The audio and video are in Spanish. These notes are a translation.
Today I spoke with Lautaro Schiaffino, CEO and cofounder of Darwin AI, a startup of artificial intelligence (AI) sales agents for companies, which increases their conversion rate by up to 50%. Since its launch in 2023, Darwin AI has raised $2.5M from investors such as H20 Capital Innovation, Dalus, FJ Labs, and Latitud. Before Darwin, Lautaro and his cofounder Ezequiel Sculli were founders of Sirena.app, the first Whatsapp CRM in Latin America, which was acquired by Zenvia in 2020.
Youtube Timestamps*
[1:34] -from Sirena to Darwin
One of the first episodes of Startupeable was with Migue Morkin, Lautaro’s former cofounder at Sirena, a SaaS success story in recent years in Latin America.
- Could Lautaro briefly share the story of Sirena and how that experience led him to the idea behind Darwin?
Historically, software adoption in Latin America has been low for several reasons. One of them is that hiring employees can be cheaper than the software itself.
- Does Lautaro agree with this perspective? What, in his experience, are the biggest obstacles to software adoption in the region, and how could artificial intelligence help overcome them?
There is a lot of talk about how AI makes existing processes more efficient, but not as much about how it enables things that used to be impossible or not very viable economically.
- What things were impossible when Lautaro was building Sirena that are possible today thanks to AI?
[17:11] - How to Build Products with AI
In this context, you could say that Darwin is a more advanced version of Sirena.
- How does Lautaro balance making things more efficient and rethinking others from scratch in his product?
- What has Lautaro’s experience selling Darwin been like? How do his customers see the value proposition, and how does that affect pricing?
In a past interview, Lautaro mentioned that implementing and customizing the AI for the customer was a bottleneck for growth.
- How does Lautaro scale Darwin’s implementation? How much of it can be automated?
- What have been some of Lautaro’s lessons on how to create products based on artificial intelligence?
[56:02] - The AI Opportunity in Latin America
Lautaro has talked about the AI opportunities for Latin American startups and founders who want to solve local problems.
- Could Lautaro explain his idea that “the opportunity is in the local context, since AI needs organization, context, and data”?
Many software companies seek to be their customers’ “system of record,” that is, a business’s central data system that is hard to replace, such as Oracle in ERPs and Salesforce in CRMs.
- How does Lautaro think about ERPs or CRMs in an AI world in Latin America, especially where many businesses still run on paper or Excel?
- Where does Lautaro see opportunities for startups in Latin America, and in which areas does he believe companies such as Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, or the well-funded startups of Silicon Valley will win.
- How does Lautaro think about which AIs will be more successful? When is it better to specialize in a function such as sales versus a specific industry?
In the United States, the space of AI agents for sales is very competitive, with hundreds of startups in this sector. In Latin America, the competition is lower, but more are emerging.
- How does Lautaro think about competition in this context? Where is the opportunity to differentiate and become an irreplaceable tool for customers?
There is a common criticism of “wrapper” products on top of ChatGPT.
- How does Lautaro distinguish between a simple wrapper and a new application that could create significant value?
Episode Mentions
You can find Lautaro on LinkedIn
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