Zefi

In November, we had the pleasure of meeting Aurora Maggio, the CEO and co-founder of Zefi.ai. This start-up develops and manufactures a product that uses artificial intelligence to manage and improve the efficiency of digital product manufacturing processes.

The Zefi team

Zefi’s team currently consists of five co-founders from a variety of educational backgrounds. In addition to Aurora, the team comprises:

• Nicola, is the CTO. He holds a double degree in machine learning and software engineering and has international experience in France, the United Kingdom and Italy.
• Daniele is the CRO, and a mechanical engineer with a Master’s degree in Business Administration. He has experience working for companies of various sizes, from start-ups to large enterprises.
• Leonardo is the COO and has extensive experience, including founding his own company in Belgium and enjoying a significant career at a prominent French scale-up.
• Alexandros is the ‘Product Guy’ and CPO. With a background in software engineering and product management, he contributed to the success of Italy’s first unicorn.

What they all have in common is that they have worked in product development and are familiar with the associated problems and difficulties, particularly with regard to communication.

Zefi’s product is designed to work as a co-pilot for product teams in the digital sphere. It is essentially a B2B SaaS aimed at customers ranging from product managers to product owners, and it covers the entire production scale in the digital sphere. Currently, the focus is on the product, but the startup’s future goal is to expand into development. Zefi automates all operational activities via streamlining, thus freeing up time for product managers to devote to development and strategy. In today’s efficiency-driven world, this is increasingly important alongside other activities that complement traditional ones. Zefi aims to free product managers from low-value activities by automating them and providing tools to make informed decisions about quality and communication between different work areas.

Here is the results of our interview!

Hello, Aurora. What is the story behind Zefi?

Daniele and Nicola were work colleagues. I met Leonardo in 2018, and Alexandros knew all the group members from different walks of life. We then all moved to Turin to start working together. I was already familiar with the OGR and Exor reality, having worked at Nebuly, an open-source AI company in Turin, so the choice of city was guided by this. Early on, we decided to participate in Vento, the first non-profit venture builder to help young people create disruptive companies from scratch. We found a fertile environment in which to develop our first growth phase. After that, we set up the first company and tried to bring some pilot solutions to market as a pathfinder to test them. Later, we launched our first real product. Currently, we are in private beta with ten companies, giving them access to our service platform, and selling our product within this group. We are also closing a fundraising round to raise funds to expand our team and complete the product’s development. We expect to open sales to everyone in early 2024. Additionally, we launched Zefi on Product Hunt*, which has helped us build a community of new customers, particularly in the US.

*A U.S. online platform where new products can be uploaded and shared, and where potential customers can be found.

How does your product work?

Zefi offers a product that uses the same platform for all customers and can be customised according to their needs. It covers several areas:

1. Product discovery: collecting data, feedback, surveys and insights.
2. the prioritisation and road mapping area, which calculates, and processes data related to the specific roadmap, such as the demand or cost of the feature adopted.
3. Stakeholder alignment, which, once it has obtained all the necessary information to plan the required activity, automatically generates both the changelog** and communications to the various stakeholders.

Our product has been developed to offer a service in the first area; the others are under study, but we expect to be able to offer a service in those areas soon.

**It is a record of all the notable changes that have been made to a project.

What is the connection between Zefi and the city of Turin?

The presence of many companies in the digital field in the Turin and Milan area certainly favoured the realisation of our project in this city. However, the product is intended to cover a much wider market, primarily the international market. Moreover, Turin has had a significant influence on Zefi: all five of us have an educational and professional background connected to this city. For example, I started my career in Turin with the innovative architect Carlo Ratti, who introduced me to the world of digital platforms. Finally, the presence of a particularly fertile start-up ecosystem in the Turin area certainly influenced our decision to found Zefi here.

What role, if any, have recent developments and improvements in AI studies and research played?

Firstly, our product offers value beyond the scope of AI. For us, AI is merely a tool that supports the implementation of our project. We also believe that AI-related technologies will form the basis of every digital solution in the future. We use many technologies that were popular long before generative AI came along; for us, the generated language is just the tip of the iceberg of the entire structure we have put in place. In our opinion, relying solely on an AI solution such as ChatGPT makes a product unsustainable in the long term, creating hype only in the short term and preventing you from building a company on it.

What were the biggest challenges you encountered when setting up your business?

Pursuing a project like ours is certainly difficult. First of all, at the national level that of startups is not an area on which Italy is pursuing many initiatives or incentives, and it is also still little known, both at high levels and also in more everyday contexts. In addition, the Italian startup market is not widely publicised abroad. In the early days, we ourselves had difficulty finding potential foreign clients. Fundraising in Italy is also more challenging than in other countries: there is little time to choose, and it is even more difficult when you have to start from scratch.

So, what is the most beautiful aspect of your work?

One can certainly think freely and from different perspectives without the constraints one might find in an employment setting. You can also choose the kind of life and pace you want. Another very interesting and formative aspect is undoubtedly teamwork. If the team is right and has a shared vision, you can find the strength to overcome difficulties and move forward together in the most difficult times, because there is always someone there to lend a hand. Additionally, the backwardness of the Italian startup management system encourages networking, and collaboration or mutual help is always sought, even among very different companies.

Are there any benchmarks in your industry or among your competitors?

There are undoubtedly competitors, but given that our field is still small, there are not many of them. Competitors tend to use more traditional solutions, such as project management software, which is also used by product managers. However, these systems are limited to mere data collection without implementing processes to analyse the collected data, which is something that Zefi does instead. Then there are tools that have emerged recently which aim to apply generative AI to solve specific problems. In our opinion, these products are not very marketable and can easily be replaced by more advanced products.

Our point of reference is undoubtedly Glean, a U.S.-based company established in 2019. It offers a final product dedicated to project management and shares the same technology as us. It has also done an excellent job of developing and publicising the product.

Is there an episode from Zefi’s story that stands out to you in particular?

There are many… One that is particularly significant for us is the launch of our product on Product Hunt. Leonardo wanted to use this platform to promote Zefi, but the rest of us did not have much faith in the project. However, the ultimate success of our promotion on this platform showed us that trusting others is key to working as a team. It was also an opportunity for us to rediscover ourselves in different roles and take on new challenges.

We even decided to launch while we were at the beach with a poor internet connection, which definitely made things more difficult! We relied completely on Leo’s guidance throughout the process.

What advice would you give to people who would like to approach your business as clients or collaborators?

We really enjoy working in teams. Now, we are spending a lot of time looking for new employees to join our company. We believe that attitude is more important than specific technical skills in the work environment. Willingness to engage and a desire to continuously learn and improve are important values that we consider when making decisions. A certain appetite for risk is also needed — after all, running a start-up involves making daily choices that carry risk, and it’s this appetite for risk that makes us feel alive!