The global management consulting industry is worth billions of dollars, but to this day it has been difficult to disrupt with technology. Traditional consulting firms provide high-quality services, but they are very expensive and have rigid terms. And while there are plenty of portals offering low-quality freelance consulting services, these are generally unmonitored and would never work for businesses and the public sector.
Also, countries like India are famous for offering administrative and investigative work at scale. A comp. Y.C. Apollo Group is in this space (although clearly their website needs work).
intelligence is a working startup that has raised $1.5 million so far from Fatima Gobi Ventures and angels including Gokul Rajaram (DoorDash board member), Mudassar Sheikha (Careem founder) and former PepsiCo Global CFO and two partners managers of large consulting firms.
The way it works is by engaging remote talent from emerging markets who are now able (due to the acceptance of remote work, post-pandemic) to engage in much higher value roles in finance, strategy and public policy.
Launching in Dubai in 2020, Intellia seeks finance and strategy consultants in low-wage emerging markets, builds on AI-powered background research, to create a project delivery platform for finance, strategy and public policy .
It claims that 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 hiring and consulting budgets. It will now launch in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia and Lagos, Nigeria next month.
Intellia founder and CEO Saad Raja told me over email: “From a business model perspective, we are closer to what Turing is for software engineering and Superside is for design, plus all the remote talent. vetted and trained from emerging markets. We are addressing the gap in the market between traditional consultancies and freelance portals”.
Examples of what Intellia analysts are doing right now include advising multinational companies with product launches, or even new market entry projects for Michelin-starred restaurants in Europe.
“We also have a broader purpose: 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.