Q&A: Startup Team Scout Talks Building "Pragmatic AI Solutions" In The Southeast

Read Time: 6 minutes

Tech Topics In This Article: AI startups, Atlanta startups, Charleston startups

Faster, more scalable AI. That is what Scout, a Charleston, South Carolina startup now building in Atlanta is building.

Under the leadership of CEO Bryan Chappell, the AI startup is designing tools that help enterprise-level teams build custom agents and better workflows. The Scout team gave Hypepotamus a look at how the startup came to life, the role Atlanta played in their evolution, and how they’re empowering “builders, hackers and tinkerers” to create pragmatic AI solutions.

Get to know Scout through this Q&A:

Question: How did Atlanta and the Atlanta startup ecosystem come into play for Scout?

Atlanta’s startup scene is really growing and has been a big part of Scout’s journey; there’s a ton of high quality and hungry talent and a community that champions innovation. The city’s network of co-working spaces, accelerators, and events has been huge for us to play in, hire folks, get feedback and get inspired. A significant boost came from partnering with Drive Capital; Nick Solaro, Cameron Clarke, and Avoilan Bingham have been invaluable and offered a ton of expertise and guidance to us. And honestly we wouldn’t be where we are without Avoilan believing in us in the earliest of days. The Drive team’s dedication to nurturing startups highlights and represents the strength of Atlanta’s entrepreneurial spirit and grit.

Q: How did you know it was the right time to launch?

We’ve been working with different forms of AI for years and it would still take us a lot of time to get something to production. We knew we could make the process dramatically faster. So we started building an MVP on nights and weekends and shared it with some of our friends. It was like a natural convergence of use cases from a few different places. We didn’t really have the intention of launching a company at first but as soon as we put our first version in front of users the potential was obvious. We slapped a UI on what we had built, gave it to a few trusted beta testers and their usage started to take off. Based on the feedback we were getting, and the usage we were seeing, it was enough to motivate us with the idea that there was a market for Scout, that we could provide material value, democratize AI and put power in the hands of the builders looking to take advantage of the new AI frontier.

Q: In the world of AI, how does Scout stand out? Who are your target customers?

At this stage of our business, it all boils down to our mission, our speed and our customer obsession. We are still an early stage company and small team, and although we’re just starting to differentiate technically, what’s gotten us to this point is how much attention we pay to our customers to ensure their success and how quickly we are taking feedback, learning and building. At the fundamental level this is what it all boils down to. These quick iterations, and our customer obsession, are our north stars and we are starting to see the fruits of this labor by taking customer feedback and acting quickly on it.

Some material examples of what makes the community love Scout:

• We have Workflow Templates so builders can quickly deploy common AI app patterns without needing to reinvent the wheel every time.
• We offer native vector database support with hybrid semantic and keyword search. This helps cut down hallucinations and “garbage in garbage out” problems.
• We offer 20+ LLM models for redundancy in case your LLM provider goes down and you need graceful fallbacks. This is key for productionizing AI at scale.
• 99.99% uptime.
• We purchase tokens, compute and storage at massive scale so we can offer the lowest prices in the industry.
• Our average customer response time on Slack is ~20 minutes. Our customers can trust us.
• You can run the AI apps you build on Scout via API, SDK, natively within the Scout interface, using the Scout Copilot, Slack, Discord etc. AI is not one size fits all and needs to be accessible from many different places, in many different patterns.

Our ideal customer is a slightly moving target; we’ve 10Xd our user base over the last 3 months. But to put it simply: Scout is for the builders, hackers and tinkerers who are building pragmatic AI applications. With where AI is today, you have to have a curious and experimental mindset because it’s all so new and there’s a lot of “right” ways to do things. It can be overwhelming. We’re giving people the tools and community to push those boundaries and develop AI applications, with real world value, without needing to be a PHD and spend hundreds of thousands of dollars. By doing the heavy lifting now, we’re making it simpler for everyone else later. You get a straightforward route to production-ready AI workflows. In the end, Scout helps turn complex ideas into workable solutions, giving creators a real chance to bring their AI visions to life.

Q: How big is your team right now?

15 people - all engineers. We don’t have a sales or marketing team yet; we are full steam ahead on building and giving direct engineering support to our customers.

Q: What is on the horizon that you can speak publicly about? What are you focused on in 2025?

Our mission is plain and simple: democratizing AI. We believe in a future where every person with the dream of building an AI application can do so without them having to spend thousands of dollars and/or get advanced math degrees - the reality is that AI isn’t accessible for most people right now. We don’t want to see that gap widen. We want to open that door for the dreamers and the builders no matter where they are on the socioeconomic scale. We want to build a community, and a solution, that gives the power of AI to everyone.

Get stories like this delivered to your inbox by signing up for the Hypepotamus newsletter! We send you curated startup stories and events twice a week. Sign up here.