Category: AI Strategy

For years, advanced process-intelligence tools have been reserved for the world’s largest companies—organizations that can afford complex deployments, external consultants, and dedicated teams to manage lengthy implementation cycles. Meanwhile, many mid-market businesses face similar operational challenges but lack the resources to adopt the same technology.

Naol Mekuriya Bassaye saw this divide firsthand during his two years at Celonis, where he developed process-intelligence solutions for multinational enterprises across energy, aviation, automotive, pharmaceuticals, medical devices, and industrial manufacturing. His work gave him an inside look at how large companies use operational data to trace activity, locate inefficiencies, and improve cross-department workflows—and it also revealed how many businesses remained locked out of that system.

“Complexity does not begin at the Fortune 500 level, but access to the best tools often does,” said Bassaye. “A mid-sized manufacturer can face demanding operational problems without the budget, implementation support, or internal resources available to a global enterprise.”

Now, as co-founder and chief technology officer of Seeft, Bassaye is adapting enterprise-grade process intelligence for mid-sized businesses that make, move, and sell physical goods. His approach goes beyond simply lowering the price of a large-company platform; he believes mid-market businesses need a fundamentally different product philosophy.

“A smaller company does not need a diluted enterprise system,” he explained. “It needs software built around its own operating reality. The setup has to be faster, the value has to arrive sooner, and the product cannot assume there is a large transformation team waiting to manage it.”

Seeft is entering the market through the procure-to-pay workflow—a process that crosses several departments and offers a contained opportunity to prove the value of a broader operational system. Instead of requiring a drawn-out technology program, the goal is to help a company identify meaningful opportunities within one to two weeks.

Bassaye sees speed as a critical component of accessibility. A lower subscription price offers little benefit if a business must still spend months preparing data, coordinating consultants, and assigning employees to support implementation.

“Time is one of the costs people forget to measure,” he said. “A product can look affordable on paper and still be unrealistic once you account for the people and effort required to make it useful.”

His perspective has been shaped by experiences beyond Celonis. As former CTO of an aerospace workflow-optimization company, Bassaye learned firsthand how weak implementation can have serious consequences. In one case, a problem remained unresolved after nearly two months of remote discussions. He visited the site, spent three days observing work directly, and compressed the investigation into that shorter period.

“The issue became clearer once I could see the environment and watch the handoffs,” he recalled. “People often describe a process based on how it is supposed to function. The product has to account for how the work is actually completed.”

That lesson now shapes his approach to mid-market customers. Software built for operational teams must reflect workarounds, informal decisions, and practical constraints that rarely appear in a formal process map.

Bassaye also brings experience building products outside traditional enterprise engagements. He created a synthetic data generator used by more than 10,000 people, producing over 2 billion data points. The project pushed him to consider adoption, usability, and scale beyond technical architecture.

“Building something technically sound is only one part of the job,” he said. “A product has to make sense to the person using it. If the value requires constant explanation, the design is probably asking too much from the customer.”

His work has attracted attention from selective startup programs. Three Sigma, his previous company, was accepted into Antler’s UK Spring cohort (with an acceptance rate below 2%) and later included in a £1.7 million investment round covering 14 businesses chosen from over 5,000 applicants. Bassaye has since received backing for Seeft through Entrepreneur First.

“A customer does not care that a product was selected by a respected program,” he noted. “They care whether their team can adopt it without reorganizing the entire company.”

That standard has become increasingly relevant as artificial intelligence lowers the cost of building advanced software. Capabilities that once required extensive custom development can now be delivered more efficiently, but Bassaye cautions that easier development does not automatically produce a useful operational tool. Mid-market companies still need technology that respects their staffing limits, protects critical workflows, and reaches meaningful results without forcing an enterprise-scale implementation model.

“The opportunity is larger than making old software cheaper,” Bassaye said. “AI gives us the chance to redesign the category around companies that were never well served by it in the first place.”

Seeft’s initial focus is procurement, but Bassaye plans to extend the same approach into collections, inventory, and fulfillment—each area affecting working capital and requiring coordination across multiple functions. The larger ambition is to reduce the operational advantage that has traditionally come with size. A global corporation may always have more resources, but Bassaye believes sophisticated visibility should no longer depend entirely on budget or headcount.

Leaders in these companies—often a COO or CFO of a firm large enough to have real process complexity but small enough that they still carry most of it themselves—rarely lack judgment about their own business. What they lack is the staff to assemble the picture that judgment depends on: the week of analyst time that turns scattered ERP records into a ranked list of what is actually costing money. Software that does that assembly doesn’t replace the decision; it moves the operator from reconstructing what happened to deciding what to do about it, and it shortens the distance between noticing a problem and acting on it.

“Good operational judgment begins with having a clear view of the work,” Bassaye concluded. “Mid-market leaders should not have to operate with less clarity simply because enterprise technology was not built for them.”