we're going to transition the company as well.
Manav [00:01:37]:
I really want to start with the problem you guys are solving because that's the most important thing. And with intrigue. What was like the aha moment for you when you were like solving problems in customer support? Doesn't sound like the sexiest problem to like put your life mission on. But what was the aha moment and what were you like? I am the right person to build this company.
Alex Marantellos [00:01:56]:
Yeah, I love it. I do think it kind of like it can sound boring, especially qa, who we kind of like love solving boring problems because this is where a lot of the value is, I think customer support is definitely a sexy area and I think that it's, it's an overlooked area for a long time. There's a lot of things to be fixed in customer support and that is explained and shown by the proliferation of companies trying to tackle customer support. Essentially this is where most of the value for a company is, the interaction with the customer base. So how do we land on that? This is what I've been doing for the past eight years. I used to be a customer success manager and I'm in a couple of Silicon Valley based companies with global presence. One of them being confluent, the other one Navan, formerly known as Trip Actions. Then I ended up building a team and growing a team out from London looking after the EMEA region, but also the wider EMEA times. So I did have a lot of, a lot of exposure on the issues that a lot of customer support teams are plagued with. I've seen customers living in anguish just waiting for a resolution or somebody to really help them get what they need. So all of that collective knowledge over the past seven to nine years has always been on my mind. I've led a lot of different projects with my previous positions where I was trying to gather more, more intelligence, make it easier to get our customers, make it easier to understand our customers, make it faster to respond to our customers and we could find the solution that would kind of like allow us to do everything. And then I met my co founders who happen to be my best friends as well and they have really strong backgrounds in engineering and data science. So usually it's a problem of systems but also of visibility on data. And I think our complementary skills allowed us to bring everything together. Me having the experience on the issues that are out there and my co founders know how to build stuff and how to make meaningful data sets and that's how we started intrigue. And then the way that we develop it and the reason that we landed on that specific idea and the angle that we're taking is purely speaking to customers. I think one of the most challenging things for a pre PMF product market fit founders is how do you get to pmf? How do you build something people want? That's what YC tells and teaches us as well. Right. And I don't think there is another way, at least in B2B SaaS that we do. There's not another way to build something really valuable without speaking to customers and really understanding the underlying pain of why they do things the way they do them. We kind of call it in a simple phrase, getting to willingness to pay as fast as we, as we can. Because nobody's going to pay you for something that is useless to them. Right. So the moment we started building, we started iterating, reaching out to people, trying to understand the problems with customer support, what kind of visibility they didn't have, what were the main friction points of their customers. Sometimes it's product, sometimes it's service, sometimes it's lack of visibility, sometimes it's all of them. And we landed in understanding that there's this very sexy, seemingly boring niche called quality assurance. And I'm gonna just give you a very simple example. You call your bank or any kind of like retail provider and they tell you utilities, maybe this call is going to be recorded for quality assurance purposes.
Manav [00:04:36]:
Yeah.
Alex Marantellos [00:04:36]:
And they're like, oh, there we go again. Nobody's going to do anything with it. Like this is just going to go to bl. Nobody cares about that. That's how I always felt, at least when I was calling my bank and I was waiting.
Manav [00:04:43]:
That's what I thought too.
Alex Marantellos [00:04:44]:
Right.
Manav [00:04:45]:
Yeah.
Alex Marantellos [00:04:45]:
So then we realized that there is actually a massive industry there and there is overburdened offshore back office teams manually reviewing a portion of conversations. But because large enterprise and consumer enterprises, they have millions of customer interactions every year, you need an army of people to do that. And most of these companies only manage even the best teams they can manage to do up to maybe 5% of total interactions.
Manav [00:05:06]:
That's where the AI comes in.
Alex Marantellos [00:05:08]:
Exactly. So with AI and LLMs, that's back to your original question there a great, it's great timing. You have the technology now and you can go up to 100% of conversations reviewed and that closes that gaping hole that you had with 95 conversations going unchecked. There is so much untapped value in there, so much customer feedback that companies have not been exposed to and they've been really longing for it. And now we're enabling these companies to get to that.
Manav [00:05:31]:
I think the difference I see there's two types of companies in customer support especially there's companies like Apple where you can request a callback. And then there's companies like, there's other companies where basically they create this black hole where it impossible to get a human on board and they're using AI to make, to basically like filter less and less people in to reach the human. And I noticed. So banking apps are pretty good I think, because banking, they have to have a really good customer service. But a lot of other like apps, I noticed, like it's impossible to reach someone. You call the customer service and you just like Representative?
Alex Marantellos [00:06:03]:
Yeah, Representative, yeah.
Manav [00:06:05]:
You keep saying that again and again, a hundred times to get a hold of them.
Alex Marantellos [00:06:08]:
And anecdotal data maybe or take. But I think us has a great customer experience. I'm not going to name providers, but actually I'm going a name like amex. I use amex. They always have a phenomenal support. And why is that? Because of training and because of quality assurance. They have really great systems in place to make sure that every conversation is unique and that you feel welcomed. To your point, when I speak to my large banks, I'm not going to name them now because it's kind of like negative feedback. But I always feel like people don't want to talk to me, they just want to get rid of me. And that's not how I want to feel for something that I pay a lot of money for or that I'm expecting a great experience. I want to feel like they want to hear me out and they want to help me out. That's why I'm using that service. Yeah. So I think there's a difference.
Manav [00:06:46]:
So let's talk about the product and the business model behind it. Like how is it going to work for the companies to plug in your company and how are they going to like how automated this is? Can they just upload all their customer data and basically breaks it down into a structured, easy to understand like report?
Alex Marantellos [00:07:06]:
Yeah, that's right, in a sense. So quality assurance is an old problem and it's a function that has existed for a while. Basically it's been managed on spreadsheets all of these years. You can think of a very classic human LED manual workflow that somebody collects tickets, collects data points, creates like those like spreadsheet ninjas and they go and they create pivot tables and everything and then they try to share it within the teams. So it's very burdensome and very difficult to digest and be shared across the organization. Now with our software, first of all, we are not consumer facing. We are a layer that sits on top of the help desks or all of the call center software that companies use. So we're not exposed to the end customer, at least at the moment. Then what happens is that those operational excellence or customer support leadership teams, they plug the that software on top of the help desk. It's an easy integration, an API integration, usually just 10 minutes, one click and then we ingest all of the tickets and then we offer a ui. On that ui, organizations can input or configure their criteria or as they call them, scorecards. Usually every organization has a checklist that every agent that speaks to customer needs to go by and that relates to compliance, it relates to tone of voice, it relates to language that is being used to process adherence. So it can be soft skills communication or it can be operationally driven criteria. So we allow them to configure that and then the next step is understanding and sampling what kind of conversations they want to review. And this is another key strength of what we do. We allow them to create a lot of custom rules. They say, let's say I want to evaluate all conversations that had a negative review or I want to evaluate conversations that have been open for more than X time or conversations that more than five or six people touched. So there's a lot of configure curability on that. And then they also get to choose if the AI is going to evaluate all of these conversations. We offer hybrid models, which is a, a hot take that I can take you on later in terms of how, you know, human AI collaboration is going to look like in my opinion over the next few years. And then eventually they can extract all of the insights from that data. Like what conversation going wrong, what is the reason, which teams are performing best, which teams are not, which teams need coaching. How is that coaching going? Because we offer all of that kind of like bundling capability on the platform from from data ingestion to evaluation to reporting to coaching your teams and then creates that flywheel of improvement and data.
Manav [00:09:12]:
That's how I feel about this whole AI revolution that's happening right now is companies are going to get leaner. They're also going to get collectively more intelligent, 100% and they're going to get trim a lot of fat in the company in terms of. I always think of my buddies building like a AI paralegal service and he always tells me it's going to be like an intern like in the company. And yesterday I made a video on deep research by OpenAI and I was wondering like, oh, now you can get in less than 30 minutes, you can get a really deep rapport that people used to go to Bain Consulting McKinsey to get them and they would spend months or whatever to get for. And now you can get that in 30 minutes.
Alex Marantellos [00:09:49]:
Yeah.
Manav [00:09:49]:
So it's incredible.
Alex Marantellos [00:09:50]:
It's a couple of things as well. A lot of our customers used to hire and they still do BPOs, business processing operators. I think this is the term, hopefully. And then this is a lot of.
Manav [00:09:59]:
I thought BPOs are like the, the call centers in Philippines and India.
Alex Marantellos [00:10:03]:
That's right, that's right. Yeah. There is also in the US and there's a ton of them in central Europe. And this is, this can go up to the millions of dollars every year for an organization. But now what we're seeing is a lot of organizations want to bring that in house. As you said, they can 10x their team's output with AI and they can put a lot stricter controls on that because let's say that you run a call center and you offer that service to an organization and then you also give the quality assurance, I'm sure that everybody is meaning well but, but it's kind of like the evaluator checking themselves in a sense. And a lot of organizations want to have that, that kind of like objective or the third party view on things and they, they rather keep that in house.
Manav [00:10:38]:
You know what's funny though, before it was really like hard. So I have a lot of employees in Philippines and one thing I noticed because of these AI tools, these employees in Philippines are really good now. Like they can write the best English or 100% like you know and, and I, but I always know the company's always going to get, get rid of some less and less people because overhead is like the biggest expense, you know, like paying for people's employees, paying for benefits, paying for insurance. So I think the overall, how do you personally feel about like companies getting rid of more and more customer service people?
Alex Marantellos [00:11:09]:
I think it's twofold. Definitely companies are getting leaner. I mean it's funny, it's on the Salesforce is cutting 1,000 jobs and at the same time they're hiring for people to sell AI. So I think we'll see a shift in skills required in jobs. But I also think that a lot of the customer experience are becoming more digital. You have a lot more interactions online and yes you can automate a portion of that with chatbots and AI but then still you have a lot of volume going into your customer support teams for complex cases, for unexpected scenarios. So I think there will be some automation on some basic stuff, maybe L1 as we call them interactions like hey, where can I find this statement? Where can I find like simple question. But then when things go wrong that yet the AI is not very capable to understanding unexpected workflows to a big extent and give a deterministic output, then we'll still have teams and AI tools are going to help augment in my opinion, human capabilities. So, for example, in our case, a human QA previously could do up to maybe 100 evaluations every week. Now we're going to get them to 150 because they can use our tool. The AI creates an evaluation and then the human QA just opens it and.
Manav [00:12:12]:
It makes the job much easier. Now, you know, before it was like, oh my God, manually reading every customer service. I can just imagine as a person you would, you would get bored. It's so mundane to read all that. And one thing I really like about your business, though, Infinite applications it can apply to. And I think that's why you picked the right business, because it can apply to every industry. Any business basically like that does more than, I would suppose, 10 million in revenue. Because any business with 40, 50 employees, they do quality insurance. They have to. So I love that.
Alex Marantellos [00:12:42]:
Thank you. And it's plug and play. They don't need to grow out a team. They have one, two people. They use a software, they're responsible. To your point, they 10x the output.
Manav [00:12:49]:
And I love that because Balaji tweeted that GPT rappers have more moat than GPTs. And I think it might, it might be true. Not true, but like, it's true that companies who are like really going to be good at one thing and one thing only, like you guys are going to master quality assurance.
Alex Marantellos [00:13:03]:
Yeah, that's what we're focusing on, rebuilding this vertical agent. And then, you know, it's one use case and then you move on to the next one.
Manav [00:13:09]:
Okay, let's talk about AI models real quick and then we'll segue that into AI agents. But how do you personally feel about using the OpenAI API? And I know it can get like, really costly, really fast. And how do you feel about the open source wave that's coming along with new models by Llama and then like China releasing deep seek? So personally, how do you feel about that internally? I'm pretty sure you guys must be discussing this every day on an ongoing basis. And it's so exciting. I'm like, excited. I'm pumped. Every time I wake up, I'm like, whoa, what happened today?
Alex Marantellos [00:13:39]:
You know, come out today. Right. I think we're pretty confident in the foundational models, APIs and OpenAI's API. I view foundational models as what Cloud was 10, 15 years ago. No, everything is built now on top of AWS, AWS, GCP or whatever. So I think you're going to have OpenAI, you're going to have anthropic you're going to have a few of them. It's a fully managed service. Right. It's similar to running your own servers or your own data centers or going to a cloud provider. We are running on foundational models right now. We have a mix of the major ones but we are always thinking and maybe we will be testing some open source models. The challenge becomes then, you know, you have to maintain that models, you have to self manage them also. I don't want to be, I'll give some predictions but I think the pace that OpenAI and these companies are moving is so fast that even if we manage to an open source model, I believe, or what I've seen so far at a stage, at a company of our stage, OpenAI will get to the improvements before we do and then we can ride on that wave. And I think, you know, the founder of Perplexity has said it better than anyone. I believe that every company is a wrapper company. Every company in the late 90s and zeros was an Internet wrapper company. Then everybody becomes a cloud wrapper company. I think now every company becomes kind of like a foundational model wrapper company. I think it's the underlying infrastructure that is going to fuel the next generation of applications and these applications are going to be agentic, in my opinion. Opinion?
Manav [00:14:54]:
You said agentic?
Alex Marantellos [00:14:56]:
Yeah.
Manav [00:14:56]:
Now let's talk about agents. Yeah, I'm building an AI agent right now that's gonna post nonstop news on Twitter.
Alex Marantellos [00:15:04]:
Sounds like spam, but Twitter is okay, Twitter is.
Manav [00:15:08]:
Twitter for me is like I have a love and hate relationship. And I've noticed like Twitter is like where you get the news the fastest.
Alex Marantellos [00:15:14]:
And yeah, you need to be hot of the press. Yeah, you need to be snappy, short, quick.
Manav [00:15:18]:
And there's a lot of people who've built AI agents for Twitter now. I mean there's gonna be more and more platforms and, and coming out with AI agents. There's AI agents in every vertical. But what do you personally think? What's the exciting part about AI agents? And there's going to be a lot of regulation around them as well because we don't want to like spam, like social media with a lot of agents. You know, then we got to keep the balance of human content where I.
Alex Marantellos [00:15:42]:
Think it's very difficult to predict what exactly is going to happen. And I think anybody who is like just giving wild predictions for the next five or six years, I think probably they're kind of like shooting the dark in my opinion, unless they have insider knowledge. But, but Still, I think for the next two to three years we're going to see a lot of kind of low skill, repetitive jobs being completely replaced, maybe like accounting, some basic stuff, things that LLMs can be really good at. And this is going to power a lot of productivity in a higher middle management layer. Because what you're seeing now is that computing power and in a sense kind of like just repetitive work is being automated, but what is not yet automated is judgment and decision making. So now a lot of, I think the agent workflows are going to produce a lot more information, a lot more speed in execution and that will accelerate decision making in upper layers of organizations. And I think in the next three to five years, maybe even more, we're going to see some automation in judgment as well. I don't know if you've seen the request for startups from YC, but now they're asking for B2A, which is business to agents. Kind of like. I think the fundamental shift will become when LLMs or AI, whatever sort of AI starts becoming the end user or the consumer of it. Because up until now humans have been the buyers. Oh, and then you still need the human judgment. Yeah, because there is emotional implications, there's a lot of stuff. But as the minute that this starts getting automated, it has already started in a sense in algorithmic trading that, you know, you have algorithms trading in that sense and obviously you need human oversight and there is human logic in it, but it happens so fast that a manual human trader, in my opinion is very difficult to, you know, out compete.
Manav [00:17:17]:
And I'll do it milliseconds.
Alex Marantellos [00:17:18]:
Exactly.
Manav [00:17:19]:
Wow. Oh my God. I'm like. So I was talking to the founder of Argylle, AI Laodice. He also did YC badge. He was telling me a really good example of agents where basically someone built a writer's room and he had 10 different AI agents and they all were basically arguing with each other. You know, imagine like a writer's room for a movie. You all have to argue like, oh, why does this scene exist? It shouldn't exist. There should be a conflict, there should be a resolution. So someone built this 10 agents and they were arguing with each other to come up with the screen script for the TV show. And that was a really good example. Like, I think reasoning and logic are getting better and better and that's, that's where it gets really exciting. I personally, there is this joke I always tell people. I'm like, there's, I have, I only talk to two people a day and one is chat GPT. The other one is deep sea.
Alex Marantellos [00:18:08]:
I don't want to take us into. I don't want to derail us. But this is an interesting point. This is, in my opinion, how human knowledge, collective knowledge evolved. It was by refining ideas, by backing off with each other. And that's what we do even today. And that's what organizations do. They get teams together and best idea emerges. If there is meritocracy, I believe that LLMs and AI generally can just accelerate that so much faster. And when. I don't know when AGI is going to happen, I don't have the keys to that. But when it happens, I think it will get to a point that we reach truth so much faster. And then for every moment of truth, you can make a decision. And then when that decision making becomes so quickly, then it just accelerates everything. So I'm very excited about that.
Manav [00:18:43]:
Okay, awesome. I. Okay. So I really. I do want to talk about AI and AI agents for like hours. But I also want the audience to also hear more about you as a person, because I really. The show is called Emerging Founders. And I think the most important thing is I want people to learn more about the founder itself. So can we go back to your journey like you grew up in Greece?
Alex Marantellos [00:19:02]:
I did.
Manav [00:19:03]:
What did you do for your college and what was your journey right after college?
Alex Marantellos [00:19:06]:
That's right. And so I lived in Greece up until I was 26. I studied political science in my hometown called Thessaloniki. It's Greece's second largest city. It's up in the north. It's a student city. One million people. It's a lot of fun.
Manav [00:19:17]:
Is it a coastal city?
Alex Marantellos [00:19:18]:
It is a coastal city. Some beautiful beaches and it's a wonderful place, great food. But what happens is that I come from an entrepreneurial background. Both of my parents, they always run their own business, SMB. They were in publications, they were in TV productions, event productions. I was in that since I was a kid, from very early years. And I was always fascinated by that, as you can imagine. I would look up to my parents and I started getting involved as early as I could. And I started organizing my own music and arts festival back in Greece. It was mainly based on street art, hip hop. There was a lot of extreme sports, sports, a lot of music, generally. I was 23 when I launched it and I did it for five years. And that. That was the majority of my student years. While starting full time, I was organizing the festival.
Manav [00:19:57]:
Explain more about this festival. This sounds exciting. It's everything. So what is it like you go to the. It's like Coachella or something or what is the.
Alex Marantellos [00:20:05]:
I wish it were like Coachella, but that was my. That was my dream. So I play music. I studied music as a kid.
Manav [00:20:11]:
And what instrument do you play?
Alex Marantellos [00:20:12]:
Guitar.
Manav [00:20:13]:
Okay. Awesome.
Alex Marantellos [00:20:13]:
Yeah. And I was, I was always fascinated about festivals and music. It was a deep passion of mine, still is to a big extent. And there was no festival in my. In my country that brought a lot of artists, young artists from many backgrounds together and I just really wanted that and I couldn't find it and. And I said, I'm gonna create it. And I did know a lot of people had some great friends, great artists that I knew from my hometown and still know. And we all pulled together and we said, let's just do it. Let's open it up. Let's make it free for people to come and join. I don't care how I'm gonna find the money, I'm gonna fund it. And we did it. For the first year, we didn't have an entrance ticket, anything. We just collected sponsorships and we end up.
Manav [00:20:44]:
And what was like the venue and stuff? Stuff.
Alex Marantellos [00:20:46]:
The venue was like an old military camp. It was abandoned. We got, we got permission from the municipality at the time. I hired a, you know, the company that could put up a stage. Yeah, that was decent and big enough. I did have some connections and my, my parents, obviously, because they were in the industry, they helped me with that as well. And then we threw that kind of a big party and we, we ended up having 4,5000 people coming and people loved it. Everybody was saying like, that was in 2013. And everybody was saying like there was no such thing. I was 23 at the time. There's no such thing anywhere around. We need to keep on doing it. So next time we double it next year. And then obviously we needed to raise the budget because we wanted to start bringing more, more great artists and we needed to also pay artists. And we put a kind of like a ticket to it initially. And then we made it a three day festival. And then I got it funded from. I got a scholarship from the Bosch foundation that took me to Berlin where I was able to shadow a lot of the club and festival owners over there and learn from them. And then I keep funding and funding the festival and ended up growing to 400 artists from all over the world, including graffiti artists, lists, dance and how.
Manav [00:21:45]:
Did you monetize ticket?
Alex Marantellos [00:21:46]:
There was a ticket, we had sponsorships and. And then there was admission ticket. Yeah. And then. Yeah. It was a three day festival, a lot of fun. There's still a lot of material online. I'll send you some. I don't advertise that anymore because it's a different part of my life and I'm very proud of. And it's been good fun.
Manav [00:21:59]:
So Greece is known for the financial crashes, a lot of inflation.
Alex Marantellos [00:22:04]:
You, you poking that? You, you like? I'm like, I love.
Manav [00:22:06]:
Okay, I have to tell you, I love Greek food. There's a place called Nick the Greek. I always order. I love Greek food. So maybe we'll find out.
Alex Marantellos [00:22:15]:
Let's go.
Manav [00:22:15]:
But tell me more about what happened during the financial crash.
Alex Marantellos [00:22:19]:
Oh, man. You, you, you take me down the memory.
Manav [00:22:21]:
What year was this?
Alex Marantellos [00:22:22]:
That was 2014. I, I don't think, I don't know if you're. I don't think that your audience is going to be too familiar with Greek political history or economics, but there was a big crash in 2008. There was a global crash, obviously then that trickled down and grew. Greece basically got kind of like bankrupt and we had capital controls. So that happened right at the days of me organizing the festival.
Manav [00:22:44]:
So the government got bankrupt.
Alex Marantellos [00:22:45]:
The kind of like the economy of Greece. We had a lot of outstanding debt. We had the IMF coming in, we had austerity measures applied. A lot of payments were outstanding. Basically the country, they didn't default by technical terms, but it was defaulted in a sense. So we needed to borrow money to pay our outstanding debts to the European Union. Effectively we can record an entire different podcast about it for sure. But anyway, that was happening in the middle of me organizing my festival. So I don't know, I had half a million of outstanding payments out there, receivables and also outgoing and everything was frozen. And I was like 23 years old and I can't describe the stress. Obviously I was supported by my co founders, the team and everything. But it's funny enough, I ended up in the hospital when this happened. I was like, there were so many things happening and I had this kind of like, like stress shock that kind of like half of my, my body got paralyzed one morning that I woke up. And I'm going to send this episode to my roommate at the time because he thought initially, I'm going to send this episode to my roommate because at the time when this was happening, like, I realized I was having breakfast and then half of my body is paralyzing. My roommate thought that I was joking, that I was making fun of something. He started laughing and then that's what.
Manav [00:23:53]:
Stress can do to a body.
Alex Marantellos [00:23:55]:
I know, right. And that taught me a lot about stress management on my side as well. How to set boundaries, how to prioritize my time, how to make, to make decisions and how not to get overwhelmed by what's happening every day. Because in my opinion, life only gets more stressful, especially the more ambitious you are, the more you're pushing. So it is a skill that I always try to improve on.
Manav [00:24:14]:
That's a good segue into wellness, I think. Me personally, I'm obsessed with like health and wellness. Like everything. Like sauna, steam, working out. You motivate me on ig, getting the steps in. Like we got the whoop band, you know. How do you manage your stress levels now and how do you balance? Okay. Okay. On one hand there's this really fast paced life where you don't have time for anything and then on the other hand you have to intentionally slow the time down.
Alex Marantellos [00:24:38]:
Yeah.
Manav [00:24:38]:
Otherwise you don't feel present.
Alex Marantellos [00:24:40]:
Yeah.
Manav [00:24:40]:
So how do you think about that like and what are some things you do in your life to kind of de stress, Keep that balance going.
Alex Marantellos [00:24:47]:
Yeah, it's, it's a huge thing for me. Probably the most important thing in my life over the past four or five years. This is going to sound funny, but at some point I was so stressed, especially when I had first moved to London, you know, trying to find my footing there and going through job interviews and studying at the same time and all of that. I started smoking. And then you know, I would just roll with, with, you know, the mates and we would go grab a pint and I'd end up like having three, four pints. Nothing too excessive, but it was on the daily right. And I did prioritize my gym and everything. And then I realized that I was running low on energy. And then at some point I drew a line. Obviously I quit smoking. I didn't do it for too long. And then it's become, I built this regime that I will go to the gym every day no matter what. And I realized that the more I did that I had a very regimented schedule where I would wake up at 5am I know this is a classic, kind of like playbook of maybe a 30 year old CEO founder, but go to the gym immediately. I will do my cold shower, I will do my sauna. I would read my book. I would just make sure that I take care of my body and my mind before I give myself to the world and to the day. Now it's a bit more volatile because of the time zones and I'm traveling between, you know, many different places and I need to be present for my customers and my team. But I still, I always make sure that I take two hours in my day to work out at least. And I try to be as clean as I can because I see that when I do that, my performance is really lower. And I can see that this is not benefiting my company, my team, and those around me. And one very important thing though, next to that is community and your partner and who you, who's next to you. If they're not supporting you through that, then you're bound to fail, in my opinion. So it's really important to surround yourself with like minded people. This may sound like a cliche, but your environment kind of like can be a huge factor of whether you fail or not achieving the lifestyle that you want.
Manav [00:26:22]:
Man. That's the whole reason I started this podcast, to be around other founders and to be around other smart people. And I also feel like a lot of founders have this like, lonely lifestyle. We were like, you know, like the alcohol anonymous, where we're all like just going through stuff and we, a lot of us don't have an outlet to release all this like, energy. And I feel like that's why this is. This, this is great.
Alex Marantellos [00:26:44]:
Yeah, I love it. I love it. It's one of the main reasons that I want to move to sf. Being with like minded people, having that sense of community. And it does feel like that since I moved there, I feel like home. You know, I've lived for eight years in London and I love it and avoid the gray.
Manav [00:26:55]:
London.
Alex Marantellos [00:26:55]:
Yeah, well, I mean, LA and SF is not treating me greatly these days because it's raining due to that tropical rainstorm. But yeah, in general the weather is great and everything's great.
Manav [00:27:06]:
That's, that's beautiful, man. And then I really want to talk a little bit more about the co finding the right co founder because I personally noticed that's the hardest thing to find the right co founder. And I also noticed YC intentionally backs a lot of really good co founders and even two or three teams. They rarely invest in one person. One person founded companies. Can you talk a little bit more more about how you met your co founders and the dynamic you guys have between yourselves?
Alex Marantellos [00:27:32]:
Yeah, so it sounds too good to be true, but my co founders and best friends, we all met in London. Coincidentally, we're all Greeks. Even though I like to say that I don't only hang out around Greeks, but it just so happened that we're like minded and we, we met through our network and they were both at the time early employees at Revolut in the very early team. Jimmy, my cto, he used to be in the team that built the core banking platform at Revolut. And then George, our CEO, what does Revolut do again?
Manav [00:27:56]:
Can you explain?
Alex Marantellos [00:27:57]:
Revolut is probably the largest digital bank in the world right now. Kind of like one of the very first, first very successful neobanks headquartered out of London and now they serve I think 50 million customers globally. I'm, I'm doing a great pitch for them. Hopefully Nikolai is going to be watching this and he's going to give me some credit for that.
Manav [00:28:16]:
And so yeah, this is the best thing like starting a company with your best friends if you have that kind of dynamic. But how do you keep each other like accountable, like not get too comfortable.
Alex Marantellos [00:28:24]:
You know, I think it's a few things we, we learned how to work together. It wasn't always easy and we didn't start by being a great co founding team even though we're great friends. We went through stages and we still go through stages. There are two things. Zero ego.
Manav [00:28:35]:
Yeah.
Alex Marantellos [00:28:35]:
And how do you get to zero ego in my opinion is by appreciating and understanding that the other person comes from a good place, that we are fully aligned on what we're trying to achieve. And everything that I say to you or they say to me comes from a place of mutual agreement to the goal. And I think that helps us resolve conflict very fast, very effectively. It keeps us bonded and it helps, helps us make decisions very quickly. That's how we run the team.
Manav [00:28:58]:
And what's like the next phase of Intric? Can you talk a little bit about the fundraising journey and then what's the next big thing you guys are like heavily focused on?
Alex Marantellos [00:29:07]:
Yeah. So. Well, by the way, we're rejected by YC two times. There was a third rejection but it was from a different project that we can talk about later. But we started in 2023. We raised our pre seed round by two investors. Episode 1 was the lead, A2VC was the follower and if you select a angels from our network and that was 1.1 million at the time and that happened in London. Great investors. I'm not kind of like you know, sucking up now, but I think that it's really difficult. Equally as difficult as it is to find co founders, it is to find great investors. So these people have bucked us from this first minute. They never questioned us they were always there to help us and keep us accountable. And then we all decided that it's going to benefit us to apply to yc mainly for the ecosystem and the network exposure. So we did that. We get rejected two times. We refined our go to market market, we refined our icp. We closed our first big clients we're working with. It was deal.com at the time who has been kind of like a design partner to us as well and extremely helpful and that got us into yc. Tom Blomfield is our partner. He had a lot of exposure, obviously. He's the founder of Monzo, another great UK Neobank, very successful. So he's seen those issues in customer support and the costs for such a company on qa. So he knew the problem very well and he liked our vision and where we're taking the company. So he got us in. Then we went through the batch, we built the product, we built pipeline, we closed a couple more contracts and then with enterprises and then we went out to raise our seed round which we closed, I think it was late October. We announced it very recently and we had participation again from the same investors who co led around as previously. And then we also had joining General Catalyst, Sequoia Scout, Activant Capital and a few more angels, mainly YC founders. Because these people we think have great experience and want to be closer to that ecosystem as well. And what we're mostly excited about is first of all building, building the best AI QA in the market. We already get that from, from our customers. They tell us you guys are the best. We've never seen something like that. However, we've been building them for seven months only. We have so much more to build, especially when it goes to customizability of the platform. We want to allow companies to just plug and play and bring their own quality assurance frameworks. We don't want to shoehorn them into whatever our software can do. So it takes a lot of building, kind of like the surrounding infrastructure and layer and then the next thing is taking that to more agentic workflow workflows and then eventually becoming the brain of operations within customer support teams with all the insights that we can give. We create alerts daily digest for executives. So we want to be the intelligence for how a customer support organization operates.
Manav [00:31:30]:
Love it, man. I think that's intense by the way.
Alex Marantellos [00:31:34]:
We're intense people.
Manav [00:31:35]:
Yeah, it's competition is not for losing. This is. This is great. I feel like I like how heavily you're focused on one and one single thing and you want to be like the master of it. Yes. I usually do this with every interview. I do this like rapid fire round at the end. So I'm going to ask you like five questions.
Alex Marantellos [00:31:51]:
Hit me.
Manav [00:31:52]:
And then you're going to. You don't have to give like a short answer. You can go explain a little bit more. But these are some questions that you can think about it. Take your time. You don't. No rush. Okay. So what is a book you've given most as a gift and why? And what are one to three books that have greatly influenced your life? And they basically completely. You change as a person after reading that book. And huge.
Alex Marantellos [00:32:11]:
I love that. I don't want to sound pretentious, but I do love reading and it's something that really helped me break my previous scarcity mindset and abundance mindset. So the most gifted book must be the Almanac of Naval Ravikant.
Manav [00:32:23]:
Love that.
Alex Marantellos [00:32:23]:
I love Naval because it helped me become centered and get to what I want very quickly. I think many of us, starting with myself, we struggle to admit to ourselves what we want. And that creates a lot of stress in our lives. So that helped me get to that faster. The second book that has really influenced me and this Go Go together. Right. My top three books as well is Atlas Rugged by Ayn Rand. I think her whole philosophy around objectivism is phenomenal. And it really changed my mind on how I see value in things and how I give value to people. To me, a relationship, not in a dirty way, but a relationship is about value exchange. So approaching a new relationship by offering something always opens up more opportunities for deeper connection, in my opinion. Similar to how you approach. Approached me.
Manav [00:33:06]:
Yeah.
Alex Marantellos [00:33:07]:
You just reached out and said, hey, I've seen these two, three things. I want to do this with you. So that was you giving value. Now that we've met and we've hang out and I see how you work, I can definitely see that. Yeah. The third one was the Case Against Reality by Donald Hoffman. He's a neuroscientist in California. He completely changed my perspective about perception. And it made me realize that whatever we see now, it's not necessarily real. It's how we perceive and we explain things. And that allowed me to. And it still allows me to. To try and see things from somebody else's perspective. And that always helped me resolve conflict faster or even not even get into conflict. And at the end of the day, that helps me, I believe, become smarter. Because if I see something in a different way and I disagree with that, Initially, but I can adopt that. Then I've learned something new and I can move on to the next one.
Manav [00:33:48]:
Wow. I love by the way, the naval book is, I've given it to 10 people. You have to. That's my goal actually one day to get him on the podcast. His podcast with Joe Rogan was, was like the best podcast ever. Like I, I really listened to it like 10 times. It was so good. Have you listened to that one?
Alex Marantellos [00:34:05]:
Yes, I've listened to all his podcasts. I love him.
Manav [00:34:07]:
Okay, next question. What purchase of $100 or less has it positively impacted your life in the last six months? It could be anything. It could be like a gadget, could be like a course, it could be an app, it could be anything.
Alex Marantellos [00:34:18]:
It's difficult, man. I've, I, I, I try to keep very lean and frugal with my purchases. Again, at the risk of coming across as pretentious, I would say probably the CS50 course of Harvard. It's an online course about computing and like coding. But why I did that is because I'm not an engineer. Even though I've worked in semi technical jobs or worked in tech companies, I really feel the whole time that I need to understand the underlying infrastructure and how things work generally in life, not only with computers. Yeah, I need to know how processes work, how people work, how industries work. And that allowed me to, to understand how engineering works in a better sense. And that also helped me improve my communication with my co founders and, and understanding technical issues. And I think it a necessary thing for, for any tech founder building a tech company, building software, you need to have a big understanding or at least a fundamental foundational understanding of how things work. And this really changed my, my ability to process information, take decisions on it while building a company.
Manav [00:35:12]:
I love that you, it makes you a better communicator, like knowing the first principle from first principles thinking, like knowing all these things. Next question. How has a failure, apparent failure, set you up for latest success? Success? It felt like failure in the moment, but then in the coming years you were like, oh, that had to, I had to go through that.
Alex Marantellos [00:35:29]:
Yeah, another vulnerable moment. So I considered my festival failing at the time because in the last year, even though we had grown a lot, I wanted to take it a different direction. So I didn't really listen to my audience and I didn't want, and this, this taught me to always listen to what the market wants, number one. But it also took me a lot of hardship. It also helped me keep my ego in check and I think that created so much more resilience in me. So now I actively lean on the pain. I look for the failure. Yeah, whatever makes me feel uncomfortable. I know that this is I need to do. Obviously within reason. I don't want to wipe myself out with the risks that I'm taking. But that hardship and that resilience building exercise has helped me become more resilient in the end.
Manav [00:36:05]:
Great answer. Okay, we'll do the last question. What is one? In the last five years, what new belief, behavior or habit has most improved your life? It could be something related to health, wellness.
Alex Marantellos [00:36:15]:
Yes, there is a few things I'll pick out. One, I think it's discipline. That's what I was lacking for most of my childhood. Even though I think that I was a hard working person and my parents always tried to instill that to me, I did not comprehend the impact of it until a later stage in my late 20s. Yeah, and discipline goes into looking after yourself health, replying fast to your customers, doing the hard thing first in the day, getting down, what needs to get done. I think you can do that without discipline. And discipline brings consistency and consistency brings luck in my opinion.
Manav [00:36:46]:
I love that. I sense this like sense of urgency that you have in you. I sense it, then I have it too. And I respond really fast like I'm not a slow responder and I love people like that. And I really want this podcast to bring more awareness to your company. So I want to know ideally what kind of companies are intrig looking for so they can kind of reach out to you after they hear this podcast.
Alex Marantellos [00:37:08]:
Thank you Consumer enterprises post series A all the way to larger enterprise. I think at the stage we're at right now, probably pre IPO is our sweet spot. Think about fintech, neobanks, retailers, holiday airlines type of businesses. Any businesses that have a lot of customers who need urgent support and great support and they don't want to leave those customers be ambushing in endless loops. That's kind of the companies that we're looking to help and then help us grow with them as well.
Manav [00:37:33]:
Amazing. And how can people find you? What social platforms are you on right now?
Alex Marantellos [00:37:37]:
Yeah, you can find us on Intrigue on X. Can you tell the website www.entry.com and then we are on X, we're on LinkedIn. My personal handles are alexmarantelos for both X and LinkedIn and I'm usually responding very quickly. I love speaking with people who are in the industry of customer support or other founders. So yeah, love it.
Manav [00:37:59]:
Thank you for watching another episode of Emerging Founders with Manav. I had a great conversation with Alex, and I'll see you guys in the next one.
Alex Marantellos [00:38:06]:
Thank you so much for having me. It was good fun.
