Halifax-based Tukan Das is well known as a co-founder of marketing data vendor LeadSift. Now, he is behind Gia, which he calls the growth partner for professional services firms and agencies, and from which he hopes for a much bigger return.

“Since selling LeadSift in December 2021, I’ve had a chip on my shoulder that we did not dream big enough,” Das wrote on LinkedIn. “Don’t get me wrong -- we built a kick-ass product that served several hundred customers, with a successful exit. But end of the day it was a GREAT feature inside of a platform. And that’s exactly what ended up happening with LeadSift being bundled inside the IDG/Foundry data platform (the company that acquired us).

“Even before I knew what I wanted to build next, I had a clear goal of the scale and impact we aimed to have.”

Since April, 2023, Das has been dreaming big with Gia, an AI-driven solution aimed primarily at knowledge workers setting up on their own.  Das’s initial customer discovery revealed that sole proprietors and small consulting firms lack the time and knowledge to grow their pipelines.

His solution offers clients AI agents that help with revenue pipelines, streamlining account management and building out networks. In an interview with Entrevestor, Das said there are multiple platforms that exist to assist people building businesses in different sectors.

“But anyone starting a knowledge-based consulting business has no place to go,” he said. “We want Gia to be that place.”

He believes his timing is ideal as AI tools are encouraging many to make the leap into self-employment.

“The AI era is going to usher tremendous change to knowledge workers,” he wrote on LinkedIn. “Resulting in a rapid rise in the number of folks quitting their (9-5) to start their own knowledge-based service business. (P.S. check the number of Fractional execs on LinkedIn or new AI Agencies) These businesses will all have an AI-first mentality -- allowing them to stay lean while replicating the benefits of scale of larger agencies/firms.

“Before we dismiss the market for selling to boutique agencies and consulting businesses -- realize these are all high cashflow and profitable businesses, that are operationally chaotic and struggle with maintaining their margins. And herein lies the opportunity -- offer something that streamlines their operation and help them grow their book of business without increasing human overhead, most will be receptive.”

Last week, Das began a beta launch with early customers. He said the beta has already signed paid clients.

Work on Gia is progressing fast, thanks to AI tools.

“The rate of coding, how fast it is iterated, has blown me away,” he said. “And the AI ecosystems … It used to take one engineer two weeks to build integration with third party systems ... AI tools do it out of the box in less than a day.”

He said his AI agent takes notes of his interactions and summarizes them, then adds any necessary actions to his to-do list. It also creates LinkedIn posts for him based on discussions and writes marketing content.  He said that, in the past, small consulting firms have not been able to compete with the big players but his platform changes that.

Das said that that, to date, he has self-funded the business but will be raising money later this year. He said Gia now has a team of six -- three co-founders: Das, Sanjeevi Ramachandran, and Bailey Darling, and a full-stack developer and two AI engineers.

He stressed that second-time around, he is unashamedly ambitious. “As a second-time founder, I am aiming really big. I am swinging for the fences.”