According to Jon Nordmark, great startups are built by a big group of mission-driven people. “Startup leaders need to believe in others and their abilities, and then recognize others for their work and accomplishments,” said Nordmark. “Leaders also need to be visionary; this requires listening to others, being open-minded and being able to connect dots in ways others may not have connected them.”
As the co-founder and CEO of Iterate.ai, Nordmark, a two-time Titan 100, said connecting people and connecting ideas to create something larger is a key part of who he is as a leader.
Iterate.ai provides customers across industries with an AI innovation ecosystem for building production-ready applications. The company is at the forefront of empowering businesses with state-of-the-art AI tools and technologies. Its platform, Interplay, is cloud-agnostic and can run AI on the edge and in secure private environments.
In the last year, Iterate.ai became a force in generative AI. Under Nordmark’s leadership, the company built a world-class large language model that generates AI code, called AppCoder. For retailers, banks and insurers, the team built private LLMs that operate in secure environments, never leaking secrets and delivering the benefits of AI securely.
At the same time, Iterate.ai continues to grow as a software platform that has 500 prebuilt nodes, many of which include complex drag-and-drop AI models, and access to another 4,000 modes built by open-source community members. This is why companies like ULTA Beauty, Circle K, Jockey, and Couche-Tard rely on Iterate.ai, said Nordmark. “I’m proud that our platform differentiates by being just as useful for a retailer as it is for a manufacturer, or a hospital or a gas station,” said Nordmark.
From the start, Iterate.ai has walked a unique growth path by scaling on just $3.2 million in initial funding. “In a tech ecosystem where profitability is a down-the-line hope for many if not most startups, Iterate.ai achieved it early and has grown without the need for the usual VC influx,” he said.
When it comes to making a lasting impact to improve conditions within the industry and for future leaders, Nordmark has championed actionable and lasting initiatives from within Iterate.ai that promote diversity, equity and inclusion. “That work includes investing in and co-founding Inclusify.com, a first-of-its-kind knowledge tech company that takes a data-centric approach to DEI,” he said. “Within Iterate.ai, I’ve purposely built and scaled our internal structure and practices to make us a company of doers and doers, not managers and doers.”
