You won’t find tumbleweeds blowing down Main Street, but if you look hard enough you’ll start to see Kansas City taking the shape of a new Wild West; one where tech startups like Lelex Prime have staked their claim, Brendan Reilly said.
“Have you seen ‘Westworld?’” Reilly, the company’s CRO, asked as he sat at a hot desk on the fourth floor of Plexpod Crossroads. “[That’s essentially what we’re building … ] we’re decoding human thought.”
Void of androids — aside from a nearby cell phone — the basic principle of the HBO show embodies the mission of Lelex Prime, Reilly said in explanation of his analogy-wrapped elevator pitch.
“[As a founding team, we looked at] digital socialization. What could that — not just social listening — what could everything … every image, every blog post, every research article — anything that lives in the digital realm … what could that tell us about humans?” he asked.
Information revealed through digital sociology could be the way companies approach marketing, Reilly added.
Promising companies the “ultimate competitive edge,” Lelex Prime technology allows its clients to evaluate emotions, needs, cultures, and decision making processes of a specific customer group — through A.I., Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, and social research based systems.
“We realized that the true value of what we’re providing is by understanding humans as humans and then implementing a variable — ‘I want to sell more Diet Coke,’” he said, citing an example of the product. “Then we can decode the thought processes of humans to understand why they choose this over this.”
Click here to further explore the inner workings of Lelex Prime.
Hardly a tech tenderfoot, Reilly previously built EON Sports VR — a virtual reality backed, athletic training simulation software, he said.
After eight years of hustle, Reilly sold the startup to EON Reality last January, paving the way for him to explore a new frontier in a similar space, which resulted in the founding of Lelex Prime — alongside co-founders Dan Scott and Richard Neal — he said.
“[Scott] always calls it entrepreneurial scar tissue. The more you have, the more of the game you have figured out, and the more you realize there’s a formula to get [your venture off the ground,” Reilly said of the way his previous experience has helped him establish a presence for Lelex Prime.
A serial entrepreneur with over a decade’s worth of startup experience, Scott — Lelex Prime CEO — also happens to be Reilly’s cousin, he revealed — adding that family trust, paired with Scott’s tenacious track record, made the pair fast business partners.
“He did a bunch of different things … but he’s a digital marketer by trade. He’s always impressed me on the data side of what he’s done,” Scott said. “And we were always like, ‘Man, if you are going to ever start something, like we will do it together.’”
Through Scott, Reilly met Neal, who came to Lelex Prime as CSO and with years’ worth of experience consulting Fortune 500 companies, Reilly said.
Timing, technology, and team have combined to position Lelex Prime for startup success in a new age where digital strategy is becoming crucial to a company’s success, Reilly hypothesized.
“When you really break it down, where are [companies] sourcing insights from? Ours are coming from science, from digital sociology — just like an MRI machine scan comes from an MRI machine,” he said. “Whatever science that is, everyone else’s is coming from data, garbage in, garbage out. You don’t really quite know how accurate that is.”
Social science as a tool for marketing growth is where Lelex Prime hangs its hat, Reilly said. Doing so has enabled the company to take on a five Fortune 500 clients.
