Overview of COMPETITOR_1

COMPETITOR_1 are the most well established competitor in our space, having recently raised a $XXXm funding round. They are also the competitor we rip out more than any other platform, as well as the competitor we most often see in successful sales cycles. As the first mover in our space, they own some of the existing enterprise contracts, but we have been successful over the last year in encouraging buyers to rip those out upon their end and replace it with V7.

Why we win vs COMPETITOR_1

COMPETITOR_1 invests heavily in sales and marketing, but their product is weaker than ours despite their greater size. This is elucidated by headcount splits, where sales, marketing and operations makes up for 60% of COMPETITOR_1 headcount, but for V7 our Engineering, Deep Learning and Customer Success/Support teams are our largest (58.6%)

In competitive analyses, we generally come out far on top in terms of performance and stability, support, and key metrics (like time per project and time per image for annotation). COMPETITOR_1 focuses heavily on selling BPO services through it’s workforce, but this stands in opposition to how most teams want to interact with these services, where the platform is underlying and there is flexibility as to how they work with services providers.

Specifically, the following features also provide significant improvements over COMPETITOR_1:

• Workflows & Quality - the equivalent system on COMPETITOR_1 is underdeveloped and incredibly buggy; being able to orchestrate model in the loop and human QA workflows is the primary reason companies prefer V7 over COMPETITOR_1.
• Annotation Speed - for teams who are doing Region-of-Interest based annotation, especially segmentation, speed of annotation is improved roughly 10x using V7 vs COMPETITOR_1 (as per customer analysis)
• Reporting - it is very difficult indeed to get an overview of annotation processes or annotator quality in COMPETITOR_1. V7 provides a self-serve UI for this information and a flexible API to serve it in the way that suits them. COMPETITOR_1, again, because of their wish to push human services, don’t want to provide a good, transparent way to understand this
• Video Annotation & Ultra High Resolution image annotation - COMPETITOR_1 has very poor support for both of these.
• Scale - V7 is coded in Elixir, an Erlang language that allows for massive concurrent action. COMPETITOR_1 struggles at scale across a number of key areas, including import/export, number of annotations on a canvas (where they’re capped at roughly 100), and querying speed. Because of the very language our platform is coded in we maintain a natural advantage over them.
• Performance - The tool is designed for a compelling trial experience, but we anecdotally typically find customers coming to V7 after around 6 months of COMPETITOR_1 use as when they try to scale their projects, COMPETITOR_1 cannot handle the scale desired.

Why we lose vs COMPETITOR_1

The short answer is we don’t really, we’ve lost 2 deals in FY22 to COMPETITOR_1, 1 of which was with a US Government agency, the other was with an O&G startup who were offered a significant discount to remain a COMPETITOR_1 customer, to the extent that they lost 50% of ARR from that customer.

That being said, COMPETITOR_1 have strong pre-existing relationships within Enterprise accounts, and in particular do well with US Government agencies. Whilst we almost always win against them, we also never underestimate them as they are the most well-known player, and internal feeling is that due to a relative lack of brand awareness, they win many deals that we simply do not factor into. They also provide a fully scoped Text Annotation platform which V7 does not currently support.

Key Wins

On deals where COMPETITOR_1 has been recorded as a competitor, and we know the company have bought a tool in the end, we’ve won 88% in FY22.

Big wins have come in healthcare (CLIENT EXAMPLES), Manufacturing (CLIENT) and High Tech (CLIENT)

Other features and differentiators