A sales guy runs an AI company. On purpose.
Most founders take a company from zero. John Kanarowski did the harder thing - he took one from ten. When he arrived at Agolo, the company was a decade into its life, on its second act, and looking for someone to carry it through a third. The original founders, who had run it for ten years, wanted new leadership to navigate a shifting market and a different way of selling. Kanarowski, by his own account, is not a technologist. He is a sales-and-go-to-market person, and he says so plainly. In a field crowded with engineers who speak in model architectures, that admission is its own kind of strategy.
So he did what salespeople do well: he asked questions and then he shut up. His first hundred days were a listening tour with no destination promised. He sat down with every one of the roughly 35 employees. He went to customer meetings. He pulled up recorded calls and watched them. He read the technology assessments. By the ninety-day mark he had three hypotheses about where the company should go, and he had tested them in something like fifty conversations with prospects. Only then did he move.
What he moved was the whole company. Agolo had spent its early years (2015 to 2019) on text summarization - clever technology that could shrink a long document into a short one. Then it became entity-intelligence middleware, software that sat between systems and made sense of the things mentioned inside documents. Under Kanarowski it became Implicit: a no-code "knowledge engine" that turns scattered documents, PDFs, wikis, and support tickets into focused AI experts. Same DNA, third identity. The pivot was not a detour from the plan. The pivot was the plan.
"It's an underrated skill to know when to quit."- John Kanarowski
It is a strange thing for a sitting CEO to say out loud. Quitting is the word you are supposed to never use. But it explains how a company can change its core product twice in a decade and still be standing - and why Kanarowski talks about strategy the way a card player talks about folding. You do not win every hand. You win by knowing which hands to walk away from.
Not a chatbot. A knowledge engine.
The pitch is deceptively small: every company is sitting on expertise it cannot search. It lives in the heads of three people, in a wiki nobody updates, in five years of support tickets, in PDFs buried on a shared drive. Implicit's bet is that you can take all of that - the tribal knowledge and the buried documentation - and turn it into an AI expert that answers hard product questions and shows its sources. Build. Learn. Deliver. The company is careful to say the answers are cited and grounded in actual organizational knowledge, not the confident guesswork of a generic model.
The customers are the ones who feel the pain most and can least afford a custom-built solution: medium-sized companies with complicated products, plus federal, defense, and aviation customers where being wrong is expensive. The selling point Kanarowski repeats is speed - onboarding measured in hours, accuracy from day one. "We can get customers up and running in hours," he says, which in enterprise software is close to heresy.
Technology that shrank long documents into short ones.
Entity-intelligence middleware that made sense of what documents mention.
A no-code knowledge engine that turns content into cited AI experts.
Remote before remote was a thing.
Before Implicit, before Cogito, before the roster of names that reads like a tour of enterprise software - Periscope, Workday, Oracle, Merced Systems, Zerista - there was DealDeal.com, an e-commerce company Kanarowski co-founded back when the internet still made you wait for it to load. He has worked remotely for nearly twenty years, which means he was video-conferencing into meetings while the rest of the world still thought you had to be in the room. The pandemic did not change how he works. It just let everyone else catch up.
That long runway shapes how he leads. He does not pretend to be the smartest engineer in the building. Instead he triangulates - he gathers perspectives from his team and a handful of trusted technical advisors, then makes the call. It is a method that requires being comfortable not knowing, and being honest about it. He is, by the accounts of people who have worked with him, humble, transparent with investors and customers, and almost stubbornly close to the people who buy the product.
"It's all about mindset in how you approach it."- On building, selling, and surviving the pivots
He is also, refreshingly, not precious about how he takes in information. He would rather listen than read - podcasts and audiobooks over paper - and counts the history podcast "The Rest is History" among his favorites. There is something fitting about a man who built a company to make knowledge listenable preferring his own knowledge that way too.
When Microsoft and Google both say yes.
Implicit's cap table is its own argument. The company has raised more than $18 million, with backing from Microsoft's venture arm M12, Google, Lytical Ventures, Tensility, General Purpose Venture Capital, and Ridgeline. Getting two of the largest AI companies on earth to fund the same startup is not an accident of fundraising - it is a signal about the problem Implicit is chasing. Kanarowski's read on those relationships is characteristically about people, not term sheets. On one investor he put it simply: "Working with Steve was an easy decision. We've known him for years, and from the board room, to customer acquisition and fundraising, his prior experience and network in bringing new technologies to market is invaluable to us."
The company was founded by Mohamed AlTantawy, who remains its technical heart, in New York in 2012. Kanarowski's job was never to invent the technology. It was to find the version of it the market would actually pay for - and to have the discipline to abandon the versions it would not.