Faraday

Andy Ross Missle, a designer-turned-software engineer with a background in politics and sustainability startups, founded Faraday in late 2012 to solve a critical problem for e-commerce brands: predicting what customers will do next. Rather than flooding marketers with data, Faraday focuses on actionable predictions—identifying high-value leads, predicting who might return products, and anticipating when customers are ready to purchase again. The vision was to democratize AI insights that would traditionally require hiring an expensive data scientist, positioning the platform to come in "under the cost of a single data scientist."

Faraday took a methodical approach to building enterprise-grade AI for consumer brands. The company assembled a team of PhDs and data scientists, and invested heavily in building what Andy calls the "Faraday Identity Graph"—a database connecting data about all 260 million US consumers to client data. This required significant investment in data licensing and sourcing from ad partners and opt-in marketing data providers. By 2018, the company had grown to a team of 25 people, all based in Vermont, and had raised capital from Vermont-based Fresh Facts Capital and InterCat as lead investors. The total institutional capital raised to date remained in the "single digit millions" range.

Faraday pursued a high-touch, enterprise sales model focused on long-term contracts and deep customer relationships. The company targets premium pricing—around $100,000 per year for annual contracts—positioning itself as an alternative to hiring internal data science teams. The 6-8 week onboarding process doesn't charge for implementation, but instead deploys PhDs and analysts directly to each account to understand the client's business and optimization goals. Andy emphasized that getting the initial problem statement right is critical: "people often think they want more customers, but what they really want is more customers that don't return products and spend at least $100."

The key to Faraday's retention has been maintaining weekly strategic calls with nearly all clients and staying aligned with rapidly changing business priorities. Rather than a transactional product, Faraday operates as a strategic partner. By 2018, the company had achieved impressive CAC payback metrics—well under 12 months per $100k contract, meaning customer acquisition costs were significantly less than $100k. This was accomplished primarily through a small sales team and significant investment in the data science team. The company focused on expansion revenue by introducing new prediction objectives as client priorities evolved—starting with lead generation, then expanding to customer lifetime value and retention as brands matured.

As of the interview (2018), Faraday was working with approximately 60 enterprise brands and pushing "six million bucks in ARR" with healthy growth. The team had grown to 25 people, primarily based in Vermont. While Andy couldn't disclose specific churn metrics, he indicated that negative net churn was "certainly our goal for us in 2019," suggesting expansion revenue was a key driver. The company remained bootstrap-friendly in mindset despite institutional backing, with Andy prioritizing important strategic decisions over urgent operational ones—a lesson he wished he'd learned at 20.