‘We aim to capitalise on US market opportunities and grow the company to $500 million by 2030’
Bagging $20 million in Series C funding, Jamil Khatri, Co-Founder & CEO, Uniqus Consultech talked to businessline about the company’s plans for global expansion, future goals and AI risks. Khatri also talked about how India should plan AI policies and how AI can impact jobs.
Where are you planning to invest the Series C funding?
The first is towards geographical expansion. Outside of our main markets, this year we are opening the entire Bahrain, Qatar, Kuwait and Oman cluster. There’s tremendous opportunity there as well as in ASEAN with Singapore as a base. We have over 250 clients in our four markets asking about valuations, diligences, forensic investigations. We are now ready to also expand our service offerings beyond the four areas of expertise. That is the purpose of the Series C that we are raising right now. Our client base in the new regions would be a combination of financial services, oil and gas and manufacturing companies across sectors.
You had talked about having a goal of hitting $150 million revenue by 2027 with the same 1200 professional skill set. Is that still on track?
Yes, we started the company only two years ago and we are already $50 million in revenue this year. We will double next year. So, calendar 2025 for us is a $50 million bill. 2026 will be anywhere between $80-100 million. That gets us to $150 million by 2027. That is when we start with acquisitions as well. We have identified a lot of acquisition opportunity in markets like the U.S. We will build on that and grow the company to $500 million by 2030.
You partnered with Cranium this year. Are you developing any AI tool together?
As companies deploy more AI, it raises the need for AI risk management. That is how our partnership with Cranium comes in. Cranium has developed a product that enables a company to see what kind of LLMs are being deployed within the company, whether intentionally or unintentionally. We serve as consulting and implementation partners. A lot of our people end up using ChatGPT without the company even realising. When you do that, you expose the organisation, as infrastructure, to a new type of risk, which we have historically not managed. There’s a tremendous interest from clients. We’re starting with the US and the Middle East, and then bringing solutions to India. The India AI deployment is at a very nascent stage. So, frankly, first you need people to deploy AI before you do AI risk management but we are seeing a lot of interest in Saudi Arabia, Bahrain, Qatar, in the UAE.
India has taken a light touch approach with AI governance. Is there anything that you would advise stricter guardrails on?
AI will throw up a lot of questions around copyright. There is a need to work on articulation of what exactly the law of our land permits in terms of using other sources of data, attribution. But it is better to think through these upfront rather than just responding to situation and resulting in litigation. Then, data privacy risk within renewed focus on AI. Globally, when people deploy LLM, we need to think about how LLMs interact with public sources through APIs and what vulnerability that creates.
How will AI impact jobs around Accounting and Reporting in financial services?
The first bit of work around data extraction and ingestion, compiling information will be done a lot more by AI-driven systems and machines. However, the analysis, where a lot of effort goes in benchmarking and analysing data, is where humans will continue to be relevant. In terms of report writing as well, AI will do a lot of work and humans will effectively end up being more reviewers as opposed to preparers. And finally, from a human perspective, they will have to think about bringing in creativity. Of course, there will be job losses. That is what all of us should be worried about: How are we going to make sure that our skills continue to be relevant for, in this example, doing analysing and creating rather than data collection and report writing.
Source: The Hindu BusinessLine
