In a previous post, I touched on a few traditional vendor services platforms (see post here) that many venture-backed companies get access to through their investors. This week, I wanted to highlight a startup that is using AI to re-imagine the vendor marketplace platform product for founders, making it easier and quicker to find the service provider startups need.
Mosaia is an AI, Blockchain, and Frontier Tech Services platform that was co-founded by Cyril Delattre and Aaron Wong whose vision is to build an OS that underpins relationships between buyers and sellers. Their ultimate goal is to enable teams to do more, faster by using AI assistants to cut down the time to hire a vendor. Their roadmap also includes leveraging AI agents to deliver deterministic work.
Cyril and Aaron saw first-hand how finding the right vendor gets frustrating at the ecosystem level with their first client, Protocol Labs. Protocol Labs is a research and development lab with hundreds of startups, exploring new advances at the intersection of web3, cryptography, distributed systems and AI. To help Protocol Labs differentiate its offering and add more value to Founders, Mosaia built an AI enhanced marketplace platform that is leveraged by hundreds of Founders to solve their biggest challenges - cybersecurity audits, go-to-market, legal, and more. Since then, they’ve shipped multiple platforms like it, customizing the platform so it can fit the unique needs of each client.
I got the chance to speak with Cyril about Mosaia below.
Maria: Cyril, I would love to dive into what inspired you to build this AI-enhanced marketplace platform.
Cyril: Mosaia exists because we found that there was extreme friction in the finding and hiring of service providers at the early stage. That’s because clients don’t really know what they need, are not sure about who to trust, and struggle figuring out how much they should pay, as pricing isn’t available upfront. So it takes weeks instead of minutes to find the right service provider. And, it’s frustrating also on the other side too, as service providers lose hundreds of hours speaking with clients that end up not being the right fit for them.
During my previous role at Airbnb, I had the opportunity to scale the professional photography program worldwide, leveraging various vendors to accelerate growth. And it was very hard to find partners matching Airbnb's pace and quality standards. Aaron, Mosaia Co-founder, faced similar challenges when he worked briefly as a sales engineer, familiar with the long time horizon of enterprise sales cycles that can take as long as 1 year to close. We’re seeing a lot of friction and it’s fun to solve these big problems together.
We are using AI to streamline this and provide a better customer experience. And we’re convinced that AI is going to unlock new kinds of marketplaces that you couldn’t have dreamed of previously. 10 years ago Uber succeeded by leveraging GPS and mobile - these technologies enabled access to the taxi industry to millions of new drivers. Airbnb had to build its own payment system to succeed, as Stripe wasn’t mainstream then. Through AI it’s going to be much easier to match a client that needs a very niche expertise with the right service. We won’t have to rely on thousands of reviews to do so, we’ll be able to leverage much more signals, updated in real-time. We’re just getting started!
Maria: Could you explain the AI component of Mosaia? You just released a beta AI assistant a few weeks ago, what is its purpose and how can founders use it if they’re looking for a service provider?
Cyril: Super simple. One of the downsides of looking for a service provider, whether it's a design agency, devshop, lawyer — you name it — is the extensive hours lost on the hunt and spent in calls in the pursuit of finding the most optimal partner. What we’ve built can act as your assistant when you’re looking for a specific provider and cut down time spent for founders so they can focus on more important initiatives within their organizations. Right now it’s focusing on capturing all details needed to do the matching, and we’re quickly incorporating matching.
Maria: I love the efficiency founders can unlock by using Mosaia AI assistant. Here’s a video example of how you can leverage the bot:
Maria: And, how do folks get access to the beta?
Cyril: Access can be requested here - we only have a few channels available for now (Telegram and Slack), and will expand to a whole new UI soon.
Maria: How can Venture Funds or folks who are heads of any sort of ecosystems work with Mosaia?
Cyril: To get started, we’ll need to understand what their value proposition is, and how they want to differentiate. Including what they don’t want to do! We believe they shouldn’t try to help founders with everything, but instead select a few areas where they are already strong, or they see a market gap, and double down there. Maybe it’s Cybersecurity. Or Go-to-Market. Or going deep in what matters the most in their industry - for instance, if their fund focuses on AI companies, services like LLM audit, providers like Axflow that help AI startups improve quality, AI dev tooling, and so on. We help them collect data about their partners, understand what is most valuable for their portfolio, and the right product to surface this.
Maria: And, how can founders work with Mosaia?
Cyril: If you are looking to hire a service provider, submit a request through our AI assistant here. If you are a Service Provider and are looking for more distribution, you can onboard through this link, which will help us understand what is your sweet spot, and the type of clients you love.
Maria: So, what can we expect in the future? What’s next on the roadmap?
Cyril: We’re shipping AI matching capabilities next in 2 weeks. And through ongoing customer feedback we will continue to improve our AI Advisor and eventually unlock the capabilities of an AI Agent — where you will actually be able to delegate the task of finding a specific type of service provider to an AI. We’re super excited about this trajectory.
About Cyril
Cyril Delattre is the Co-founder and CEO of Mosaia. Prior to co-founding Mosaia, he was at Airbnb where he rebuilt the Airbnb on-demand services platform, scaling to millions of services matches. Cyril also has a background in consulting from Bain & Company. Cyril grew up in France and relocated with his family in California 4 years ago.
Mosaia was incubated out of Protocol Labs, a research and development lab with hundreds of startups, exploring new advances at the intersection of web3, cryptography, distributed systems and AI.