Startup Stories - Mixergy

My friend created an AI engineering firm and every time I see him, he tells me how much his business is growing. So I asked him to tell me all about it in this interview.
This is the story of how Tarun Thummala created PressW, the Austin-based AI dev shop.

Tarun Thummala is the founder and CEO of PressW, an AI engineering firm that builds custom automation systems for real businesses in regulated, document-heavy industries. Instead of selling generic “AI transformation,” Tarun focuses on delivering specific workflow outcomes—often automating 90–95% of manual processes. Today, PressW generates over $2M in annual revenue by combining deep technical execution with a service-first approach to AI.

Sponsored by
Zapier

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Yevgeniy Matsay was a real estate broker who hated making cold calls. So he built an AI automation to do it for him.
It worked so well that he created an agency that created cold calling automations for other brokers.
Today he’s turning his automation service into Rozera, a cold calling SaaS for real estate brokers.

Yevgeniy Matsay and Aidan Richards are the co-founders of Rezora, an AI-powered outbound calling platform built for real estate brokers. Yevgeniy is a former real estate agent with a background in computer science and cybersecurity, while Aiden leads sales, marketing, and operations. Together, they’re building AI voice agents designed specifically for real sales conversations—not generic chatbots—starting with real estate and expanding to other industries.

Sponsored by
Zapier

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Over a decade ago, Joe Apfelbaum was on the podcast, telling me how focusing on SEO helped him grow his agency. That was hard for the idea-a-minute founder. Now he’s back. And AI is enabling him to create more businesses. He broke down the 5 types of companies anyone could make

Joe Apfelbaum is the founder of Ajax Union, a digital marketing agency, and EvyAI, an AI-powered sales and social media assistant used by thousands of businesses worldwide. A longtime Mixergy guest, Joe previously grew Ajax Union into an Inc. 500 company before rebuilding it with AI-first systems after COVID. Today, he focuses on creating scalable AI services, software, and education products that help entrepreneurs grow without growing headcount.

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On the surface, it looks like Ricardo Vice Santos is selling AI-created books for your kids. But he’s aiming for something much bigger: a world where TV, movies, and every other media will be customized to you, using AI. He’s starting with children’s books because that’s what people will buy and what AI can do well today. This is the story of how he’s building DreamStories and how you can build a similar company.

Ricardo is the founder of DreamStories, a company creating AI-powered, personalized children’s books tailored to individual families. Previously, he worked in consumer media and was an early team member at Spotify, where he developed a deep understanding of long-tail content and personalization. Drawing on that experience, Ricardo is now building toward a future where books, videos, and even movies are generated uniquely for each person.

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Zapier used to be the software that connected all your other software. But it’s AI has become so powerful that people are using it to build software companies.
Founder Wade Foster joined me to talk about and show how they’re building on it.

Wade Foster is the co-founder and CEO of Zapier, the automation platform used by over 350,000 customers to connect more than 8,000 apps. He started Zapier in 2011 with just $1.2M in seed funding and grew it into a profitable company generating hundreds of millions in revenue. Today, Wade is leading Zapier’s evolution into AI-powered automation and agent-based workflows that help businesses move faster with fewer people.

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