The global management consulting industry is worth billions of dollars, but to this day it’s hard to disrupt with technology. Traditional consultancies offer high quality services but are expensive and have rigid terms and conditions. And while there are plenty of portals that offer low-quality freelance consulting services, they are generally unsupervised and would never work for companies and the public sector.
Moreover, countries like India are known for offering back office and research work on a large scale. A YC comp Apollo group is located in this space (although their website clearly needs work).
Intellia is an ongoing startup that has raised $1.5 million to date from Fatima Gobi Ventures and angels, including Gokul Rajaram (board member of DoorDash), Mudassar Sheikha (founder of Careem), and the former global CFO of PepsiCo and two managing partners of large consultancies.
How it works is by attracting remote talent from emerging markets who can now (because of the adoption of remote work, post-pandemic) participate in much more valuable roles in finance, strategy and public policy.
Launching from Dubai in 2020, Intellia is looking for strategy and finance consultants in emerging markets where wages are cheap, show what AI-driven vetting is, to come up with a project delivery platform for finance, strategy and public policy.
It claims its on-demand remote analysts (from countries like Colombia, Pakistan and the United Arab Emirates) can be deployed within 24 hours and save companies 80% on recruiting and consulting budgets. It is now scheduled to launch next month in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Lagos, Nigeria.
Saad Raja, Intellia’s founder and CEO, told me via email, “From a business model perspective, we’re the closest we’ll get to what Turing is to software engineering and Superside to design – in addition to all the outside talent that is vetted and educated from emerging markets, we are addressing the gap in the market between traditional consultancies and freelance portals.”
Examples of what Intellia analysts are currently doing include advising multinationals on product launches, or even new market entry projects for Michelin starred restaurants in Europe.
“We also have a broader goal: Intellia’s mission is to build frontier markets as knowledge economies with a diverse workforce (half of our analysts are women) – aligned with ESG principles and social responsibility,” says Raja.
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