Working at Kasisto: The Leading Digital Experience Platform for the Finance Industry

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Sacha, thanks so much for joining us.

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Well, thank you for having me. I really appreciate it.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Yeah, I'm excited to talk to you. Because as everyone knows, AI is everywhere. But a lot of companies are kind of racing to figure out their strategy of how to incorporate AI into their business yet because Kasisto has a perfect use case for it. And it's been core to your business for since day one. So let's talk about the system and what the company does.

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Absolutely. So at Kasisto, we are an AI company, we've been doing AI and using AI to help. Sometimes we talk about as democratizing finance for people. So we create AI virtual assistants that help people communicate with their financial institutions using their own language, and also listening in natural language. So that's sort of what we started out to do with Cisco about nine years ago. And what we continue to do today, although it's advanced a lot since we first started. So yeah, in short, because at Kasisto we use AI to help people understand and dominate manipulate their finances.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

So how did the company come together? Like what's, what's the background story and a little bit about your background?

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Perfect. So why don't I start with my background. So my background is in computer science and engineering. I started my career working for a defense contractor in Massachusetts called Mitre. We're working on futuristic DARPA projects. Very exciting. That's how I got exposed to AI and speech recognition. And I've pretty much spent my whole life doing this. I always tell people that I've dedicated my life journey is to teach computers how to talk to humans, and I think we're really reaching a point where computers are getting so much better at understanding us and talking to us. So it's really fascinating to me to be here. Cuz Kasisto was started about nine or 10 years ago, nine years ago Zorich or love myself and two other co founders Ruth Brown, and drawer. We were working with Sri, which is a research company out in Menlo Park, California, where they had developed the creators of Siri, the ones that stayed at ESRI and didn't go to Apple created a whole new infrastructure for creating conversational agents. And they were looking at what to do with that technology. So they recruited zorbs are recruited me, we looked at it, we said, this is fantastic. It's super complicated, because it was built by 20 PhDs, but it has all the foundations that we need, and to create something that's more general. And can you know, there's, they're nothing like this exists today in the market. And we learned that banks were one of the people who are willing to try this technology and to offer it to their customers, we also had to happen to have a lot of data in the banking domain. So that's what we started, when we started our first customer, was a customer in Singapore, who actually was launching a brand new bank in India. So you can see how you know from its origins, because Kasisto has been an international company, started in New York, but really came out of California and first deployment in India funded through Singapore.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Now, large language models, LLM is like that's something that people are familiar with now, but maybe weren't as familiar a little over a year ago before cat GPT. You know, finally it was announced. So in financial services and banking, it's a regulated industry. So that changes the whole complexity of what you're building.

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Absolutely. So for our customers, they in addition to you know, having to be very responsible, because they're dealing with people's money. They're also highly regulated, as you stated, so they have to pass by government regulators, security regulators, and for them, things that might not be so important to other people, which is what happens with your data. How did you train your large language model? Is your large language model violating any copyrights? Will it violate any copyrights? When it says something to me? Will it break any laws? Will it say things that can confuse our hurt might cut my customers and client base? So these are all things that are really important for our customers, which is why it consists Though we've trained a finance build, specialty built large language model that's built to reduce hallucinations to increase the probability that it's giving you accurate, and also compliant information that is transparent. So you can understand where what was used to train it, what data was used, what algorithms were used, accurate, and reliable. So so those are those are really important things for our customers for the regulators that regulate our industry, in which is why we created what we call chi GPT, aptly named.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

What's the latest with Kasisto? though? Like, what's any numbers you can share as far as number of employees or what other details?

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Absolutely. So at Kasisto, we have about 65, full time employees. At any one point in time, we have about 90 employees, including all our contractors, we have employees all around the world, we're pretty distributed here in the United States, we also have employees and London in South Africa, and Singapore, Australia, Philippines. So we are we're pretty well distributed. We often have employees that move from office to office. So you have people that are in New York today that used to be in Singapore, we have people who are in London that used to be in New York, and so on, so forth. So we're pretty mobile and diverse community of of employees ecosystem was.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

As an extension of that. So what's the culture like working at the company?

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Well, it's a startup. It's a nine year old startup, but the culture is still that very much of a startup. So people are very passionate about the work that they do. A lot of people come to Kasisto, though, because they want to make a difference. They don't just want to be a piece of an organization, but they want to be a contributor, someone who can have an impact in the organization. Other people come to Kasisto, because they when you work at a small company, you never have one job, right, you always have to do many things. I'm the CTO, I fixed the espresso machine, I set up the operations. You know, I work with project managers, product managers, I mean, sales calls, and much like me, other system, employees are constantly filling different roles. So you do get a lot more exposure, and to what you get to do and what you learn as part of your day to day job. But you will work hard. So if working hard is not for you, because this is probably not the right place for you.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Now that top tier talent has options for their career, regardless of market conditions. So why should Kasisto be on the job seekers radar?

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Well, because we will guarantee that you will work on some of the most challenging problems in the industry, which is something you might not get an opportunity to do. If you went to work for a large corporation, I have many colleagues of mine are former colleagues of mine, who are PhDs in computer science and AI, and are writing JavaScript for Google. So you know, I mean, if if that's what you want to do, then go for it, you're gonna get the job security. But if you what you want is to be challenged every day to be presented with unique and interesting problems on a day to day basis that you can apply all your energy and your, you know, intelligence to them, because this was the kind of place that that you would find works for you.

Keith Cline, VentureFizz  

Well, if you are interested in exploring opportunities at Kasisto then go to their company page on VentureFizz, which has all their jobs listed there, go to venturefizz.com/kasisto And you'll find the listings. Sasha thanks so much for taking the time to walk us through all the great things happening at the company.

Sasha Caskey, Kasisto  

Thank you for the opportunity. Have a great day.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai