E153: Teemu Kinos - Building for the AI-Native Future

Skene actually means like a subculture in Finnish, as well as apparently it means a stage on Italian. So Michele is Italian and lives in Italy. And apparently skene is like a Latin word for a stage, which like is kind of a good metaphor for a company.

How did you come up with

that? Well, for a metaphor, we're building AI agents. So agents have now a stage to go on and present themselves and be part of like actual business operations these days.

Amazing. Timo, what can I say? Thank you for joining this Founders' Corner. Thank you. And it's great to have you here. So we're here to check in. How have you been, guys? What have you been up to? And we've just had a quick catch up and you said it's been now literally a year since you were... Fundraising, correct? So how has it been so far and what would you say your biggest milestone and success of the year of work?

Yeah, we began full time like after like we had a little bit like a non-traditional way of kind of a building because we've done this before. So we raised a little bit of money before. We actually founded the company. Of course, we validated our hypothesis quite severely because we knew quite a lot of people from the ecosystem. So we were able to run these interviews with them and that enabled us to raise the pre-seed round. We began full time in September. We launched our first MVP in the end of It was like a turn of October, beginning of November, which was horribly wrong. I've kind of put it very bluntly that we were trying to fix a 2026 problem with a 2016 delivery model, which meant that it was very like a traditional, you go to Scanner.ai and you log in and you build it and Blah, blah, blah. Like a very like a traditional kind of a customer journey. But like the whole hypothesis and the whole innovation has been from the work from Michele and Teppo that how can we actually build like full end to end automated agents. based on just understanding the code. So reading like a GitHub repository and the code that exists there. Right. And of course we had quite a few signups. I was the technical support. Well, I still am. But I was contacting these people, like, have you had, like, any challenges? And it was very, like, it became very evident that people wanted to have, like, maximum amount of ways to configure how these customer success, like chats and widgets and tooling in general. looks like, but then we were like, okay, now we are starting to build like a lovable to customer success and growth functionalities to the web, which didn't make like literally any, any sense. Then we already started like thinking of how can we be part of these, uh, like development environments like cursor and cloud codes. rather than building like a separate application, because we understood that everything else is friction. So if a developer needs to leave from their development environment to an application, which is on Scanner.ai, that's friction, which we did not want to have. And a good point was when I was talking with Mari Sampson, Luukkanen, she actually came to our office for a day and in the first 15 minutes, she's like, oh, but this is PLG. This is product-led fraud tooling. It's not just customer