Iranian-American entrepreneur Falon Fatemi has raised $16.3M from investors such as Mark Cuban, Avalon Ventures, and Canaan Partners for her startup Node. Her startup, which she founded in 2015, aims to change information discovery by using artificial intelligence technology. Node finally emerged from its stealth status on Tuesday to announce that it had raised a large sum of venture capital.
Fatemi’s career began at Google where at just 19 years of age was the youngest of the company´s 3,000 employees. At Google, she developed the strategy for its entrance into much of Europe, the Middle East, and Africa and built strategic partnerships at YouTube, and later worked full time consulting with dozens of startups.
Fatemi is the daughter of two generations of serial entrepreneurs: her parents and her grandmother. In an article penned for Forbes she reminisced about her journey: “So how did I end up on this path? Like many things in life, my path largely stems from my upbringing. My parents escaped the Iranian Revolution and came to the US in the 1970s. They built a successful life in Silicon Valley by virtue of a strong education and lots of hard work. Both my parents are serial entrepreneurs: My father took the traditional Silicon Valley route while my mother ventured into real estate. My parents’ experiences helped me recognize that my ability to choose my path was a blessing not to be taken for granted.”
Artificial Intelligence is in its nascent stage, making it a hot market for investors looking to discover the next Google or Amazon. Cuban is one of those bullish investors who unequivocally believes in the future of AI. “I am telling you, the world’s first trillionaires are going to come from somebody who masters A.I. and all its derivatives and applies it in ways we never thought of,” Cuban said at the SXSW Conference in March.
“Search is really great when you know what you’re looking for, but we’re living in a world where there is more information created in a single day than in the past 90 years,” said Fatemi.
“I realized there’s actually a bigger search and discovery problem that I was solving at a much smaller scale within my network,” says Fatemi, 31, who is also the CEO of Node. “But what if we could actually apply technology to almost accelerate serendipity at scale?”
“We’re certainly dreaming big here,” Fatemi says when asked if she hoped to be the first trillionaire from her AI-based company. “And go big or go home is kind of how we are look at it.”
