Meet Derek Gregg, CEO & Co-Founder of Kaavio, "a relapsing, recovering entrepreneur" - one of the VentureBridge 2025 Cohort Companies

June 20th, 2025 - Steven Guo

Carnegie Mellon University’s VentureBridge program, an initiative of the Swartz Center for Entrepreneurship, supports CMU-alumni founded companies with capital, co-working space, access to mentorship and resources, and investor demo days across San Francisco, Pittsburgh, and New York City.

In this spotlight series, we take a behind the scenes look at an interview with Derek Gregg of Kaavio at the beginning of the VentureBridge program in May. The interview below is slightly edited for clarity.

Q: Let’s get right to it. Who are you?... Who is Derek Gregg?

Derek Gregg: A relapsing, recovering entrepreneur *chuckles*. Yeah, so, I had started my first company when I was an undergrad student. I was going to school to be a programmer - a software engineer - but actually got hooked up with some professors and another student, and we ended up starting a biotechnology business.

We built a large scale DNA manufacturing technology that we patented, and then we spun that out of the university. That was at Marshall University in West Virginia, and that was my first experience basically raising venture, getting customers, and selling product. And we ultimately ended up selling that company to one of our customers.

After that, I came to Carnegie Mellon to do my MBA and then I moved out to California, where I was – and this is the recovering entrepreneur part – where I went to work for a series of founders. I wanted to see how other people did it, and so I went to work for a company called Quartzy. And I’ve worked for a series of three startups out here, but the one that is most relevant to Kaavio is Quartzy.

Q: What was the inspiration for Kaavio?

Derek Gregg: This goes back to my time at Quartzy, where we basically built software for scientists to help them manage their labs, and we made money when people bought lab supplies through our platform. I had spent the first two years there onboarding supply onto the platform, and then I spent my last two years there on the demand side of our marketplace, if you will, getting more customers, leading sales, leading marketing.

With that, I personally saw this problem first hand of “what does it take to ingest content and sell millions of products that come from thousands of manufacturers?” And specifically the problem space of technical widgets for technical people.

Q: How did you meet your co-founder?

Derek Gregg: When I left Quartzy, I went to a company called Copia Automation, which is where I met Sam, my co-founder. Prior to Copia, Sam had been leading engineering at a company called Volition, which was a marketplace for hardware components. And before that, he had been leading engineering at a company called Octopart, which was a company dealing with electronic component search.

So between the two of us, we've been in three businesses that were basically like, how do you sell technical widgets to technical people just product content from 1000s of manufacturers? And how do you create selling experiences to actually help customers find what they need to buy? In addition to helping people find what to buy, you as a distributor also want to influence their behavior. Sometimes you might have a line of products that are functionally equivalent to another one, but you're going to make more margin when you can sell those products.

So anyway, we got to talking about this problem and ultimately, we both decided to leave Copia and start something ourselves. And we kept coming back to this problem space of technical widgets, technical people. How do you sell them? And then also adding the AI and LLM world? Can you completely reinvent the way that you would think about how you deal with this information?

And so that's what we're building at Kaavio, it’s essentially a flexible AI first data schema for how you think about technical products. And our customer today that we're starting with is the distributor of these products. The distributor is the one who is selling to the end users and is working with manufacturers to ingest content and data for millions of products and then present those products to customers. But ultimately, we see this as sort of the infrastructure layer that can enable the agentic future of how B2B commerce happens. Not just people looking for products, but now AI is looking for products, right? What's that look like? And how is that different from how you shop and look for products today… on the web, on the internet?

Q: What is Kaavio’s North Star?

Derek Gregg: The North Star of Kaavio is that we are building a system of record, a product graph, if you will, that can power intelligent purchasing decisions for both humans and machines. So we have this, you know what we're building essentially when, as we work with more and more distributors, and ultimately, we start working with manufacturers to help them understand not just what these products are and what makes this product, what it is in terms of its attributes, but how it fits into the context of a broader workflow.

And so you can imagine a world in which a scientist isn't looking for a reagent XYZ. What they're really doing is telling an AI, “hey, this is the experiment I want to do. Now go source the materials I need”, and now you have an AI agent that's going out and trying to procure all the components that this person needs to do their job, or an engineer or a technician or maintenance person. So it's more about understanding the job to be done and what products are required in order to complete that job. And now maybe I have an AI agent that's going out and doing that buying for me, and so we think we're powering that infrastructure that can allow that to be possible.

Q: What were you seeing or experienced that no one else seemed to notice?

Derek Gregg: I think lots of people have seen this problem and have tried. So one of the ways that people have tried to solve this problem is to build what's called a product information management system, like a PIM system, and this is a tool where you store all of the content related to these products. You store their attributes, you store documents related to them, and it's all very structured, and you create a taxonomy.

You know, if you're browsing a website, all you see are categories and then subcategories and then you proximate those categories with different attributes associated with these products. So that's the status quo way that you solve this problem. I think what's unique about taking the AI-first approach here is that we no longer care too much about the data structure, because we can derive the structure we need at the time we want to deliver it to the end user/customer.

So we no longer need to have this very rigid crud app, essentially like a database backed app. I mean, obviously we still have a database, but you have a more flexible schema in terms of how you store that content, which means that you kind of rethink the whole PIM layer that sits between an ERP and your website.

Ultimately, right now, Kaavio works with existing PIMS. We're helping people organize their PIMS more effectively. We're also helping them take the information they have in their PIM and enhance it and improve what they're displaying on their website… But in the future, you sort of start to ask the question, like, why is there a PIM?

Q: You had mentioned that your team’s superpower was “we know how to build and sell startup products to an enterprise” and you alluded to that earlier with your deep experience. Tell us more about that.

Derek Gregg: When Sam and I at were at Copia, he was the head of engineering and I was the head of sales, and we had to work together to basically try to go into an account, understand what problems we could solve for the client on day one with the product that we had, and then understand how can we build something to solve their problems in the future, such that they expand. And our biggest example of doing this was at Amazon, where we landed a fairly small contract, but then basically built a roadmap to expand them to seven figures over the course of about 12 months.

And so we’re basically doing that now with Kaavio. We're trying to land small but fairly decent sized enterprise customers and then build road maps such that we can expand them quickly. And having worked at a couple different startups for both of us, we found it unique that a head of sales and head of engineering could get together and get that done and not just piss off one another.

Q: Let’s go back to you personally. Why is this so important to you?

Derek Gregg: We think there's an opportunity here to rethink the entire infrastructure layer for how this commerce layer happens, and it's in dirty, dusty industries that have been slow to – at times – they've been slow to adopt new technologies. But there's an opportunity here to leapfrog a lot of these companies that are sort of still in the process of just adopting e-commerce.

Now we can almost leapfrog that to agentic commerce. And so there's a lot of money to be made, and there's a huge opportunity here. And Sam and I are the best people on the planet to figure out how to do it.

Q: What drives you to keep coming back time and time again as a founder?

Derek Gregg: My CFO at Quartzy once told me that I was a “CEO stuck in an employee's body”. I mean, the reality is that I like having the ability to influence and basically have control over a wide swath of the organization and the strategy. And I've had a hard time staying in my lane, if you will, as being solely a sales leader or a marketing leader, or a BD person. Like, when I first started at Quartzy, I always wanted to get into the product, get into the strategy, get into the fundraising, get into all the other stuff. And so ultimately I just like having control over my destiny and choice.

What I've learned now… what I've learned having worked for other founders, is that I also appreciate the ability to build a really healthy culture and a team that likes working together and I feel like I can put that together – I can build that.

Q: What do you feel is the culture you want to build, or have built?

Derek Gregg: So, I think it all comes back to trust. I think that's probably the biggest thing on my mind. I mean, Quartzy had a very healthy culture, I feel like and when I really distilled it all down, it came down to the fact that there was a level of trust and accountability that everyone had for themselves. In other words, by getting to a place where you're not holding each other accountable, you actually find everyone holding themselves accountable which requires a level of trust, because in order to hold yourself accountable, you need to be willing to admit your mistakes to the entire organization and trust that you're not gonna be punished for it.

I’ve made enormous mistakes at Quartzy where I made mistakes that cost the company well over $100,000 and I could say that in front of the whole organization, and actually be rewarded for it, not punished for it. I can't say the same was true at other places I've worked. Therefore, getting to a place where there's enough trust is key. And I think this just comes from the top, that if you the CEO is willing to get up and say, “here's what I messed up this week, and here's how much it cost us”, then I think everyone else is able to do that. And when you have that level of trust, then everyone's sort of holding themselves accountable, and everything else sort of flows from that, like all the other things that you would think a company wants to value, like moving fast and shipping and iterating. If there's enough trust in the organization for people to hold themselves accountable, then everything else I think flows from that.

Q: What’s your ask to the community? How can we support you?

Derek Gregg: Beyond fundraising, the next big thing we want to do is basically get customers. So we have some customers now, but can never have too many. And so we're basically looking to connect with people who are responsible for selling technical things to technical people, whether they're at distributors or manufacturers.

Thank you to Derek Gregg for the conversation. We welcome you to follow, invest, and champion Kaavio as they move forward. Come and see them pitch in-person at our upcoming CMU VentureBridge 2025 Demo Days in Pittsburgh (September 24th) and San Francisco (October 8th)!