Insights From A Second-Time Founder: Jesse Lozano of Intellectible

Jesse Lozano is the founder of Intellectible, a company that works hands-on with consultants and other complex service co’s to automate their manual processes with AI.

We first met through a program here in Austin called Boost ATX, which helps local scale-up founders connect and learn from each other as they grow from 7- to 8-figures and beyond.

There, we had one of my favorite conversations in recent memory, about aging as a founder.

“The younger version of me would just eat through any mountain,” he said, staring into the middle distance as nearly two decades of business experience flashed before his eyes.

“He’d still lose to me today though.”

I think about that conversation a lot. Because I’m not always sure which version of me would win in a competition.

I liked the certainty with which he said it. It got me thinking about the ways in which I’ve definitely grown and become more effective than my younger self. And the conversation itself is a reminder of why it’s so important to learn from each other in this space – because sometimes you can borrow the certainty of someone else when you need it.

Enter Jesse…

1. Okay, tell us about your business! What's the backstory? And how did you get your first customer. 

We’re an “operational AI” platform for service businesses - think consultancies and complex service providers drowning in documents, handoffs, and compliance.

Instead of adding yet another tool, we turn a team’s SOPs into a living digital twin: multi-agent workflows that read source material, make rule-based decisions, draft compliant docs, and keep everything auditable and under the team’s control.

Platform + partner: you get the software and a hands-on implementation crew that encodes your process the way you actually work.

Backstory: I’ve spent years building products that support real-world operations (education, defense, public sector). The constant pattern: knowledge work was manual, brittle, and margin-crushing. AI chatbots didn’t fix that; orchestration did. So we built Intellectible as a production-grade way to capture a company’s judgment calls, rules, and templates and run them end-to-end.

First customer: a grant consultancy called Inspiralia (still a great customer of ours btw 2 years later!) buried in SBIR/EIC paperwork. We sat with their team, mapped their intake-to-submission workflow for AFWERX and delivered what was probably the first truly automated SBIR output in the world.

That early win gave us the playbook we still use: start with one high-leverage output, prove measurable time savings and quality, then scale across the rest of the operation.

2. What’s one unconventional decision you made early in your business that you believe set you apart from competitors, and how do you think it shaped your trajectory?

We made a counter-cultural choice for AI: platform + partner.

Instead of chasing pure-SaaS margins, we paired a flexible orchestration platform with a hands-on services layer that maps to each client’s existing SOPs—rules, approvals, data flows—so the AI fits the business, not the other way around.

That mattered because the real risk in enterprise AI isn’t the model; it’s failed integration and behavior change. (MIT’s 2025 “GenAI Divide” reports ~95% of enterprise gen-AI pilots show no measurable P&L impact—largely due to poor integration—exactly the gap we designed to close.)

What it changed for us: slower first mile; much higher retention rates; multi-year retention; and big, compounding expansions as adjacent workflows get encoded. That’s why our deployments work in the wild because we integrate into how teams already operate, instead of forcing them to adopt “a new AI thing” their team don’t actually want.

3. What’s the most surprising thing you’ve spent significant money on for your business or yourself as a founder, and how has it changed your understanding of value?

I raised $30m+ for my last business and made those ‘surprising money spends’ on that go around! This time around we are a lean operation and I will ‘take the pain’ for a while before we decide to spend money to ‘solve a problem’.

Here is what I will say though: being nice and calm with your team is free - treating everyone great and fostering a great work atmosphere by taking the time (time is money!) to make sure the team is happy is the biggest value thing you can do.

I truly believe happy people work harder and happy people are more fun to work with too!

4. What’s one belief about entrepreneurship you held when you started that you’ve completely abandoned, and what made you change your mind?

I have been building businesses for 17 years - in the beginning I really thought you had to be a specific way to win.

Now being around for a long time - I have seen so many different types of people win and lose. So be yourself and do what you think you should do - everyone can win and everyone can lose. You might as well feel at home in your own skin while you go on the journey.

5. If you were to recommend one under-the-radar Austin spot to another founder for brainstorming or unwinding, where would it be and why?

I work near the Capital Building and my favorite walk is to just take a walk inside the capital - look around and just be inside an old building for a bit.

6. If you could borrow one quality or skill from another Austin founder you admire, what would it be, and how would you apply it to your own business?

I’d borrow Josh Baer’s ecosystem-orchestration superpower. As a Capital Factory portfolio company I have really benefited over the years from that community and what the CF team have done - it takes an incredible personality to keep a community like that growing over the years. I would put that skill towards building out a partner community of Intellectible.

You can learn more about Intellectible at their website, or follow Jesse on LinkedIn