Ep. 313 How I Raised It with Max Spero of Pangram
episode
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
47 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 14 days ago
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How did Max and his co‑founder first meet and decide to start Pangram?
So me and my co-founder, we actually met eleven years ago at this point. Uh we were in the same freshman dorm at Stanford and we quickly became very close, played a bunch of poker, ping pong. Um we we've we've been good friends for a long, long time. Within Stanford, we were at the same AI research lab. Um and then we kind of went our separate ways. Uh My co founder Bradley was at Tesla. He's working on the big computer vision models for it. Um for autopilot early on. And I was at Google, I was doing applied machine learning. And then we both bounced around a bit. I was at Neuro doing other self driving car stuff. Bradley was at AbSide doing AI for drug discovery. And then Twenty twenty three, GPT four came out and we're like, Okay, this is like obviously chat GPT was huge, but we weren't sure if it's like just a fad or if it's really, really useful.
And then GPT four was a huge uh step function change. We're like, Okay, this is like going to be really impactful on society. And so how can we make sure this powerful technology makes a positive impact on society? So that's sort of where we started our ideation and how we came up with detectability as a problem space that's interesting to us.
Hi guys, welcome to the How I Raise the Podcast, the show where you get an inside look at how real entrepreneurs and VCs raise capital for their businesses. I'm your host, Nathan Beckard, and today's episode is with Max Spiro of Pangram, an AI detector tool. We talk about the challenges of AI in the classroom when it comes to plagiarism and tips for how to use AI the right way to generate good content. And then Max shares his journey raising four million dollars from Sennel Shaw of Haystack and Kevin O'Connor. Mm-hmm. If you're tuning into this podcast to learn how to raise capital for your business, be sure to check out foundersuite.com if you're a startup, or fundingstack.com if you're a VC or advisor.
Both platforms will give you access to an awesome collection of tools for raising capital, including a massive investor database, a new get intro tool to help you get warm intros to investors, a CRM to manage your raise, a virtual data room to run due diligence, plus pitch deck hosting, investor updates, email tools, and much more. Last but not least, if you enjoyed this conversation and think someone else would too, please share it with them and hit that subscribe button to get all our latest episodes. Thank you. Now sit back and enjoy this chat with Max.
Welcome to How I Raised It. The podcast that goes behind the scenes with entrepreneurs who've raised capital. We uncover the tips, tricks, and techniques they use to get investors to write a check. Strap in and turn it off.
Hi, welcome to another episode of How I Raised It, produced by foundersweet dot com and fundingstack dot com. Today I have Max Spiro of Pangram coming to us from Brooklyn. How's your day going? Hey, it's pretty good. How about you? Very good. Very good. Well, let's just jump right to it. What is Pangram?
Yeah, so Pangram we're building the most accurate AI detection models. So we will tell you if some piece of text was generated by Chat GPT or whether it was written by a real human. Um and so we sell this technology uh through our API to uh internet platforms. Uh but we also um provide it as a dashboard and sort of service to teachers at universities and like other educational institutions.
Gotcha. Okay. So let's let's talk about that a little bit. Um so as a pretty obvious example, a teacher might use this to feed it essays that their students have written and you're able to say this one's real, this one's AI generated, right? I mean Exactly.
Yeah, yeah. So we're able to to help kind of curb AI cheating and set guardrails on how AI is used in the classroom.
You know, it and I hi you hear this topic come up a lot, especially as we're heading back to school. I drop my kids off uh first day of middle school and first day of high school today. Very exciting day. You know, but you hear this come up all the time, right? Like, how do you prevent kids from from cheating or using AI to to do their work?
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
How did Max and his co‑founder first meet and decide to start Pangram?
0:00–4:12
2
What problem does Pangram solve and how does its AI detection technology work?
4:12–9:25
3
How can educators use AI detection tools to prevent cheating while still teaching AI literacy?
9:25–15:08
4
What are the biggest challenges when detecting AI‑generated reviews and fake content online?
15:08–21:08
5
How did Pangram raise its seed round and what role did Haystack Ventures and ScOp VC play?
21:08–30:57
6
What strategies helped Pangram secure follow‑on funding and attract the right investors?
30:57–38:20
7
How does Pangram plan to stay ahead of ever‑improving AI models like GPT‑5 and beyond?
38:20–46:39
8
What advice does Max have for founders starting a startup without a fully formed idea?
46:39–47:01
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
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