Former C2FO manager creates AI data analyst to usher in a new way of making business decisions

Tyler Amundsen is set on building a future where every professional uses artificial intelligence to make better decisions, faster, he said.

“With humans, AI and computers working together, we can achieve truly mind-blowing things, and we’re just at the beginning of it. … We’re at a point in the world where AI can tell whether or not a tumor is cancerous or it can tell if a person crossing the street is actually a person. So I thought, ‘Why can’t AI translate questions to code?’ It turns out, it can,” said Amundsen, the founder and CEO of LB.AI Inc.

LB.AI Inc.’s flagship product is Lightbulb.ai — an AI data analyst that helps professionals get instant answers about their business data so that they can make informed decisions at a quicker pace, Amundsen explained. Lightbulb.ai is currently in its beta phase.

“Fundamentally, we think that AI is going to up end like the whole tech stack,” he noted. “From content recommendation to decision making in business, there’s a massive change coming. We want to be building a future where everybody has open access to these really powerful technologies in a way that’s super simple and super easy to use for the average professional in their day-to-day jobs.” 

Click here to check out Lightbulb.ai.

Lightbulb.ai was created from Amundsen’s personal frustrations as an operations manager at C2FO, he recalled. While working on C2FO’s Cashflow Plus product, Amundsen was responsible for reporting customer feedback and product performance to the company’s executives. He found that the process for getting answers on business data was lengthy and tedious, especially for someone who did not know how to code.

“In that time, I could be formulating better questions and making decisions faster,” Amundsen said. “… [With Lightbulb.ai] you have everything that data analysts can do in terms of answering questions about data, but it’s in the form of a chatbot. You’re asking questions the way you normally would with a human, and you’re getting the answers in seconds instead of hours.”

AI-generated image of Tyler Amundsen, LB.AI

Amundsen officially left C2FO at the end of January to pursue his startup full time, he said, crediting C2FO executives for giving him the knowledge and groundwork to start a business of his own. 

“Sandy [Kemper, the founder of C2FO] is amazing at making his way of thinking about things and his values widely available,” Amundsen said, noting that Kemper would host a company-wide meeting every Monday. “He really emphasized his best case scenario, if someone’s going to leave the company, is for them to go out and start their own.”

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From Kemper, Amundsen learned to be “insatiably curious,” he shared.

“[I am] always trying to learn and understand what’s happening in the world, what’s happening in terms of the innovations, how is that going to impact society?” Amundsen said. “That constant desire to learn to dig deeper and understand what’s going on at a deeper level is something that I think is essential for any entrepreneur and something that Sandy taught me firsthand.”

With curiosity comes empathy, Amundsen continued, explaining that it is crucial to understand customers’ pain points and never assume.

His final take away from his time at C2FO was that one must be tenacious.

“You have to learn how to see the bigger picture and push through those really grueling points that can be scary,” he said. “But if you have the right people around you, I think you can really do a lot.”

The LB.AI Inc. team is made up of six individuals across the globe — with a machine learning expert in Romania, a developer in Brazil and a few professionals and interns in Kansas City, Amundsen noted. Amundsen moved to Austin, Texas, in February, but his hope is to connect Austin and Kansas City.

“We are going to have strong ties to KC, as our investors and beta customers are in KC,” he said. “The goal is to build a pipeline between the two cities and capitalize on the best of what each city has to offer.”

Amundsen and his team are currently raising a pre-seed round of $500K to build out a core team and keep iterating on the product based on customer feedback, he said. 

“We want to be efficient and not raise too much at a huge valuation and then have all the negative things that come with that happen,” Amundsen said. “So we’re trying to raise in tranches and really focus on the fundamentals — just being frugal and efficient with capital.”

Some individuals view AI as a threat, Amundsen acknowledged, but he wants to help usher in a future that shows how AI can be utilized for the benefit of humanity.

“I’m passionate about finding new ways and better ways to solve big problems,” Amundsen said. “I’m passionate about building teams and products that make these [perceived] closed-off, gated, scary technologies more open and available to everyone — and doing so in something that’s simple and easy to use, so that ultimately everybody can do more with less. I think that’s the direction the world is heading.”