AI’s growth dilemma: risk or opportunity? | Yagub Rahimov on BeyondSaaS Ep 014

Jason Niedle Today we’re talking with Yagub Rahimov, founder of Polygraf AI, about how we can use AI to grow safely and about his recent win for their best pitch at South by Southwest (SXSW).

Welcome to Beyond SaaS. I’m Jason Niedle, founder of Tethos, we’re a growth agency and for over last 22 years, we’ve been accelerating tech company growth through strategy branding, lead gen and conversion. And today I’m really excited to explore how to grow a tech company with Yagub. He is the founder and CEO of Polygraf AI and they enable data centric organizations to identify and mitigate emerging threats from data leaks, breaches and fake or AI content, which seems like something all of us need these days.

He’s a really cool overlap between AI and data privacy. And apparently he’s also got an amazing pitch because their pitch just won best of show at South by Southwest (SXSW). So welcome, Yagub.

Yagub Rahimov Yeah, thank you for having me here.

Jason Niedle Before we, I do want to hear about the pitch, but before we get in, do you have a golden nugget for us today?

Yagub Rahimov So what got me into entrepreneurial journey is a book by Ken Schoolland and it’s called Jonathan Gullible Adventures of Jonathan Gullible. If you are entering into entrepreneurial journey and you want to read a book for yourself as well as you can read it to your five-year-old you got to get that book and it’s in every language Adventures of Jonathan Gullible by Ken Schoolland

Jason Niedle Adventures of Jonathan

Amazing. Say the name one more time.

Perfect, thank you, I’m gonna check that out. So tell me little bit about this win.

Yagub Rahimov it was very strange, right? We didn’t really prepare for this at all. And at Polygraf, we have a rule per event. We only send one person and one person only. And they told us that we need to have two people in there to control the pitch. Like one person is running the slide, the other one is on the stage. So I asked a client of ours to get on a stage with me.

Jason Niedle well.

Yagub Rahimov Well, to control my presentation. So really not prepared at all. Yeah, we even had a little bit of a glitch. I lost like 26 seconds, if I remember the exact number. So I pitched it, and left actually the whole event. I thought that we really messed it up.

And then they give me a call, where are you? I’m like, well, I’m not there. I left and they keep on telling like, it’s very important that you come here. And I’m like, why should I come? And they’re like, just don’t ask, come. That’s the moment the token kind of dropped. Maybe we actually won. But the best part, like here is something that I always tell.

Jason Niedle wow, I left.

Yagub Rahimov I actually just paid attention how you presented Polygraf, right? When we try to stick by a pitch, when we try to stick by a tagline or whatsoever, it becomes freakishly boring. Right? Like I really hope that I don’t actually present Polygraf the way that we started it at the beginning. So that’s the main difference that we brought on South by Southwest (SXSW) where everybody was like to the line.

You know, they were like a machine gun literally and YC companies, Sequoia companies and so on, like all well backed companies. And then all of them with proper team representations, you could see that they are very well prepared. And then there is this guy coming on stage and his assistant is his customer.

Jason Niedle So.

Yagub Rahimov We just basically told what we are doing, like really to the point. That’s what won us the SaatPy. And not just the best in show, we won best enterprise, smart data, FinTech and Future of work award as well. And yeah, it was fun.

Jason Niedle Wow.

So are you saying my summary was boring? And if so, what’s the better summary?

Yagub Rahimov So I would say that Polygraf is an agentic AI built for eliminating risk, fraud, and privacy issues of companies in any environment.

Jason Niedle And what’s your role there and what’s your current focus?.

Yagub Rahimov I’m the founder and the CEO. I work for my team. That’s what I say in general. I’m the one who comes with weird requests. They are the ones who are making it real. And I’m the UI/UX on the front of everybody talking about what we do.

You know, in my previous life, I was fighting and eliminating financial fraud cases. In the current life, we are eliminating data risk issues, fraud issues, as well as to a certain extent, playing a role to protect lives as well on the defense side.

Jason Niedle To be clear, did you just classify yourself as your company’s UI/UX?

Yagub Rahimov I am the company’s UI/UX. Yeah, because you know, have only the founders are the front-facing stuff, right? You are the front end.

Jason Niedle That’s pretty cool. haven’t heard people phrase it that way before.

Yagub Rahimov But I’m as good as my back end. My back end is my superpowers, my engineers. We have nine engineers, six of them are PhDs in ML from VTech, UT Austin and so on. And three of them are competitive hackers. So they are the massive force behind Polygraf making and building, you know, unique content, unique software solutions that has never been built before. And whatever we do, we strive to be number one. We have a rule

if you are not number one in what we are doing then we are the last one there is no no space for being the second.

Jason Niedle What stage would you call yourself? Startup, mid-stage, where are you guys?

Yagub Rahimov are a startup. Polygraf only started in late March, April of 2023. We work with 38 enterprises. We have over 100, to be more precise, 114 pilots today.

We have over 20,000 monthly active end users that’s using Polygraf today. We launched the MVP on the 15th of October, 2024. So it’s only been done in like four months give or take. So we are one of the fastest growing AI companies in the world, period.

Jason Niedle No way.

That’s insane.

Yagub Rahimov And we are not a Gen.AI company, that’s the weird part, because everyone who is on the Gen.AI doing some cool weird stuff, create some text or whatsoever, they are of course attracting people. We are doing the boring stuff, protection, detection, elimination, and yet we are growing with it as well.

Jason Niedle Wow. So you’re in hyper growth right now, what do you wish other growth leaders knew about this phase?

Yagub Rahimov Accepting that you don’t know nothing. Like you cannot literally presume that you know everything but at the same time don’t take your eye off the ball.

The second you let go for even one day, I work myself 18 hours a day every day, including the weekends. The second you let your eye go off the ball, you’re losing the control. Like when you are growing hyper, stick by it. Don’t let it go. Don’t let it sleep by.

Jason Niedle So that said, what’s your growth goal for the next 12 months?

Yagub Rahimov We are becoming a unicorn by end of this year. Perhaps even earlier.

Jason Niedle I like it. It’s not 500% growth or $3 million, it’s “Unicorn”.

Yagub Rahimov Yeah.

Jason Niedle What’s your obstacle to that goal?

Yagub Rahimov Let’s just call it global instability. It’s the thing that actually forces and drives us forward, but it’s also the thing that stays in front of us. Like we have a couple of large deals that we have signed already. The budget is basically on freeze. Everything has been approved. We are just waiting for the budget to come.

Jason Niedle That’s an interesting place of tension in that the instability of all these things leads to security issues and risk factors that they’re trying to mitigate, but at the same time they don’t want to spend the money to mitigate them because of the risk.

Yagub Rahimov Absolutely, The instability pushes the demand for Polygraf, but it’s also our enemy at the same time. We are in a unique environment. We don’t really call ourselves B2B or B2G as we are a B2P company, P stands for partners. Essentially speaking, that’s how we have been growing crazily.

So we will grow it nonetheless, but the question is, will it be at 200 miles an hour or will it be 175?

Jason Niedle So that said then, how do you define an ideal customer profile?

Yagub Rahimov We don’t have one. We have an ideal partner profile and that’s a DLP, a secure network solution provider. DLP stands for data loss prevention. Cyber security providers or fraud detection providers that control 20 % or more of the given industry that they operate in. So we embed Polygraf with them and they are the ones who have the ideal customers that they have.

Essentially speaking, we will work with any compliance department and any technical department or CTO’s office of any company.

Jason Niedle Well, so how do you fill that top of funnel? How do people hear about you?

Yagub Rahimov We are very very selective when it comes to selecting and working with that partner. We only have four partners right now. We are not chasing dozens and dozens of partners. We want to basically select four, five, six, like every three months I want to double the number of partners.

Last quarter we were two partners, this quarter we are already four, next quarter it will be eight, and we are going on this direction, right? At least for the first eight quarters. And those

Partners are the ones that are also on the growth mode. So we are essentially speaking putting double fuel onto the fire with them. They’re growing with us. They’re growing even faster and basically we growing with them as well.

Jason Niedle Are you growing them or are you protecting them from risk?

Yagub Rahimov We are doing both. So we have a partner that they were in stagnation mode and with us they are now projecting this year on 8 to 12 percent growth mode for the year. And this is not a, 10 million dollar growth we are talking about. This is tens of billions of dollars.

Jason Niedle How does that work? How do you come in as the quote unquote smaller startup and get these big companies growing? What’s your magic?

Yagub Rahimov So let

We just went through a audit for our privacy detection solution. And that audit will soon be announcing it publicly, the details as well. So we outperformed Microsoft by 17%, Google by 6.4% and Amazon by 6.2% for privacy detection.

Essentially speaking, by claiming that now, we can say that we have outperformed everybody in the world. And the major difference for it is that it’s our technical approach for the things that we are looking at. So while everybody is looking at the technical PII detections or PPI, PHI, et cetera, detections from the side of, you know, semanticness, we are looking at things from context perspective.

Jason Niedle Hmm.

Yagub Rahimov And we are using a very dedicated small language model that identifies privacy in a context perspective. Now, let me give you an example. You’re speaking with the founder of the company, right? If you go ahead and say that in today’s podcast, we spoke with the founder of the company and discussed about their growth and on and so forth. There is no entity out there except Polygraf that would actually identify a personal identifier in here. The founder of a company is an identifier, right? Knowing that there is a founder of Polygraf is Yagub Rahimov, therefore it’s a personal identifier. All other tools end up failing on that direction. Polygraf will identify it clearly.

Jason Niedle So I want to make sure I have your funnel right because I’m always thinking about sales funnels and I’m thinking the customer usually finds their ideal customer profile and then they usually send out 10 million pieces so they can get 10,000 replies so they can get a hundred customers, right? And you’re saying, nope, only partners. I’m happy to start with four and then double that quarterly. And we’re still the fastest growing.

AI company in that regard.

Yagub Rahimov Like with one partner

alone, in six weeks, we have had $7.2 million in bookings. And that’s an industry that it would have taken me just three years to say hello to those people. Forget about selling it to them. So that number is not fully realized yet. We are still working on it, right? And to get to…

Basically make that deal with that partner. We said no to three of their competitors. Some of their competitors were much bigger than this one partner, by the way. But we still ended up saying no because we saw that this one partner would be dedicating team to sell Polygraf.

It doesn’t get better than that. You have a dedicated sales team inside a very large growing entity that would be basically cross-selling, overselling, upselling, whatever you want to call it, your solution. And they are not doing it for the money. They are doing it for the mission because they are actually seeing how we are coming and changing the game.

we are protecting their customers from the threats that they couldn’t be protected from previously. Like audio call centers as an example, we are detecting that the caller is the real Jason or someone else, or Jason, but it’s a deep fake of Jason in 5 to 15 seconds.

everything else out there, it requires 45 seconds to one and a half minutes minimum data input. So we are fast, we are accurate, and we are small, meaning that we can actually be deployed in any environment. So a small language perspective, right? So from that perspective, it kind of is like a no brainer for them to push us as well.

Jason Niedle So probably every CEO listening wonders what your magic sauce is. Like who are these partners and how do you find them? you probably don’t want to give up all the magic, give the audience a little hint of how to execute on something like that in their own company.

Yagub Rahimov So I’m known as Mr. Paranoid among my close friends. I’m who I am. I don’t try to be impersonating myself or anything else. even, we even have made like Polygraf music using AI and so on. Like if you sit in my car, I’m full Polygraf. I don’t really care about it. If I even take it here, there is Polygraf underneath too.

When you are 110 % into the mission that you’re going for and your message is always the same in front of everybody, first they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight, then you win, right? So we’ve been ignored, we’ve been laughed at at the beginning, we’ve been fought at, and now we are in the winning mode.

So that’s the one thing that I’m going forward. I really am in love with my partners. I cannot really put it more stronger than that because we are one on one, you know, aligned with our mission. We are aligned on the mission and the vision that we are going forward.

Jason Niedle So did I read correctly, you grew up in Azerbaijan?

Yagub Rahimov I was born in there, correct?

Jason Niedle What’s one big impact that that upbringing had on your entrepreneurial journey here?

Yagub Rahimov In our neighborhood, bunch of kids got a bike. And I went to my dad and I asked my dad, I think I was eight years old, that I want a bike too. He said, you need it or do you want it? I said, I want it and cried myself off. A few months later, I got a bike, but…

I did not see my dad afterwards for a whole year. So he took another job night shift to be able to afford that. And the worst part was that how I realized was two months after this, I actually lost my interest in the bike. I was looking for my dad, but I wasn’t able to see my dad. So I told that I don’t want to be like my dad.

I wanted to be like one of the neighborhood kids. They had a dad that owned a shop, right? He owned a shop and he employed people. So he was with their kids for all their birthdays and anything else that they needed. Where as my dad, even on New Year’s Eve, we never really saw him. He was working.

So that was my starting point. My dad is my rock. He’s awesome. I love him. I owe my life to him. But I don’t want to be like my dad from that perspective. That’s the starting point. And then in 2005, I was sponsored by the US State Department to graduate my high school in California.

During that one year, I basically broke through all my comfort zones. I anyway lived in a boarding school and so on. But when you are living in a…

know, exchange family and so on, you don’t really live your own comfort, you live their comfort, whatever they deem so. So I broke through my comfort zone and rediscovered myself, found my interest in finance and so on. And then the following year, I met actually Ken Scholland the book that I just mentioned, Adventures of Jonathan Gullible, the author. So Ken Scholland,

Basically brainwashed me. That’s what I’m just gonna say In a very good way. I really appreciate him. He’s like I actually call him someone that made me in a way to who I am Unintentional or intentional.

Jason Niedle love I feel like what you’ve been doing is pretty innovative. Where did that come from?

Yagub Rahimov So Polygraf’s inception goes down to one personal issue. Like everything I’ve done in my life, I’ve always been obsessed with it. Like I don’t do things just because I see a dollar value or something. If I’m not obsessed with it, I cannot do it because I lose my interest otherwise very, very fast. So February 14th, 2021, it’s my first winter in Texas.

Jason Niedle Or just in general, the way…

Yagub Rahimov And my car got destroyed in a winter storm here. So, in short, I wrote a review about the dealer who refused to serve it under the factory warranty. And the review platform deleted it, saying that it was a bot content. which I appreciated, you know, like if it is a bot content, delete it. But when I asked, can you prove it? They could not prove it.

So I went on a personal journey in a way. Me and my now co-founder, Vignesh, we wrote the very first bot that detected the bot. And one day I literally woke up that our stupid website was featured on Fox News.

Jason Niedle Hmm

Yagub Rahimov They didn’t even talk to us. I don’t even know what went wrong, what went right. That opened a whole bunch of opportunities for us. And then after that, we had an investor, Gregory Guggenheim. I met him at Beverly Hills Family Office lunch, where I was a speaker.

He walks to me and he’s like, I love what you’re doing. I want to be part of it. I’m like, who are you? Okay, I didn’t know they were and so on so forth In short like because of them we ended up basically pursuing on being venture backed and so on as well. That was the starting point And there is here is here is one very important element. It’s wanting to do something for fun with your own money

And it’s another thing to take an obligation with your investors’ fund. So when we took that obligation from our investors, we went back and we actually started working backward and trying to understand what is the one big problem that we are going to be fixing. So we went on a rabbit hole of customer interviews. I personally interviewed over 300 CIOs and CTOs.

Jason Niedle Mm-hmm.

Yagub Rahimov identify what’s the problem that they’re facing, why is it that it’s a problem and how is it going to be evolving and so on. So we joke with our internal team that we have better data than Gartner about the industry that we are operating in. So with that, now we understand what the problem is, who we are supposed to be targeting and what is the end goal with it.

We, instead of saying like, okay, we have one product that’s handling everything, especially from the AI perspective, we could have chosen an LLM approach. We said, no, no, wait a minute, LLMs are prone for hallucination, LLMs are…

prone for being hacked and data leaks, etc. by themselves. So we looked at a different approach with SLMs S stands for small, small language models. So Polygraf ended up building five different AI models with 17 different AI agents, each one, like specifically handling a risk issue, privacy issue, fraud issue, document processing or document reduction activity.

And each one of them are like your personal direct advisor. Like it’s your privacy lawyer, it’s your fraud detector. And that data never being transmitted to us neither. So we never ever under no circumstances, even with the consumer product that we have on our website, we do not collect or train or do anything with the data.

And that’s again, thanks to our small language model approach that we are utilizing.

Jason Niedle So everybody’s talking about AI and how it affects their company. What do you know that we should know? What are some things about AI that people are missing perhaps?

Yagub Rahimov What I know is that one out of 14 words that goes to ChatGPT is privileged data that should never go to ChatGPT. What I know is that people, especially high impact people, are getting hacked or getting even kidnapped because they use email summarizers and stuff like that, that data ends up basically living.

What I also know is that all of these things are eliminatable. Like we can actually stop all of these issues without stopping you from using, know, summarizers, without stopping you from using those chatbots and so on. They’re fun. I use it myself. But we can stop your privacy so that if your API gets to be, you know, exposed,

They don’t know that your flight is landing at Johannesburg airport at 2.40 p.m. This has really happened, by the way. An email summarizer was exposed and someone went and stayed at the gate with the CEO’s name because they basically intercepted the communication. Right? And the guy went and sat in their car. So these kind of issues, Polygraf eliminates it.

Jason Niedle So I was going to ask you what are some simple steps that CEOs should take to implement better security, but I Polygraf is one of them,

Yagub Rahimov Well, let’s get Polygraf first and you’re 90 % there and the other 10 % is your policies.

Jason Niedle Like what?

Yagub Rahimov Like what kind of cyber policy you follow, what regulation you are under and how much dedicated is your organization or yourself. Are you a part of it? Because we have all of these things, it’s ready, click, click, click, you’re set to go. But we won’t do it for you. You still need to have your own organizational policies, cyber policies.

Jason Niedle What would you advise early stage CEOs?

Yagub Rahimov Speak with your potential customers as much as you can. Eliminate your conviction. Like your conviction means nothing. are 99% of the time you’re wrong and you haven’t understood what the problem is. So speak with your customers or potential customers, understand the problem. That’s the number one recommendation. And don’t chase the venture capital money right away.

Jason Niedle I’m such a huge proponent and I love that you said that you did 300 interviews with everybody because very few people do that and everybody thinks they know the market and you don’t know until you’ve asked people the questions.

Yagub Rahimov You can’t know the market, right? For us, we knew the market that we were coming from. But even then, I wanted to see what my compliance director really thought about it, like the company that I used to work with. I wanted to see what my customer’s compliance director and CIO thought of it. One side is that there is always two sides of a coin.

So you’re either the head or a tail, It always falls on either direction. So you need to understand and be able to bring the both sides so that if it falls on a tail, it doesn’t come up as a useless solution.

It may still do the same thing, but do they perceive the value? So perception and conception are the two important elements of understanding what you’re doing for your customers.

Jason Niedle I love that. So you mentioned the chaos of our times. What trends do you see? How can we kind of look a little bit in the future and see what might come of all this?

Yagub Rahimov So our slogan, by the way, is clarity within chaos.

And we have an internal joke. It says passwords and encryptions are same as horse carts… obsolete. So we see a future that all encryption will be useless. And the only way to protect your data is actually not to have that data in there, period.

Jason Niedle Password.

Yagub Rahimov So if your data is leaving to a third party, you need to eliminate whatever is valuable for you so that in case that third party is hacked, you are not in danger. And I want to eliminate the word in case and exchange it with the word when, when that third party gets to be hacked. And if anyone comes and says, no, we are all compliant and blah, blah, I want to remind them that the treasury was hacked in one day.

So if the US Treasury can be hacked in one day, then whatever encryption that you’re utilizing is already dead.

Jason Niedle Before I wrap up, there anything else you wanted to say?

Yagub Rahimov What I’ve said here is valuable for whomever is listening to this. I am here for them and cyberworld is something that it’s not one man or one company thing, it’s a collaborative thing.

If they are looking for partners, we are here. We are more than happy to talk with them. We are happy to collaborate with them. Although I did mention we are B2P, we have quite a few direct customers right now too. So in some cases we are working direct as well. And if anyone wants to go ahead and test Polygraf solutions, they can actually use JASON25

and we’ll give a 25% discount for them for our consumer products.

Jason Niedle Jason25 and that’s at Polygraf.ai, P-O-L-Y-G-R-A-F.ai. How can they get a hold of you or find you if they need to?

Yagub Rahimov So I’m everywhere available under my initial Y and my last name Rahimov. Like LinkedIn is the only social media that I actually follow. And I’m actually very active on it. So LinkedIn would be the best reach out.

Jason Niedle LinkedIn, and again, that’s Polygraf.ai. Yagub, thank you so much for being on Beyond SaaS. For listeners who are leaders in mid-stage tech looking to grow, I do offer a limited number of growth consultations, and you can find me at tethos.com. And please drop any questions, comments, or feedback below. If you have any questions for future guests, let me know, and we’ll share those as well. Until next time, this is Beyond SaaS.