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The Secret to Scaling AI in Financial Services with Ankur Patel
Predictable Revenue3 Jun 2026
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That is one of the more subtle false signals of product-market fit. “A broad market can make the product feel more validated while making the company less focused, which means founders do not only have to decide whether a market has pain. They have to decide whether that market is the right place to concentrate the whole company right now.” Focus Makes the Whole Company Easier to Operate
That difference matters because early-stage companies don’t just need conversations, they need conversion, and they need a segment where the pain is urgent enough, the timing is right enough, and the buyer has enough internal momentum to move from exploration to paid use. “Customer Interviews Only Work When You Listen for Urgency” Multimodal did not start by guessing its wedge. The team interviewed buyers across financial institutions and looked for workflows that followed a specific pattern: the process had to be recurring, occur at high volume, involve complex document sets, and require a level of reasoning that had historically been difficult to automate.
But a founder has to ask a harder question: “Is this buyer curious, or are they ready to change how their business operates?” That difference matters because early-stage companies don’t just need conversations, they need conversion, and they need a segment where the pain is urgent enough, the timing is right enough, and the buyer has enough internal momentum to move from exploration to paid use.
The deeper lesson from Multimodal’s story is that founders should be careful not to treat product-market fit as the finish line. It is a milestone, but not the whole system. “The better question is whether the company can repeatedly reach the right customers, show them the right value, earn enough trust to move them forward, and expand once it is inside.” That is where Multimodal’s focus on credit unions, lending workflows, advisory boards, channel partners, and customer expansion becomes instructive. The company is not just looking for more interest; it is looking for compounding growth: more customers in the right segment, more use cases with existing customers, more partners who can surface the right opportunities, and more market trust before the sales conversation even begins.
The hardest part of early traction is that it rarely arrives neatly. Once Multimodal had proof that its product could solve complex document workflows, the temptation was obvious: why stop at lending? “Large companies were interested, buyers wanted to explore, and the market was moving quickly, so for an ambitious founder, it is easy to interpret that as permission to expand.” But Ankur was direct about what happened:
Product-market fit often sounds more binary than it really is, and founders often talk about it as a moment of arrival. You search, you validate, customers react, and eventually the market tells you that you have something worth building, but in practice, the signals are rarely that clean. “People can be interested without being ready to buy, they can agree to a proof of concept without having a clear path to production, they can praise the product without becoming the kind of customer who helps the company grow.” That distinction was at the center of Collin Stewart‘s conversation with Ankur Patel, founder and CEO of Multimodal, on the Predictable Revenue Podcast.
Banks and credit unions care deeply about deposits, lending volume, and the quality of lending decisions, so if AI could help shorten the time to quote, it could do more than reduce cost. It could help the institution win more business. “That is the kind of signal founders should pay attention to.” A workflow can be inefficient and still not be urgent, a buyer can acknowledge pain and still not have a budget, and a team can like a demo without having a reason to act now. The strongest early markets usually have more than pain; they have pressure.
That is the kind of signal founders should pay attention to. “A workflow can be inefficient and still not be urgent, a buyer can acknowledge pain and still not have a budget, and a team can like a demo without having a reason to act now.” The First Real Signal Is a Customer Willing to Keep Paying