Kyivlab Blog - AiSDR launch. Axdraft story. Double Y-Combinator alumni

Can you step in the same stream twice? For sure yes, if you are Oleg and Yuri Zaremba - brothers and long-time partners in business. And they’ve just launched their second company together - AiSDR.

Since we recorded the interview with Oleg in August, he and his brother graduated Y Combinator’s 23rd batch, launched their new product and a company, and Oleg got on the list of Forbes Ukraine “30 under 30”.

AiSDR co-founders Oleg and Yuri Zaremba YC — AiSDR co-founders Oleg and Yuri Zaremba next to Y-Combinator sign. Photo credit: AiSDR

Interestingly, having launched two startups in his life, Oleg shared that he wasn’t entrepreneurial in spirit. In the beginning of his career he worked as an engineer at Booking.com, and was a proponent of a stable lifestyle and predictable salary, and didn’t leave his job all the way until they got accepted to one of the leading technology startup accelerators - Y Combinator in 2019. He got invited to this adventure by his brother Yuri. And I must say they created a complementary powerhouse.

So I was more of a, ‘let's find a nice job, let's find a well-paying big corporation job and stay there.’ Yuri, on the other hand, had the idea behind Axdraft and he was also the energy behind Axdraft. So everything, pushing us forward, looking for customers, demanding more of the product, of the team, first hires, which were non-engineering at first.

He also asked for advice, thought about the decision, and discussed it with friends and family. From his experience, his advice to people is that if they’re going to do it - they should do it now when they still have a lot of energy and motivation, and do not delay.

Their first company Axdraft was focused on lawyers, and non-legal teams within organizations to help them quickly draft legal documents.

Yuri Zaremba was a lawyer for about more than eight years before the Zaremba brothers started Axdraft in 2017. So every pain point that Axdraft tried to address was a pain point that he felt himself when he was a lawyer, when he was drafting legal documents. He saw a lot of repetition in those documents. And, with this problem, he came to Oleg, a software engineer. Having those two mindsets of an end user and problem-solving skills they quickly tackled this challenge.

The success story which seems a quick journey in retrospect wasn’t so smooth as it looked from the outside. They applied to Y Combinator three (!) times.

Only on the third try did we get accepted. We applied with the same company. We applied with new numbers, better traction, better MRR, and the third time we got accepted. We flew into California to Mountain View, for the interview, which was just 10 minutes. So Yuri flew for like 12 hours, and I flew for like 11 and a half for a 10 minute interview. But basically very nerve wracking because you arrive and it's 10 minutes and you sit down, they start asking you questions like, hey, so what does your company do?

Having this persistence, they got into YC on the third try in 2019.

It was just such an interesting thing and to try to get into that we just kept applying.

YC invested money into Axdraft. Oleg said that YC also gave them necessary knowledge and a network in the US. They also raised a seed round of $1.1 million at a $10 million valuation for a total of $1.4 million raised. And from there they came back to Ukraine to build their company.

They did that for about two years and somewhere around 2020, they started getting inbound interest about a possible acquisition. They ignored the first requests, but eventually a deal was done and Axdraft was successfully acquired by Onit - a bigger player in the legal software world, at the beginning of 2021.

They stayed within the Onit company running Axdraft all the way until this summer when they devised a clever new idea which became their new company - AiSDR, and applied to YC for the second time, becoming a part of the YC 2023 batch. As the name suggests, they are trying to automate the work of sales development representatives (SDRs) using newly-available technology.

Having real experience building a sales process for their previous company and combining it now with the rise of GPT-like models and the advancements in generative AI, it seemed like a very promising idea for Oleg and Yuri to try to automate in particular outreach and communication.

Comparing the two experiences, Oleg said that now they definitely at the second time know a little bit more about what they are doing at every stage of the company, what steps you should take, for example, at the idea stage, and what you should do once you start a company, what’s important and what’s not.

For the first time they had the same fear as a lot of first-time founders have - sharing their idea. Now they don’t have this fear anymore and Oleg considers that the most valuable part is the execution of an idea.

For a lot of companies, the execution is going to be your product. The way that you talk to your customers, the way that you acquire your customers. You get a first customer, you talk to them, they say, ‘hey, I would like you to do this or that.’ You listen to that and you try to improve. Y Combinator says that it's much better to have a few customers that absolutely love your product than quite a few customers that just go like, ‘it's nice.’ And this is probably something that you should strive for in your company.

Great teams build great products, and great teams do not give up at the first obstacle. The Zaremba brothers’ story is definitely inspiring and motivating; they knew full well that there were no guarantees in repeating their previous success but managed to persevere and repeat the magic.

Please also enjoy our short interview.

AiSDR launch. Axdraft story. Double Y-Combinator alumni

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