Anant Bhardwaj
Founder & CEO, Instabase. On 2 shows, 2 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutivescientist@anantpb ↗LinkedIn ↗people.csail.mit.edu/anantb ↗
Bhardwaj founded Instabase in 2015 out of MIT CSAIL, building an enterprise AI platform that automates complex workflows from unstructured data. Under his leadership, the company achieved unicorn status and raised over $300 million from major venture capital firms.
2shows
2appearances
20statements
0resolved
0supported
0contradicted
Everything Anant Bhardwaj said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Anant Bhardwaj: AI automation will fully replace legacy RPA
“The bet that we are taking is that AI will drive automation in a significant way. RPA would be fully eaten by AI automation, and the future is likely going to be more of decentralized, federated execution.”
Bhardwaj: RAG alone is insufficient for high-accuracy enterprise data processing
“While drag is good for casual search, you need a complex workflow under the herd that is explainable, that is auditable, that is guaranteed to be accurate and correct, is important for solving many of these enterprise problems.”
Bhardwaj: Enterprise AI clients prioritize predictability over baseline accuracy
“So I think in general what we have seen is enterprises are fine using AIs as long as we show them predictability. They don't care about, you know, 99% accuracy. You can be 90% accurate or even 80% accurate, But just tell us which 20% need to be reviewed or whi…”
Bhardwaj: Enterprises reject black-box AI decisions without clear step-by-step explainability
“Nobody wants, like, AI making a decision, even if it is correct, if they cannot Explain here are the set of steps that it took, because if something wrong happened, they have to explain, because in human world you can explain.”
Bhardwaj: Enterprise AI agents will operate at compile-time, not runtime
“So I do not believe that autonomous agent would be a runtime phenomena. However, there would be a build time or compile time phenomena.”
Bhardwaj: Major capital will flow into building reliability systems around LLMs
“And that is going to be a lot of investment that you will see across the board, which is how do we build the right systems around AI and LLMs that solves the problem.”
Bhardwaj: Indian bank conducts entire lending process conversationally over WhatsApp
“I was working with a bank in India, and now given that AI is, has become reasonably reliable, they are offering entire lending over WhatsApp.”
Bhardwaj defines unstructured data as anything non-queryable via SQL
“Anything that cannot be put into nice database tables where you can run SQL, anything that is not that is unstructured data.”
Instabase tripled its revenue between 2021 and 2022
“We tripled our revenue that year, twenty-twenty-one to twenty-twenty-two.”
Bhardwaj: Automated systems process bank lending applications in under five seconds
“So now you can do lending in like less than five seconds. Rather than earlier, that would have taken several, several weeks.”
Bhardwaj: AI will automate filtering unstructured documents down to key reviewable items
“Whenever unstructured data like documents come in, humans will still see some kind of dashboard with like whatever stuff is, and only the thing of interest they will go and double click on. And AI will do a lot of things to minimize their time to get to that t…”
Bhardwaj: Enterprise AI adoption hinges on data security and auditability
“Two key things that they care about is, how do you guarantee that my data is safe and secure? So that's number one. And second is, how do you give me auditability and predictability? That's the two more, like if you boil down to all their questions, they event…”
Bhardwaj: RPA cannot effectively process unstructured data due to variability
“You can't do robotic process for unstructured data because it's not it's not fixed. They change it. So anything will be very, very brittle.”
Bhardwaj: Software applications fall into lifestyle, management productivity, and operational productivity
“And I think there are, like, three different kinds of applications we use. One we call lifestyle applications, which we use over phones. One is management productivity applications, which we use over phones and tablets. And the other one is operational product…”
Bhardwaj: The operating system for operational productivity remains an open market
“But for operational productivity, the game is still open, and I think there is not a clear winner.”
Bhardwaj: Building operational apps needs better abstractions than raw cloud services
“There should be a better way to plug it, to build these applications and to distribute these applications than, like, the building blocks provided by these services.”
Bhardwaj: Building loan processing apps typically takes over a year
“People spend, like, More than a year of engineering cycle to build these kind of applications.”
Bhardwaj: Great platform businesses succeed by expanding total market supply
“If you look at any good platform, Like Uber or Airbnb, it's not that they made life convenient, but they also increased the supply of things. Like with Airbnb, the supply of hotels or supply of basically places you can find significantly increases, or with Ube…”
Instabase built its core from scratch to compile into a single binary
“The reason why we had to build all of those ourselves is because, ah, we had to run on-prem, or we had to run everywhere. So we could not use any other cloud stuff, but that also allowed us to kind of like rethink everything from scratch, which means that now …”
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Anant's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 a16zLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Instabase | 1 | 13 | — | full record on the a16z Podcast → |
 MADLEDGER | Founder & CEO, Instabase | 1 | 7 | — | full record on the MAD Podcast → |