This week, we’re sharing a special installment in our Paths to PMF series: the inside story of how EvolutionIQ’s founding team quietly plugged away at an AI solution for an ultra-narrow market — that recently netted a hefty exit.
EvolutionIQ Just Got Acquired for $730M — Here's Their Playbook For Building an Enduring AI Business
Over the past few years, we’ve seen a flurry of headlines with AI companies raising monster rounds, reaching sky-high valuations and racking up revenue at a record clip. But it's still too soon to tell which players will prove to be a flash in the pan — and which will become enduring businesses.
That's why one headline late last year was particularly intriguing: “CCC Intelligent Solutions acquires EvolutionIQ for $730M.” It marks one of the first major vertical AI exits — and offers an instructive blueprint for today's founders trying to capture lasting value.
The founding idea was interesting but fairly niche: improve disability insurance claims processing with AI to help people return to work. But in the early days, the EvolutionIQ team faced down a bumpy road, with skeptical investors warning of a too-small TAM, a slow-moving industry wary of outsiders and seriously long and intricate sales cycle (12+ months).
While most startup tales are told years removed from the outcome, when success has already smoothed over the rough edges, we immediately set out to document EvolutionIQ’s unique path to product-market fit, so founders and builders across the ecosystem curious about the headlines could have all the requisite context — right away.
We’ve seen this team’s journey up close over the years, ever since First Round partner Bill Trenchard led EvolutionIQ’s seed round back in 2019. So to round out our notes, we sat down with co-founders Tomas Vykruta, Mike Saltzman and Jonathan Lewin to chronicle the exact moves they made early on.
In this exclusive interview (and serious deep dive), the co-founding trio reflects back on what they got right, from narrowing in on an overlooked industry to resisting automation to building out an old-school, white-glove sales motion. Here are just a few of their sharpest — and often against-the-grain — insights:
- Split the CEO seat — and double your bandwidth. It was an unconventional choice to adopt a “co-CEO” model a few years into building, with Lewin and Saltzman sharing the seat. But it paid off. “Most startup advice says that co-CEOs are a terrible idea. For us, it was a force multiplier. We could get so much more done,” says Lewin.
- Design for adoption, not just accuracy. When designing AI products, it’s easy to get swept up by the sophistication of the tech itself — and lose sight of the people you’re building for. “Adoption of AI is actually much harder for technical teams to solve than building the technology itself,” says Vykruta. “You should be spending something like 70% of your time figuring out how to get people to use it. We're all great engineers, we know how to build technology. But can you get somebody to use it? That part’s not as easy.”
- Win hearts and minds at every altitude of the org chart. If you’re trying to get a relationship-driven sales motion off the ground, don’t write off frontline workers and more junior-level employees. “One of the things that I think our business has done really well — and has been important to do well — is we have been good at building and maintaining relationships across the verticality of an organization," says Saltzman.
- Hire sellers who sound like natives, not tourists. To build cred in the specialized world of insurance claims, the EvolutionIQ team knew they needed to send out an elite fleet. “That meant no SDRs, no BDRs, no folks straight out of college mashing the phones,” says Saltzman. “Even though we were an early-stage startup with six people, we had to act and be perceived as though we were an established company — not through obfuscation, but by professionalism, clarity, level of service, commitment to customers, and deeply understanding not just the business problems, but how their organizations worked.”
Thanks, as always, for reading and sharing!
-The Review Editors
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