Ep. 318 How I Raised It with Sarah Lucena of Mappa AI
episode
How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
52 min
1 speaker
8 chapters
transcribed 11 days ago
Transcript
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Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
What is MAPPA AI and how does its voice‑analysis technology work?
Hi guys, welcome to the Howard Raiser Podcast, the show where we 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 Sarah Lucena of MAPA.ai. MAPA is a startup that uses behavioral voice analysis to gain insights into people. For example, this can help you hire people more efficiently. MAPA most recently raised a $3.4 million seed round led by Draper. Associates along with nine other VCs. Sarah shares her journey taking the business from Brazil, where it was founded, to Uruguay and then to San Francisco. And she shares a lot of insights for immigrant founders looking to build their startups in the USA. 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. Tools for raising capital, including a massive investor database, a new get intro tool that'll help you get warm introductions to those investors, a CRM to manage your raise, a virtual data room to run due diligence, plus pitch tech hosting, investor updates, email campaign tools, and much more. Last but not least, if you enjoy 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. 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 foundersuite.com for startups and fundingstack.com for VCs. Today I have Sarah Lucina of mappa.ai coming to us from a a tiny town in northern Brazil. How's your day going?
Hey Nadan, I'm great. Thanks for asking. Thank you for having me here. Super excited visiting family and friends back in Brazil, but glad to be able to jump on this call and do the podcast together.
Yeah, I'm excited. So you were just at TechCrunch and you're based in San Francisco. I w I wanna get to your journey from Brazil. You know, I'm picturing you're in a little little village in the in the jungle or something like that. How how do you got from there to to San Francisco and all that? But let's just start off first with what do you guys do?
Yeah, um, so essentially we are building MOPA. MOPA is the infrastructure for the future of connections. We do that by mapping behavior at scale through voice AI. What that means to not keep it super high level is that we extract biomarkers uh from both speech and prosody uh to map your behavior in under 30 seconds and create connections that actually work. Not only on paper, but most importantly in real life. Things like how many times you refer to yourself versus how many times you refer to other people ties directly back to your relationship with control, ownership, teamwork. The amount of verbs you choose to use allow us to understand if you are more action-driven or somebody that needs to be conviction before acting.
Your pitch, the volume of your speech, even the frequence of pauses, allow us to understand. and how you actually think, work and operate with others to then uh create connections based on real true compatibility. Our main product is a hiring product and we've been helping companies never make a bad hire ever again in their lives.
That's so fascinating. So where does this data set like the research or or foundation for this come from? In other words, if I pause more often or if I refer to myself a lot, you know, whatever. W like how do you sort of triangulate that in a in a reliable way to my future behavior as an employee.
Of course. So and this is a great question because MAPA is not another GPT rep. We actually built our technology from the ground up and today have the most well curated data set and human behavior to exist in the market.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is MAPPA AI and how does its voice‑analysis technology work?
0:00–6:43
2
How did Sarah’s early career and research background shape MAPPA’s product?
6:43–13:43
3
What specific voice biomarkers does MAPPA use to assess candidate behavior?
13:43–20:11
4
How does MAPPA’s hiring platform help companies avoid bad hires?
20:11–26:40
5
What was the step‑by‑step process behind MAPPA’s $3.4 M seed round?
26:40–34:16
6
How did the team generate and prioritize a 2,500‑investor target list?
34:16–40:25
7
What practical advice does Sarah give to immigrant founders raising capital in the US?
40:25–48:14
8
What impact did the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield have on MAPPA’s growth?
48:14–52:22
Speakers
1 identifiedMore from How I Raised It - The podcast where we interview startup founders who raised capital.
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