Rich Waldron

Rich Waldron is co-founder and chief executive of Tray.ai, a low-code integration and automation platform that large companies use to connect their software and build AI-driven workflows. He grew up in Southampton, on England’s south coast, and kept the company going through years of agency work before it raised venture money.

A south coast start

His hometown’s “most famous claim to fame is where the Titanic set off from,” he told Sramana Mitra. He studied at university in Bournemouth, finished in 2006, and spent three years as a product manager at a company near home, ending up in charge of its sales team.

He met Alastair Russell, later Tray’s chief technology officer, while Russell was researching the semantic web at the University of Southampton. “Our friendship started by bonding over a multi-touch OS table-top computer Ali had built as a prototype for the UK’s Ministry of Defense!” he told Mosaic Ventures.

Three and a half years without pay

“The area that we’re from in the UK just doesn’t have a technology scene,” he said. He and his co-founders ran a web agency to fund their own products and started the company in 2012. Their first product added context and rules to email inboxes before they moved to connecting business software.

“We found a way to survive 3.5 years without salary or savings,” he said. That meant building a 20-person agency, launching a magazine with a 50,000-copy monthly print run, selling shoes on eBay to pay for rent and food, and moving to the United States with three days’ notice.

Engineering first

He chose to build a deep technical product before chasing early traction. “I think at heart we’re purists, who believe the foundation of a great company is to invest heavily in technology,” he said. He writes about AI agents and enterprise automation on Tray.ai’s blog and is a member of the Forbes Technology Council.