In our inaugural episode of the exclusive interview series at AllAboutAI.com, we had the pleasure of speaking with Abhinav Sinah, an innovator and builder in the AI industry. His work has garnered recognition on platforms like Product Hunt, where he actively engages with the community.
This series aims to spotlight the stories, breakthroughs, and challenges faced by AI industry stakeholders. Here in this interview, Abhinav, the mind behind RAFA, shared his journey as an entrepreneur and the future of AI in investment.
Without further ado, let’s know Abhinav’s overall journey and his thoughts on AI in the investment industry. You can watch the full-length interview with Abhinav Singh on the link given below:
Could You Share Your Background and What Inspired You to Become Part of this Industry, Especially in Investment?
I’ve been a technical person throughout my career. I started in the computer science domain and then joined Nvidia as a software engineer. I worked at Nvidia for almost eight years. It was an amazing experience, and I realized that something big was happening within the company and outside the world around 2015 when deep learning took off.
I was involved in various projects, particularly in the computer vision camera group, and this exposure influenced my decision to venture into AI investment tools.
How Did You Decide To Become Part Of the Investment? Why Choose This Path in the AI Industry?
I was always fascinated by the mathematical side of investing. I’ve been a retail investor for almost a decade. While at Nvidia, I did a lot of active investing on the side. One of the biggest pain points I realized was the lack of time for retail investors working nine-to-five jobs.
Investment requires deep dives into balance sheets and price patterns, which is cumbersome for anyone doing it on the side.
I started building automations and workflows around investing and managing my investments efficiently. This led to the creation of RAFA, designed for people who want to invest while managing a full-time job. I started building some automations and workflows around investing to continue my passion for it.
Could you Describe the Challenges You Faced When You Started this Venture?
When we started, there was a lot of optimism. Initially, it felt like we could conquer everything overnight, but building a production-level system was a different deal altogether. We were actually faced with a lot of challenges initially.
The vision was always to have assistive technology that helps investors maintain discipline and follow the rules in the game of investing. We started in 2019, and the journey involved dealing with basic language models and conventional NLP technologies, which was super hard.
“Google’s BERT wasn’t even out there around that time.”
We had to step back, build data pipelines, and structure the architecture around it, which eventually paid off. RAFA is built in-house. We are not using any of the external frameworks.
How Does RAFA Differentiate Itself in the Competitive Investment Tool Market?
RAFA is unique because it acts as a co-pilot rather than just offering predefined portfolios. It helps users invest based on their individual preferences, whether they want to do index investing or invest in specific companies they believe in.
While working with RAFA, you just talk to a strategy pro agent; you could ask that agent like, hey, I really like these two stocks. And can you build a portfolio based on these two stocks at all? And it actually does the work.
And it’s not just textual output that you would see in most of the other tools out there. We actually worked really hard to have a generative sort of UX. So it kind of does all the charts. The best possible visual representations are added to it.
RAFA integrates fundamental, technical, and macro insights to provide a comprehensive solution. It uses agentic frameworks to handle user queries efficiently, making it simple for users to interact with the system without needing to direct questions to specific agents.
What Kind of User Experience and Feedback Have You Received Since Launching RAFA?
We had a very modest initial goal. The response has been overwhelmingly positive. “Our goal was to get 10,000 users as quickly as possible and then start the iterative loop. We crossed that mark very quickly within a month.”
User feedback has been instrumental in shaping RAFA’s features and functionality. We’ve already added a bunch of new features for the app since it was first launched.
One constructive feedback we received was from international users who wanted portfolio integration, which we initially didn’t support. We’re working hard to expand globally and continuously improve based on user input.
Can You Share Any Success Stories or Significant Feedback From Users?
There is a user from the European Union who said they save almost six hours a week using RAFA. This feedback was a testament to all the hard work we’ve put into the product. Such positive feedback motivates us to keep improving and expanding our features.
What Are RAFA’s Future Plans? Any Upcoming Features or Expansions?
We recently released a multi-turn conversational flow, allowing users to have more dynamic interactions with the agents.
“Finance is different than any conversation you have with chat gpt.”
Our goal is to fully integrate into the cryptocurrency market, supporting both centralized and decentralized exchanges. This will enable crypto users to connect their portfolios just like our US users can.
Where Do You See RAFA in the Next Five Years?
My vision is that Rafa becomes a tool that’s very hard to avoid when you’re investing. It will become a mistake not to use RAFA. I imagine every serious investor having this app on their phone, making it a top-of-mind tool for investment.
As a Builder, What Are The Most Valuable Lessons You’ve Learned So Far?
One of the key lessons is the importance of distribution. There is a huge weight that has to go to distribution.
You can build the best product, but if no one knows about it, it’s useless. We initially focused heavily on perfecting the product but realized the need for a strong distribution strategy to get the word out.
What Are Your Hobbies or Interests?
Other than this, I enjoy playing tennis and obviously spending time with my kids. It’s one of the best use of the time that I have.
What Advice Would You Give to Young Entrepreneurs Trying to Tap into the AI Industry, Especially in Investment?
I would say right now the world has changed a lot. Like if you were a couple of years back, if you were starting a company, you would start the company and then you would have all the time in the world to actually go and be slow and then get the feedback in. Now, because technology is building up, it’s such a fast pace. Speed of execution is everything.
The faster you can execute and get user feedback, the better. It’s all about surviving the initial hardships and iteratively improving based on user input.
Any Final Thoughts or Messages For Our Readers at AllAboutAI?
AI is an incredible field right now, with lots of hype but also immense potential. Focus on the right problems, and there’s incredible upside in the field. I’m glad to see AI taking off and transforming conventional workflows into AI-based ones.
A lot of the old workflows, conventional workflows, will kind of change to these AI-based workflows. It’s all about like the agents and artificial intelligence really doing the job where it’s It was actually built for automation.
Thank you for the enlightening and inspiring interview. We look forward to seeing RAFA’s continued success and innovation. If you wish to know more about RAFA, please visit https://rafa.ai/.
We at AllAboutAI.com are excited to bring you more inspiring stories from industry leaders like Abhinav. Stay tuned for more insights and interviews as we explore the fascinating world of AI. You can also visit our social media channels for more updates on AI technology.
