Chris Meaux made a name for himself a decade ago when his Lafayette-based food-delivery company Waitr became a startup darling. Now, he’s got a new venture that aims to use artificial intelligence and the expertise of local business leaders to help more founders achieve success.
QiMana Inc. is a collaboration between Meaux and former Baton Rouge Business Report Publisher Rolfe McCollister. They’ve created an online platform called Solomon where successful business owners upload business advice and stories from their experience as entrepreneurs.
For a fee, QiMana subscribers can query the database of “luminaries” that then uses AI to provide personalized insights based on the collected expertise.
“What’s missing from the entrepreneurial ecosystem is an organized and systemized way for startup business owners to get the coaching they need to be successful,” Meaux said. He noted that businesses that go through local accelerators, such as Launch Pad Ignition, Nexus Louisiana, The Idea Village or LSU Innovation, have a 20% higher likelihood of success.
QiMana came out of a conversation Meaux and McCollister had in 2019, when they talked about how they were regularly getting requests for help from fledgling entrepreneurs, but they didn’t have enough time to give advice. Originally, the thought was to develop an app, but Meaux said it needed to be something different if he was going to ask people to pay for it.
Last summer, when Meaux was advising a mentee at Loyola University’s Wolf Pack LaunchU startup boot camp, he heard something from one of the other advisers that was a “light bulb moment.”
“He said the No. 1 rule is don’t share advice, share your experiences,” he said. “You give advice, people get defensive. But you share experiences, it shows how you tackled the same challenges.”
Specific advice
Solomon is different from large language model AI chatbots such as ChatGPT, because it taps into a specific knowledge base.
For example, Meaux said if you ask ChatGPT how to start a business, it will give you a step-by-step list of basic functions. But Solomon will discuss experiences, like how Meaux talked to 1,000 potential users and 100 restaurants to validate his idea for Waitr.
Meaux founded Waitr, the app-based food-delivery company, in 2013. The business was wildly successful, and in 2018, it was acquired by Texas billionaire Tilman Fertitta, who took Waitr public a few months later. In December 2018, it had more than 9,000 employees, including 400 in its Lafayette corporate offices.
But the business struggled following the acquisition of Bite Squad, a Minnesota-based delivery service, and Meaux left Waitr in 2019.
The company changed its name to ASAP and tried to move into general delivery service, bringing customers everything from auto parts to sporting goods. But it never took. ASAP went out of business in March.
Right now, QiMana is signing up customers to be part of the beta test of the Solomon platform and lining up experts to fill out the knowledge base. The plan is to release select access to beta customers at the end of February and launch the service sometime in the first quarter. When the service launches, Meaux said he hopes to have 25 to 50 “luminaries” as part of the program.
Entrepreneurs will pay $30 a month to have access. They can also book private counseling sessions with mentors for an additional fee. The service will pay the experts when their information is accessed, like how Spotify pays royalty fees to musicians when a subscriber listens to one of their songs, Meaux said.
“So this will incentivize not only education for the Solomon brain, but it will encourage luminaries to come back and provide additional information,” he said.
Meaux and McCollister have put in their own money to launch QiMana. The process hasn’t been cheap, but Meaux said he hopes once the service launches, it will attract investors.
“We know how to scale this to do what we want,” he said.
AI across Louisiana
Meaux isn’t the only Louisiana tech veteran who is experimenting with AI.
In New Orleans, many familiar faces are applying AI technology to their areas of expertise in the hopes of bringing successful startups to market.
Patrick Comer, who sold his research tech company Lucid in 2021 for $1.1 billion, is using AI to fortify Gripnr, his 4-year-old Dungeons & Dragons platform. Brent McCrossen, managing director of Revelry StartUp Studio, is developing AI tools to speed up the process of launching a new venture. The Nieux Co., led by Idea Village founder Tim Williamson, is building AI-powered tools to help build human connections.
“Everybody is using AI to solve problems they had in the past and trying to build a business out of it,” Williamson said. “Coupled with knowledge of an industry, AI can be a powerful tool.”
Meaux has a lofty goal for QiMana: He wants the service to improve the number of startups that stay in business.
“Even if we get 1 or 2% more of businesses to succeed, that would have an economic impact on our communities,” he said.
Staff writer Rich Collins contributed to this report.