Hi Friends,

I started a company called Allenix. We have paying clients, profitable, and real momentum. This is the story of why.

In the last 60 days, I have had the same conversation roughly 50 times.

At entrepreneur dinners. At the Ion. At meetup groups. At office visits across Houston. I sit down with a founder running a $15M engineering services firm and ask what they know about AI. They tell me about ChatGPT. Maybe Gemini. A few have heard of Perplexity.

Nearly half have never heard of Anthropic. When I tell them Anthropic just overtook OpenAI in revenue, they think I am making it up. I have to pull out this chart on my phone to prove it.

In the enterprise tech world, we throw around terms like "agent harness" and "digital twins" as if everyone knows what they mean. The 6.3 million small and medium businesses that run the real economy, do not have AI playbook to guide them.

That gap, between what this technology can do and what real businesses are doing with it, is one of the biggest missed opportunities in American business right now.

Allenix exists to close it.

At this very moment, we sit down with founders of growth-stage businesses and find the one workflow that is bleeding the most time. Then we rebuild it with AI in 30 days or less.

A small Houston engineering firm was spending 72 hours generating each sales proposal. They wanted to see if we can help. We took that to under 15 minutes. Built in under a week. That is the model. Meet clients where they are, educate them of what’s possible.

We are running these engagements as fast as we can right now, learning what scales and what does not.

Here are the real questions I have heard from CEOs in the last 90 days:

These are the right questions. And almost nobody is answering them for the operator running a real business. They are left to figure it out alone.

AI adoption is not a technology problem. It is a change management problem. A data strategy problem. A trust problem.

I wanted to build something I wish already existed.

In August 1836, Augustus and John Kirby Allen paid $5,000 for 6,642 acres of swamp on Buffalo Bayou. No port. No railroad. Oil was 70 years away. Just mosquitoes, brutal summers, and a printing press to announce what they were calling the next great American city.

A completely unreasonable bet.

The Allen brothers did not wait for conditions to be right. They decided they were. The world molded to their vision.

That kind of conviction is almost extinct. And in an AI world where execution is commoditized, conviction is the moat.

And I must admit, I am inspired by it.

The name pays homage to the bet. Allen for the brothers who staked everything on a city that had no business existing. The "ix" is the same root as Phoenix. Rebirth.

That is Allenix. (Uh-Len-Ix.)

The Allen brothers' city has spent over a century quietly building extraordinary companies. Cart.com is a $1.6B unicorn. BMC Software did $2B in annual revenue in relative obscurity.

I recently asked a Bay Area founder friend to name a Houston tech company. After a long pause: "I can't name you one tech company in Houston. But I can name you three rappers from Houston. Travis Scott. Paul Wall. Mike Jones." Then he paused again. "Wait, wasn't Enron based in Houston?"

😞

I want to build the company Houston is proud of.

That is the bet.

If you know growth-stage founders who should be in these conversations, send them my way. No pitch. I want to learn about their business, understand where they are with AI, and share what I am seeing across the market.

Wish me luck,

--Ali

P.S. My friend, Phil, recently shared with me this tweet while writing this post that validated everything I am working on.

About Me: I'm Ali. Former fintech product executive. Now building Allenix. Been recently feeling nostalgic about pogs and bought some to play with the kids..