An Ottawa-based tech startup is on its way to San Francisco after being selected to join the prestigious and competitive accelerator Y Combinator.
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An Ottawa-based tech startup is on its way to San Francisco after being selected to join the prestigious and competitive accelerator Y Combinator.
Josh Earle and Leo Paz, both 26, met at Carleton University and initially worked together to develop an app that gamified personal finance for users. But as artificial intelligence boomed, they started to look for new ideas to get in on the ground floor.
“We got an opportunity to be part of a fairly prestigious startup program called Techstars and we moved to Chicago,” Earle said in an interview with OBJ. “We were living in Chicago, getting our first real experience in the startup scene. From there, the product changed. A big focal point for us was wanting to build with more AI in mind.”
The result was Outlit, a platform that uses AI to automate parts of the procurement process to improve efficiency.
“We found that there was this sweet spot applying AI to contracts,” said Earle. “Once we dove in deeper, we found that in the world of sales, the problems were more frequent, more painful.”
Outlit can analyze and provide insight on historical payments and price deals and uses AI agents in the sales process to help with proposals, negotiations and the closing process.
“It’s definitely a big vision,” he said. “AI is able to optimize and speed up these processes, which are delayed and lag due to waiting on a signature. We can automate a lot of those approval flows and all these nitty-gritty tedious tasks.”
So far, it’s a vision that’s paying off.
Outlit was recently accepted into Y Combinator, a startup program that has churned out multibillion-dollar companies such as Airbnb, Instacart and Stripe. Acceptance included a US$500,000 investment.
It’s a program with a notoriously low acceptance rate, but Earle said making connections helped.
“Last June I was in Toronto and I did a pitch competition at the DMZ and we won a $5,000 cheque,” he said. “After we won, someone in the crowd came up to me and implored us to go to San Francisco. We basically took that $5K and turned it into a month in San Francisco. It was a huge risk. But there was an instance where I was there and met someone associated with Y Combinator and we had a great chat.”
Now Earle and Paz have moved out of Ottawa to the Bay area, a hub for tech companies and startups across North America and the world.
“When you’re trying to make a revolutionary company, you kind of just have to make those sacrifices and those big jumps,” said Earle. “We’re leaving all of our friends and family behind to participate in the program, but also to stay there long term and continue to build, hopefully, a generational company.”
San Francisco is different from Ottawa in a lot of ways, but it’s especially different for a startup like Outlit, according to Earle.
“It’s definitely difficult (to found a startup in Ottawa),” he said. “I think just Ottawa being a smaller city, there’s less opportunities, less entrepreneurs, less capital to go around. I think a lot of founders are really realizing that and looking to raise from U.S. investors instead of community investors.”
But that doesn’t mean Ottawa is without its perks. Earle said that when it comes to AI, the city has developed a thriving community of enthusiasts and entrepreneurs who collaborate and support each other.
With AI booming, he added that finding success as an AI product means standing out from the crowd.
“There’s very little barrier to entry to start,” he said. “It’s very popular right now. One thing that we did extremely well when building out the product is we took a very granular approach. We’re not trying to service everybody. If you try to do too much at once, it’s just not going to work.”
