Inside Vambe: A Conversation with Founder Nicolás Camhi

Nicolás Camhi joined the SCET community in 2018 after earning a scholarship from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile to participate in the Startup Semester program at UC Berkeley SCET. Camhi earned a degree in Industrial Engineering from Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Coming from a family of entrepreneurs, he knew early on that he wanted to follow in their footsteps. Throughout his time at the university, he worked on numerous side projects, including designing a QR code payment method to help students skip the lunch line in Chilean schools.

After winning a scholarship through the LeBridge Startup Fellows Program at UC Berkeley, he traveled in a group of thirty students from around the world to SCET. Throughout his Startup Semester, Camhi worked as a product manager on a tech startup called Urban Radar. His time at UC Berkeley deeply inspired Camhi, and he decided to return to the Bay Area immediately after wrapping up his career as an industrial engineer to start his own business. 

The Origins of Vambe

Camhi partnered with Matías Pérez Pefaur and Diego Chahuán Luhrs, both Civil Engineers at Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile. Once Nico identified an opportunity to start a business, he reached out to Pefaur for his technical expertise. The two began developing debt collection software. After facing difficulties with the initial product, Diego joined the team, overseeing technology, scalability, and operations. Matías leads AI and product development, and Nico handles executive duties, sales, investor relations, and team management. 

The team decided to pivot after realizing that he could use AI to collect debt through WhatsApp. In early March of this year, they switched gears to build an AI-based business communication platform based on customer feedback, specifically in Latin American customers. It was here that Vambe was born — a solution designed to help small and medium-sized businesses scale their sales processes in Latin America, a region where the conversational economy is dominant. Often, companies of this size lack the bandwidth to manage all customer engagement interactions, particularly messages through Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp, without incurring significant costs. Vambe is a solution utilizing an AI platform to drive this traffic. 

Raised by a family of entrepreneurs, Camhi recognized this issue, found inspiration, and took action. He says, “I’ve been in the shoes of my customers since I was very young. At Vambe, we serve small to medium-sized businesses, and my family could have been my potential customer.” He further noted that it is these entrepreneurs who are driving the economy. 

“I am really inspired by them. Now, being in a position to help these entrepreneurs drive their businesses more efficiently and improve their sales is something that motivates me.” and CEO at Vambe (SkyDeck Batch 18), a company providing a hyper-personalized conversational AI platform for small and medium-sized businesses to increase their sales capacity and boost closing rates. Vambe has achieved the highest annual recurring revenue (ARR) of all SkyDeck Batch 18 companies, scaling from 24k to 500k in ARR in just five months, which is an 80.2% average month-over-month growth. Currently, the team is raising their first seed round. We connected with co-founder Nicolas Camhi to hear about his reflections on his entrepreneurial journey and his vision for the future of Vambe. 

Scaling Success

Since pivoting, the team has overcome numerous technical challenges, achievements that would help them earn their spot as the highest annual recurring revenue (ARR) of all SkyDeck Batch 18 companies. In a short time, they have designed an intuitive platform for customers who do not have an extensive technical background. Additionally, they have been working on advancing AI capabilities without requiring prompt engineering expertise, and they have been scaling customer communications and simultaneously orchestrating multiple AI flows. 

The company is currently focused on streamlining the customer onboarding process, developing self-service capabilities, and expanding integrations with other SaaS platforms and customer relationship management platforms. 

Reflections on the Journey

When asked what he loves most about what he does, Camhi replied that tackling difficult problems with an intelligent and collaborative team is the most rewarding aspect of his work. 

“When I’m there with the team thinking about how we’re going to fix a problem, improve a bottleneck in our processes, deliver our solution better, improve our product to better serve our customers and add more value. That’s the most fun part of it by far – taking on big challenges with a wonderful team.”

When asked about the qualities shared by all successful entrepreneurs, Camhi emphasizes the importance of resilience. 

“Entrepreneurship is a roller coaster of emotions – it’s real and extreme. One day, you could be at the top, and at the end of the day, you could be down. There are a large number of different problems coming at you that you don’t know how to solve right away, and you don’t have the experience to help you solve them. It’s intense in every sense, and being resilient and flexible is a requirement to adapt to all of these situations.”

Additionally, he expressed just how critical a good work ethic is to achieving entrepreneurial success. He says, “You have to be really obsessed with what you’re doing. You need to hustle and put your everything into it.”

Camhi’s advice to all prospective entrepreneurs is to just jump in. He says, “If you are really sure that you want to do this, go for it. I’m just twenty-six and have been doing entrepreneurship since I was eighteen years old. Most of the people I meet have this approach of gaining experience in the corporate workplace before pursuing entrepreneurship. I don’t think that’s true – I would tell students and young entrepreneurs to chase after their dreams if they are passionate about an opportunity.”

The Future of Vambe

In the next couple of years, Camhi’s goal is to focus on expanding in Latin America and eventually dominate that space. Ultimately, the team hopes to go global, bringing Vambe to businesses in the US and Europe. Camhi says, “I would like to see Vambe supporting every entrepreneur, providing our platform to make AI applications real and accessible to all entrepreneurs who want to drive their businesses.” 

In reflection on his entrepreneurial journey so far, Camhi noted that he has come a long way. “When I was twenty years old, I came here to Berkeley as a student chasing a dream of one day becoming an entrepreneur. Almost six years ago, I came to SkyDeck and remember seeing how entrepreneurs work. And now, I’m back here again, but as a founder. I’m speaking at our demo day in front of over 1,400 investors and receiving students. It’s super amazing for me.”

Camhi hopes to build and lead a company that will encourage others to become the best version of themselves. 

“What I love to do is to inspire people to believe in themselves. It’s what I’ve been doing. I would love to build a company and a group of people to help them make the most of their potential. That’s what I try to do with my customers — helping other people reach their maximum potential, as well as their businesses. Our slogan is ‘AI for all, growth for all.’”

In the long term, the Vambe team seeks to make AI accessible to businesses of all sizes and functions. Eventually, the founders see the company evolving into a primarily data-driven company that improves the commerce experience orchestrated with artificial intelligence.