Introduction
On Episode 2 of Bits and Atoms, Elias Can sits down with Sammy Verghese, Co-Founder and CEO of Mucka AI, an AI voice assistant transforming how tradespeople run their businesses. The conversation dives into Sammy’s journey as a serial entrepreneur, lessons learned from scaling businesses, and his contrarian take on pattern matching in venture capital. Sammy also unpacks the inspiration behind Mucka AI; tradespeople spending hours each day buried in admin, often at the expense of their mental health and family life. This episode explores how voice-first AI, empathy-driven product design, and founder grit can combine to build meaningful, industry-changing companies.
Interview
Elias Can: Hello and welcome to Bits and Atoms, the Grishin Robotics founder series. I'm your host, Elias Can, and today I've got Sammy Verghese, Co-Founder and CEO of Mucka AI joining me. To get started, Sammy, would you mind sharing a quick intro about you and Mucka AI.
Sammy Verghese: Thanks for having me here, Elias. As you mentioned, I am the Co-Founder of Mucka AI. We are the AI voice assistant for trades people. We save them over two hours a day in admin. We automate all their invoices, quotes, payment scheduling, payment chasing, job management, etc.
Elias Can: Amazing, let's jump in with some questions. To get started, what originally motivated you to become a founder?
Sammy Verghese: This one's sort of deep seated in my origin story. I had a different type of upbringing to a lot of people, I am the son of two immigrant parents into the UK. Growing up my mother was actually a toilet cleaner and my father didn't have a job, but that sort of changed in my earlier life through a lot of moving around to different places like the Middle East. My father eventually got a job and actually worked his way up to becoming Managing Director of a multi-billion dollar conglomerate out in the Middle East. So that sort of like hustle, grit, and determination was my inspiration to co-found my first company at 18. Once you've lived that upbringing, I think I had a sort of chip on my shoulder. If my parents can do it, especially my mother who couldn't even really speak English, why the hell couldn't I? It almost felt like part destiny, part responsibility.
Elias Can: Really interesting, and I love that you frame it as an origin story because with your upbringing and what you saw from your parents it definitely can help shape and guide you in life as well.
Elias Can: You mentioned starting your first company at 18. Out of curiosity, what was that first company? I know you've been a serial founder so take me through the different founder experiences that you've had so far.
Sammy Verghese: There's been a few different experiences, but the first was in the oil and gas industry strangely enough. That company I founded while I was still completing a law degree at the same time, and crazily enough we scaled that business to do about $30 million of annual revenue and had raised $100 million of debt into the business but were about 12 months before a global market collapse in the industry. So just as we were scaling and rapidly growing, we took on a huge amount of debt and unfortunately the business didn't survive that. After that, I then founded a tech company, an events business, which was one of the fastest growing events businesses in the UK. Then took a slight career detour into buying multiple nightclubs, pubs, and music festivals, living the dream until COVID…and that dream would become a harsh reality. Then went back to technology in the frontier tech space and now at Mucka.
Elias Can: Oil and gas as the starting point, I mean, you don't hear too many people say that. Typically, it's like, hey, I had an online shoe reselling business or was doing something on my local college or university campus. I think oil and gas as a starting point is the first time I've ever heard that which is super interesting.
Elias Can: You've had a few different journeys, and I know this might be hard to sum up in one piece, but for other folks either starting or early into their own entrepreneurial journey, what for you have been some of the key insights or takeaways? It could be different at each stop or holistically as being any key takeaways on the founder journey for you so far.
Sammy Verghese: I think the most key one to my personal viewpoint on entrepreneurship and being a founder comes really from the first company. Part of me, and I think a lot of first- time founders have this, part of me had that sort of imposter syndrome. That feeling like I'm just an 18, 19, 20-year-old, whatever, I can't do this and I don't deserve to do this or I'm not smart enough…blah blah blah. But then flying to Nigeria and signing my first contract in Nigeria, which is worth $7 million to the company, made me realize that, similar to my parents, if they can do it, I can do it. And hold on, if other people can do this, I can do it. There's no barrier of age. There's no barrier of experience.
I think a lot of the time in the VC world, and I'm not sure your thesis on this so we may disagree, but a lot of investors and founders talk about pattern matching. They like having people with deep industry expertise, but that hasn't always led to outlier outcomes when you look at the likes of Airbnb and multiple other huge unicorns. For me, the key takeaway was if you believe you can do it, really the difference between first-time founders or second-time founders or third-time founders is that a business is just a model, and if you can create a sufficient, sustainable model then almost anyone can do it. The question is, have you got the grit to really put yourself through the lows that will come?
Elias Can: Yeah, absolutely. Grit and resourcefulness, these are a couple of the key traits that we're usually looking for in founders as well. You also mentioned pattern matching and that some investors are looking for founders with deeper industry experience. I do think it's generally one of those broader consensus pieces that folks usually gravitate towards. I think it's risk mitigation. As an investor, you’re already taking a very risky leap to make an investment into a company. And so to try and change that risk profile a little bit, if someone has experience then at least they have some good contacts or ways to get off the ground quicker. But to your point, a lot of great founders from the past 10 to 15 years were new to their industry or had success somewhere else and came over and were able to take learnings from a different industry and apply it to the one that they're in. The challenge of early-stage investing is there's no perfect model for how it will work. Otherwise, we’d probably have that perfect AI VC already.
Sammy Verghese: Can I sprinkle a little bit more dust on that point? Pattern matching in certain scenarios makes sense, the pattern for me is grit, determination, agency, and resourcefulness. Pattern matching when it comes to being a Stanford dropout or someone with deep industry expertise can be taken too far in certain scenarios.
There’s actually a really good book on this and I'll recommend anybody watching this to read this book, it's called Pattern Breakers. It lays out a really good case for why industry outsiders tend to break industries and evolve industries at a much higher rate than industry insiders who are stuck in the way it's been done. So, back to what I've learned in my journey, going into an industry completely naive sometimes is super valuable because you ask the question of “why?” rather than trying to understand how other people have done it and then replicate it.
Elias Can: Building off that because I think it segues nicely, what was the genesis or inspiration for starting Mucka AI? What were you seeing in the market or that legacy solutions were missing that made you think this is an opportune time to build Mucka?
Sammy Verghese: I have quite an extensive network of very close friends, family members, etc. who are tradespeople, same with my co-founder, Tom. Tom has actually spent a lot of time developing properties, flipping properties, building, construction, etc., as a little bit of a side hustle to his other startups. We always knew that there was a problem and we previously co-founded a company together. When that company didn't work out towards the start of last year, we were sort of lost in the wilderness asking ourselves what next? So we started exploring a little bit further on tradespeople, like plumbers, electricians, carpenters etc. because of our extensive network there. What we realized in that industry was heartbreaking to be totally honest. Tradespeople spend two, three, sometimes five hours a day drowning in admin. What’s worse, nearly half, and it's relatively similar across the world, but half of the 1.1 million tradespeople in the UK alone are neurodiverse. They're dyslexic, OCD, ADHD, etc. and all these legacy SaaS tools that were apparently built to solve their problem are just clunky, confusing, overwhelming, and most importantly, manual.
So imagine being dyslexic, and after spending eight to ten hours of your day fixing issues, you get back and you have to now open up a laptop and write out all your invoices, quotes, and job management bits. That is just purely overwhelming, which has actually led to, in our research, 82% of tradespeople suffering from adverse mental health issues. When we found all of that out, we were just like, "Okay, come on." This is the most obvious problem for us to solve, so we went all in pretty quickly on it. Not overly plugging what we're doing too much, but we've got everything done in a five month period so far. Going from conception, to live product, to revenue generating in five months.
Elias Can: Have you been using that positioning of this is even better for folks that are neurodiverse? Is that for you a good entry, I don't want to say selling point, but a good conversation starter with folks that you're working with early on?
Sammy Verghese: Yeah, though in certain cases we don't flex it too much. We just build the product with that audience in mind. How we sort of position it at the moment, and differentiate it as well, is it's really that voice AI approach and the ability to speak to an AI. If you think about the actual workflow and day-to-day journey of a tradesperson, they tend to be in the van or truck and moving between site to site, visit to visit, etc. So why not use all of that redundant time to speak to Mucka and do all of your admin work and automate all your invoices, your quotes, and your job management? That for us is how we differentiate versus our legacy competitors that still require manual input.
Elias Can: To your point, tradespeople are spending a lot of time doing the actual work, and then for them to have to do this manual admin work is challenging. It's a huge help to be able to automate a lot of this work.
Sammy Verghese: The real value here is not only being able to unlock additional revenue, but being able to unlock additional wellness and mental health for our users. We can save three hours an evening where you can go back and spend family time together or go out and socialize with friends. A lot of our users and audience are spending multiple hours over the weekend and missing out on family activities and whatnot just to stay up with a tender or stay up with their customers to make sure their customers are getting the best experience.
Elias Can: I think it’s amazing that you're able to give them back more time with family and friends. This is always a good selling point on the individual level, I'm sure.
Sammy Verghese: Listen, we work in the startup world where we don't necessarily always think about time with family and friends, but that's a sacrifice we make and know what we're getting into. Tradespeople don't think about the sacrifice of long hours, weekends, etc for admin work. They think about wanting to do this job because they love fixing problems. They don't think “I can't wait to spend my entire weekend doing all of the admin for it”.
Elias Can: Thank you again, Sammy, for joining me on Bits and Atoms. It was great to have you!
Sammy Verghese: Thanks for having me!
Mucka AI is the AI voice assistant for tradespeople, saving over 2 hours per day on admin. You speak, and Mucka instantly creates quotes, invoices, reminders, chases payments, and updates your CRM - then syncs it to your accountancy software, allowing tradespeople to spend more time doing what they love. Founded by repeat-exited founders.
Grishin Robotics is a Silicon Valley-based VC firm focused on investing in early-stage companies in broader consumer categories. Grishin Robotics has invested in category-defining companies such as Ring (acquired by Amazon), Spin (acquired by Ford), Zipline, Starship, and many others.
