#StartupsEverywhere: Mountain View, Calif.
#StartupsEverywhere: Sienam Ahuja, CEO & Co-Founder, Bryckel AI
This profile is part of #StartupsEverywhere, an ongoing series highlighting startup leaders in ecosystems across the country. This interview has been edited for length, content, and clarity.
Untangling the web of commercial contracts
After building a small chain of restaurants across the northeastern U.S., Sienam Ahuja created Bryckel AI, a contract analysis platform that saves commercial property owners time and money. We sat down with Sienam to discuss her company, her experience fundraising, her approach to working with AI, and more.
Tell us about your background. What led you to Bryckel?
I jumped into entrepreneurship pretty early on. A year after moving from India to the United States, I started a restaurant. It grew from a hole in the wall in New York City to six locations across the northeast. When I signed my first lease on a restaurant space, the volume of paperwork obscured major issues. The contract was vague and arbitrary, and we paid heavily for it over the years. It didn’t require our landlord to expose his statements to us; every time there was a renewal or some extra charge, he could make up a number, call that an operating cost, and we would have to pay it. Eventually, I successfully sold the business and then—in the early days of ChatGPT —had a eureka moment on how AI could be applied to document intensive tasks in the real estate space, helping others avoid the mistakes I made.
What is the work you all are doing at Bryckel?
Bryckel helps large commercial property owners & tenants draft and navigate the interactions of their various legal agreements. Let’s say there’s an owner of a shopping center that just got a restaurant to rent a space, before the owner can offer them a lease, they have to double-check that they didn’t sign away contradicting exclusive rights with McDonalds in the same center. Normally, they’d have to sift through countless contracts to ensure compliance and protect their interests. With our AI , they search, compare and draft agreements with compliant provisions in seconds. The result: every document aligns legally, commercially, and operationally, effortlessly.
How did you decide to approach AI development in this space?
There were three core considerations we factored into the development of our AI.
The first was reliability. We spent over a year fine-tuning our model because contract analysis is not something you can just throw at a basic AI model. We trained our model on the leases attached to publicly available filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission; we also trained it on our own professional experiences.
The second was transparency. Many AIs don’t show their reasoning. If our AI didn’t show its work, the lack of transparency would be a significant risk to our users. We never want our customers to blindly use our technology. Bryckel has strong guardrails to stay on topic and avoid misleading users.
The third was viewing AI as an enabler, not a replacement for human beings. We have very consciously built our entire software keeping in mind that a human can override anything that an AI produced. There is a documented trail that clearly tells users what is AI-generated, and what has been manually overridden.
What were the deciding factors for selling your restaurants?
Running a restaurant requires your entire focus. My restaurants were in five different states, and that meant frequent travel. Also around this time, I started a family. Optimizing family time and managing a small business is a struggle that many women entrepreneurs face; they end up being absolute either-or scenarios. So I made my choice, and I’m happy that I have time with my children, and can still be an entrepreneur. Moreover, that experience is the foundation of the rest of my entrepreneurial journey, and there’s a direct line to what we’re building with Bryckel AI. I made a lot of mistakes when it came to commercial leases for the restaurants starting out as a 20-something. We had a lawyer of course, but there was obviously no AI tool like this back then—so it’s exciting to build the tool to help others avoid the mistakes I made and get better lease terms.
What has your experience been as a woman pursuing Venture Capital (VC) funding?
There’s a saying about some founders being good for customers and other founders being good for fundraising. I fall into the former category. When I did a temperature check of relevant VC firms, I realized very quickly that I had to start Bryckel completely bootstrapped. Fundraising is challenging for me, specifically for two reasons:
The way I see it, you can either fit that typical VC mold— a 20-something white man or Stanford drop out —and spin a story to get funding, or you can build up momentum for an undeniable product that has people knocking down your door. The VC community doesn’t take risks; they follow old, reliable patterns in founders and products. In order to get that funding, I am making Bryckel AI undeniable.
What has your experience been pursuing grant funding?
I’ve been told not to worry about a lack of VC funding because there are so many grants available. But, each of the many Startup Grants on the Small Business Administration website has separate and complicated applications. Grant resources are so fragmented. These applications should be like the Common App for college applications. Identifying and applying for these grants is a full-time job in itself. Startup founders need a simplified, time-saving approach to grant applications.
How have you utilized different startup founder communities in building Bryckel AI?
Being a founder can be a very lonely job. Luckily, living in Silicon Valley, every other person is building their own startup, which has given me ample opportunity to build community. I quickly realized that the west coast doesn’t have a lot of legal tech startups, so I started my own Slack community of legal tech startup founders. We recently had a series of get-togethers to exchange ideas and support each other in any way we can.
What are your goals for Bryckel moving forward?
With the contracts we just signed, our projected revenue is in a good space. Bryckel is at the point where it’s ready to grow, and now, the thing keeping me up at night is how and where I want to build my team. It’s expensive to have a tech team in the U.S., and it’s challenging to manage a team halfway across the world in India. In the AI world today, we need to be fixing our problems, and listening to our customers instantaneously. So, I’m exploring hiring local freelancers and utilizing offshore teams in places like Colombia and El Salvador.
All of the information in this profile was accurate at the date and time of publication.
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