Combining Generative AI with Code Intelligence – Rishi Singh, SapientAI

This is techstrong tv. Hey everyone. Welcome back to techstrong tv.

I'm Alan Shael, founder of techstrong. You know, I, I've been, uh, I've been away on some business trips and personal trips. It's great to be in front of the cameras, and I'm really happy to introduce you to a new company, to our tech drunk TV audience.

It's actually a new company, pretty much to everyone, not just our text, text drunk TV audience. Let me introduce you to Rishi Singh. Rishi is the founder and c e o of a, a new company called Sapian Sapian, or is it Sapn Rishi?

Yeah, it's a Sapn ai. Sapien ai. They are what I, I'm going to, I'm gonna coin the term here.

AI Native Company. So this wasn't a company that joined the Gold Rush when ev, when Chat G PT came out. This company was actually designed from the ground, uh, purpose-built around the whole generative, uh, G P T around, you know, large language models and ai.

So, Rishi, welcome, welcome to Text Strong tv. Nice to meet you. Yeah, thank you.

Thank you, Alan. Thank you for introducing. Um, so I just said, uh, we are SAP ai.

Uh, in fact, we just came out of the stealth mode, uh, last week, really. Congratulations. Thank you.

Thank you. Um, you know what, Before we jump into Sapien Rishi, let's, let's talk A little bit about you, if you don't mind. I don't wanna embarrass you.

Lovely. But, uh, give, give our audience a little bit of the Rishi Singh story. Sure, sure.

Thank you. So, you know, Alan, uh, thank you so much for introducing as you, as you said, you know, I'm founder and CEO O of the SAP npi, but I also co-founded another company, um, you know, which is much better now, uh, harness. Uh, it's a leader in the software delivery space, and obviously I founded more than seven years ago.

You know, we have come a long way. 7 billion valuation. And, uh, you know, before that, you know, I was a platform architect at Apple, and I think that's when I got, uh, into the world of the DevOps.

You know, personally, I, I always look for this developer's productivity and the developer's tooling. You know, I always like to work on the things, you know, that makes the lives of the developers easy. You know, that's, uh, briefly about me, you know, I'd like to go on and talk, tell, uh, Ms.

Long's story. But, uh, yeah. Excellent.

So, of course, our audience is very familiar with Harness Harness io and our friend GDI is also a co-founder at Harness, as well as Traceable and AppDynamics and Jodi needs, you know, it's got quite a resume. Um, what, you know what, Rishi, as we were talking off camera, I'm, I'm a bit of a serial entrepreneur myself. Yeah.

And one thing I find in common upon all entrepreneurs is no one wakes up in the middle of the night and says, you know, I feel like starting a company. Let me see what I should do. Yep.

We're driven. There's something kinda like in that movie, uh, close Encounters of the third kind, where Richard Drives is always like, building this mountain, but he doesn't know where the mountain is. We're driven.

We have this vision. There's something that drives founders to, to go without sleep, without food venture in where there may not be money, but you know, you're gonna have to raise money, you know, but we're so driven we're, we are willing to do without and do all of the things necessary. What, what was the driver here for you?

Yeah, totally. Um, you know, very well said. I think the, you know, no founders just decide to found a company one Fine Day because they have a, came up with a wonderful idea.

It is really the years of, uh, struggle and observations, you know, that makes me from the company. Um, this is something that happened to me at Harness when, you know, when I was always looking for some better solution that can help me do the production deployment that can take the stress away. And it's a very similar kind of phenomena that I went through for recipient ai.

So, you know, if you look at the last decade, I think there has been, um, you know, the, you know, the massive, uh, increase in the pace of innovations. Almost everyone is trying to write more software. They're trying to ship the code, you know, as fast as possible to the production, uh, production environment.

You know, what has been missing there is, there is a always a challenge maintaining the balance between the speed and the quality. And so, you know, in my role at Harness and at Apple, you know, I have seen where, you know, often the engineering leaders are, uh, you know, end up sacrificing the quality in the favor of, uh, speed. And given the pace of innovation has gone so high where everyone is writing the code, you're trying to ship the software every day or maybe multiple times in a day, it's just impossible for anyone to keep a tab on the quality.

And I think this is where I thought there has to be better way, there has to be better, more intelligent platform that can better understand about the code, about the application, and they can help developers maintain the balance between the speed and the quality. They can help a developer, you know, take care of some of the most repetitive, you know, some of the most tedious tasks that they have to do it on a daily basis. Um, I think that's what got me into the nti.

I think, uh, we are on a, on a mission to create the intelligent platform that can take care of, uh, you know, some of the most tedious tasks and, and make them successful in the long run. Excellent. All right.

Um, so let, let's talk SAP and ai. What exactly, I mean, you alluded to it a little bit, but let, let's peel the onion back. What, what exactly is it doing?

What do you Yeah, uh, great question. So, you know, we have, uh, you know, the Build AI Test coder, uh, which is really the testing co-pilot for the software developers. And so, you know, as a developer, you know, you write a code, but then you spend a very significant of our time just writing the test code, which is not, uh, you know, fun thing to do.

Uh, we have a build this AI native platform, uh, that, you know, leverages the power of the generative ai, but it brings its own power, this contextual intelligence, contextual insight, and the code intelligence to generate, uh, better, more meaningful, more accurate test code, um, for the software developers. So what, and what kind you, you know, I know a little bit about testing, but you know, we, one of the nice things about software testing is we have a lot of open source testing engines, like, for lack of a better word, is that what Sapn is utilizing? You know, things like Selenium or something like that, or, or you know, is it bespoke?

Yes, yes. Yeah. Great.

Great. Great question. So, um, another interesting is not a new thing.

There has been lot of framework, especially the Optin Source framework. There has been a lot of standards chaun section. There are, you know, the mato Selenium, there are so many of the frameworks and, and the libraries out there.

Uh, what has, uh, uh, you know, what, what, what you need is that you need to spend a lot of time writing the code on top of these generic frameworks. So at the same NT, I, we are, uh, you know, we are leveraging generative ai. You know, we have our own machine learning model as well as lot of our own computer science that we are, you know, doing under the hood.

And we are writing the code on top of the generic frameworks. And so that as a customer, you know, you don't have to buy any new software and you don't have to, you know, bring and import anything new, uh, other than the SAP pti. Excellent.

I love that. Um, so you just came out of stuff last week. What, it is a great question.

I'm sure people in the audience, I don't know how much they've thought of it, but why now? What, like, what was the trigger that said, Hey, now's a good time for us to come out of stuff? I think, uh, it's a, it's a, the multiple things, I think there, it is a readiness of the product, but also, you know, the readiness of the, the market.

I think, you know, we have been working on this product for some time, you know, you know, it's a little over an year. I think, uh, now, you know, here we are, you know, we have the product, you know, it's ready. Um, you know, anyone can download and then they can start leveraging the, uh, you know, the power of the, the recipient AI product.

But also the market has come a long way where there is a greater adoption of the generative ai. There is a greater awareness of the generative AI for. And so, you know, so as a developer, I think, you know, probably you'll be a lot more inclined to, uh, utilize the product like this.

I don't, I don't disagree. Um, I think we mentioned earlier on, you mentioned the seed round. Can you elaborate on that maybe a little bit?

Yes. So, uh, you know, I've been really, really fortunate to work with some of the great venture and the angel partners. I think, uh, we raised the 5 million, uh, dollar of the seed round led by the eight vc.

Um, but we also have some other, um, in the venture partners, correlation dc, the GTM Farms. And there are, you know, the several, you know, the technology and the GTM leaders, you know, who have been, uh, part of this journey, uh, and you know, who has been helping as well as the guiding force, uh, on this journey. Absolutely.

So, Rishi, I, I'd be remiss if I didn't mention this and ask your opinion. You know, you can't walk more than three feet without tripping over someone talking about AI today. And if you're out in Silicon Valley, you probably can't walk more than a foot and a half without tripping over it.

How do you avoid kind of get, just getting lumped in with all the other ai, ai, this AI that, that we're seeing come out, right? How do you, how do you stand out here? Yeah, I think, uh, one of the most important thing, um, you know, uh, that that helps to cut through the noise is really creating this eventual experience for our end users.

And so, you know, the technology is always there. There has been some wonderful technology. The Kubernetes was there, like the talker was there, you know, there is always, uh, uh, you know, a sort of buzzword that takes, uh, into the account and that becomes a noise.

Uh, and, and today the AI special generative AI that has become, become the top of the town. But the reality is, in the end, um, it's, it's a final product. It's really the experience that's going to differentiate among many of these products.

And, and I think this is where we are not just relying on the raw technology, but leveraging the technology along with anything else, uh, you know, that we are creating ourselves and, you know, we are really, really focused on creating the right experience for the, the final user. So let me, you know, I'll, I'll give you an example for that. So I just started developers, you know, write lot of code.

You know, I need a help to write the test code. Guess what, you know, the 90 to 95% of the time, I don't write a new code. You know, I always work on the, you know, I, I always make an incremental changes on the existing covid who is going to do the job for me, you know, to watching out, you know, what it changed, what is not changed, what are the new things that are emerging out of it?

What are things that are becoming obsolete? You know, how do we really address the, the quality in this kind of complex, uh, scenario? And I think this is where the power of the technology is there.

AI is there, but in the end, how exactly we leverage the AI and create the real product, uh, create a real experience for the user is going to, you know, is what going to make us successful. And I think, uh, we'll, we'll have to, you know, continue, uh, you know, defining our messages so that, uh, it resonates with our, uh, users about their, their use cases instead of just relying on the buzzwords. Makes sense.

Last, last kind of area I want to hit on with you, Rishi, is, you know, look, our audience is DevOps and cyber and cloud native, including a lot of testers as well. People out here who say, Hey, you know what, I'd love to give this a shot. This sounds something interesting.

It's new, it'll make my life easier. What's kind of the on-ramp for them? Is, is the product available in, in GA at this point?

If so, you know, how do people engage? Yes. So, um, the product is available.

It has been ga um, you know, people come to our website. Um, we have created the product, uh, uh, in a such a way that, uh, it is a sort of a distributor services, make sure there is one service that is always running in a, as a part of the development environment. And so when you think about the intelligent and the BS code, this is the environment where the developers, uh, like, and, uh, um, you know, we have created the product in such a way that it becomes naturally to them without any learning curve.

Um, and so yeah, it's available, you know, they can download a plugin and they can get started, uh, with the ai, you know, aap and they can start writing, um, the nice, beautiful, the test codes. Um, you know, we didn't mention the website. Is it Sapien do AI or is it sap?

Yes, It's a Sapien ai. ai. That's right.

That's correct. All right. Hey, Rishi, we wish you a lot of luck and fortune with, with Sapien ai.

You know, if it was as, as successful as Harness, I'm thinking you'd be happy. And I, I hope it's that and more come back and keep us posted on, on your progress and, and you know, this is a very interesting area that we're all interested in anyway, so we hope to see you again soon. Absolutely.

Thank you. Thank you Alan, for the opportunity. And you know, I'm looking forward to have a more conversation like this.

Absolutely. Rishi Sing, founder and c e o of Sapien ai, a new company just out of stealth here, helping bringing AI to testing and development. Check it out.

We're gonna take a break here on Techstrong tv. We'll be right back.