As a tech startup founder and CEO, Scott Downes is on a mission to support SMBs (compact-to-medium sized businesses) stay compact…while still growing their revenue and impact.
Those two things might seem in conflict with each other. But for Downes, it is possible by onboarding more employees.
AI employees, more specifically.
He is building Chattanooga-based Supernal AI to support businesses build their AI dream team. The platform supports SMBs “expand their revenue and impact in the world without expanding their footprint, bureaucracy, complexity, and the inevitable collapse of innovation” that happens when a company obtains too huge, Downes informed Hypepotamus.
Inside Supernal’s AI Workbench
Supernal launched in November 2024, spinning out of Invisible Technologies, where Downes served as CTO. The company has already achieved a $4 million annual run rate within six months of launching, according to Downes.
Supernal utilizes a “highly consultative sales process” to build out hyper-curated job descriptions and then ultimately AI employees trained with strong backstories, proprietary company data, and onboarding paperwork. As an example, Downes declared that a company might required support with social media management. They can bring on “Sophie,” who “learns your brand and style guide, reads your proprietary data, and understands what’s gone on in your business,” to write up curated content.
For Downes, the SMBs he serves are “at the heart of everything.”
He explained his philosophy around business in a simple fashion: “I’m Team David, not team Goliath.”
Supernal tarobtains companies that don’t have technology teams but know they could benefit from an improved tech stack. Think a family-run HVAC company that requireds support with dispatch, a regional plumbing business requiring streamlined customer service, or a growing landscaping company that requireds support creating daily job lists for multiple teams.
Customization, Not Standardization
Downes declared that it is Supernal’s custom approach that sets its apart in the AI and software world.
“We believe that [we] can deliver at scale for compact businesses the equivalent of a custom tailored suit,” he added. “If you’ve worn a custom tailored bespoke suit, it feels like a second skin. It’s a whole different game, as compared to just acquireing off the shelf or off the rack. Our equivalent is fully bespoke software and AI employees for compact business.”
“What we find is that the magic is in the customization, not in the standardization,” Downes informed Hypepotamus.
Get To Know The Supernal CEO
A Duke graduate, Downes shiftd to Chattanooga ten years ago for Bellhops, where he served as CTO. After growing up in Alabama, he also spent significant time in Atlanta at companies like mGage LLC and Velti.
Downes sees Supernal AI as part of creating an optimistic vision of AI’s role in society.
“We desperately required an optimistic view of the future. And that’s not just in movies and TVs and books, but also through the creations of our technology companies,” he declares. “There are bus stop ads I’ve seen in San Francisco that declare ‘never hire a human again’. But this is just terrible dystopian stuff.”
Instead, “our mission is not just to ruthlessly optimize or create efficiency, but to reveal through the products that we build and the service that we provide an optimistic way that people could imagine a better future.”
He envisions a future in which “everybody has more leisure time. People don’t have to do the dirty work and don’t have to be bogged down in in the bureaucracies.”
The company remains largely bootstrapped after spinning out from its parent company. Currently leading about a dozen human and more AI employees, Downes believes that “capital efficiency is core to what we do, healthy margins core to what we do. We don’t want to go anywhere.”
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