Indiviudals on the autistic spectrum have traditionally been excluded from the workforce, but this is beginning to change with forward-thinking companies like Ultranaut. 75% of Ultranaut’s workforce is comprised of individuals on the autistic spectrum. These individuals specialize in providing a full suite of software testing services including data quality and integrity. This neurodiverse workforce is very well suited for these functions and as a result, Ultranaut has outperformed competitors and increased bug detection by as high as 55% All the work is done in the United States across twelve states.
AlleyWatch spoke with founder Rajesh Anandan about the business and social mission of Ultranaut, which has now raised a total of $5.3M across three rounds.
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Ultranauts closed $3.5M in Series A financing. SustainVC and The Disability Opportunity Fund led the round, joined by a diverse group of impact investors including The Libra Foundation (investment facilitated by Candide Group), Social Venture Network, Wasabi Ventures, Moai Capital (run by Emergence Capital Founder Brian Jacobs), Cognizant Vice Chairman Frank D’Souza, Bain & Company Chief Talent Officer Russ Hagey, and advocate & philanthropist Lisa Yang.
Tell us about the product or service that Ultranauts offers.
Ultranauts provides a full suite of software and data quality engineering services to Fortune 500 and startup clients, including specialized capabilities in UI and API test automation, data and analytics hygiene and accuracy, and web and app accessibility. We have also built the world’s first fully remote workplace for neurodiverse talent, with colleagues working in 20 states across the U.S., 75% of whom are on the autism spectrum.
What inspired you to start Ultranauts?
There are 4 million Americans on the autism spectrum, many are readily employable, and yet, 85% of this talent pool are unemployed or underemployed because they’re wired differently. But being wired differently is not a disadvantage, and in fact, we believe that many of the traits of a world-class quality engineer – e.g. pattern recognition, logical reasoning, systems thinking – are more common among an autistic population relative to the general population.
We founded Ultranauts to build the world’s best quality engineering firm and prove that neurodiversity, including autism, is a competitive advantage in business. We plan to share our learnings, practices, and tools vis-a-vis building high performing neurodiverse teams, and in doing so, help shape a future where everyone, no matter how they’re wired, can have a fair shot at success.
How is Ultranauts different?
Ensuring data quality and integrity is extremely challenging for most enterprises. Understanding data behaving outside expected parameters or determining the expected result of analytics and machine learning require an intimate knowledge of the industry and business. Internal experts who have that domain knowledge have no bandwidth for quality assurance and external service providers can’t provide value without first gaining the domain knowledge – which most vendors aren’t able to do. Ultranuts ingest domain knowledge rapidly, ramp up quickly and embed seamlessly, allowing our clients to deploy quickly and continuously without compromising quality.
Ensuring software quality, especially for fast-moving digital teams, requires not only the right technical skills but also speed and flexibility. Internal teams struggle with keeping up with the ever-expanding QA workload, and most QA service provide leverage offshore teams who can’t effectively embed with agile teams or deliver consistently high-quality results. Ultranauts’ exceptional onshore team brings both specialized technical skills and a highly responsive, flexible engagement model.
What market does Ultranauts target and how big is it?
We compete in the rapidly growing market for data quality tools and services, estimated at $40B, and in promising niches like test automation in the mature software testing market.
Who do you consider to be your main competitors?
Ultranuats main competitors are Global IT firms with offshore QA teams – Ultranauts serves onshore customers who have a need for agile services and require real-time interactions with development/analytics/business teams – which offshore teams can’t adequately provide. Additionally, Ultranauts teams have a unique ability to rapidly ingest domain and product knowledge which allows us to engage efficiently and generate unique insights – which other vendors’ teams (be they offshore or onshore) can’t do.
What’s your business model?
Ultranauts provide enterprise and startup clients with quality engineering services.
What was the funding process like?
Raising funds was exciting, getting to know a big group of investors, sharing the results we’ve been able to achieve, and recruiting allies in achieving our mission. Closing the round was not exciting but necessary, wading through seemingly endless investment documents, going through the process of converting to a C corp, getting old and new investors aligned on a closing process, and corralling everyone to sign on time.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
As a mission-driven venture, identifying impact investors whose priorities mapped not only to our business model and growth potential but also our mission and impact thesis was challenging. That said, the end result is that we now have a group of investors who are fully aligned with our vision for both growing the business and multiplying out impact.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
Ultranauts has developed a uniquely scalable model for employing individuals on the autism spectrum – having built the world’s first remote workplace for neurodiverse talent – and achieved consistent business results – having grown at over 50% annually since the company’s founding, achieved profitability, and beginning to accelerate, with 70% YOY growth in Q4 2018 and 100% YOY growth in Q1 2019.
Ultranauts has developed a uniquely scalable model for employing individuals on the autism spectrum – having built the world’s first remote workplace for neurodiverse talent – and achieved consistent business results – having grown at over 50% annually since the company’s founding, achieved profitability, and beginning to accelerate, with 70% YOY growth in Q4 2018 and 100% YOY growth in Q1 2019.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
Train majority of the delivery team in one or more specialized quality engineering services. Staff up the sales team and double enterprise footprint in priority verticals. Develop and pilot new service to support ML/AI testing and validation.
What advice can you offer companies in New York that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Preemptively make the tough decisions before you get to a point where you have too little runway to course correct; Prioritize the one thing / few things you need to achieve using OKRs or a similar framework.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Become the leading quality engineering service provider in the healthcare, insurance and media industries, and one of the largest employers of autistic talent in the US.
What’s your favorite restaurant in the city?
Hanjan – casual Korean in Chelsea
