Everest Likes the Palantir Model of Managed Services

The AI startup provides onsite forward deployed engineering assistance to users of its service desk automation software.

So say you’re an MSP who very much likes the sound of FDEs with a Silicon Valley pedigree helping you roll out AI updates, but don’t want to sell your business to Shield Technology Partners. To the best of my knowledge, you have one option right now, a startup named Everest that bears an interesting resemblance to Shield.

For one thing, it’s backed by venture capital, in its case venture investor Y Combinator. For another, it dispatches FDEs to its partners.

“We’ve adopted a Palantir model of high customization,” says co-founder Yolanda Cao (pictured). “We travel to our customer’s office, sit with their technicians to customize and fine-tune our platform, and make adjustments based on technicians’ feedback, because each MSP runs slightly differently and people have different habits.”

That typically includes about two weeks of initial onboarding, she continues, but can extend to additional engagements later. “It’s almost like we are embedded into their team as a growth partner,” Cao observes. “They don’t just get service desk automation. They get our expertise and advice on how they can add new ideas and new areas of automation to their business, or sell certain solutions to their customer base.”

That last bit is important, because it points to something that separates Everest from most of its competitors in the AI-for-MSP vendor community.

“We enable our customers to resell us to their customers,” Cao says. Meaning MSPs successfully using Everest’s voice AI functionality to handle support and sales calls, for example, can pocket extra MRR selling the same feature to clients. Which further means those MSPs can be for their clients what Everest wants to be for its partners.

“Our goal is almost to be a managed AI service provider for MSPs,” Cao says.

The inspiration for that goal came to her during an earlier stint working the help desk for some 3,000 users at Netflix. “There were just four of us and each of us got 50 to 100 tickets a day sometimes,” Cao explains. “It was very repetitive, a lot of tasks and questions. So we started building up some automation internally to help our lives become easier.” A conversation with an MSP friend eventually opened her eyes to the fact that a lot of people who’d benefit from those same tools didn’t have them.

“That kind of inspired me to quit my job and build for the channel,” Cao says.

The service she and co-founder Spencer McKee (a former software engineer at Microsoft) created doesn’t come cheap. “It’s in the range of a few thousand to maybe $20K per month,” says Cao of Everest’s pricing. “It really depends on the level of customization and their scale.”

Which, of course, reduces the number of MSPs big enough to buy what Everest sells. “But we generate a lot of value for each of them, and then the contract size becomes larger,” Cao says. “It adds up.”

Guess what?

ConnectWise is thinking hard about this AI stuff too. No better way to find out specifically what it’s thinking than to tune into the latest episode of the podcast I co-host, MSP Chat, which features an interview with CEO Manny Rivelo. Other great interviews with industry leaders are available here.