Profitable SEO startup raises funds from 500 Global for next bet: AI

Francis Lui was born into an underprivileged family. He remembers his family not having enough to pay their rent of about US$10 in a small town in Ipoh, Malaysia, back in the 1970s.

He would walk four to five kilometers to primary school each day. In secondary school, he commuted by bicycle daily over a 10-kilometer distance.

Photo credit: NexMind AI

Such long journeys would come to define his life. As he grew into adulthood, he went on to study abroad and hold senior positions in companies like American shipping firm UPS and internet major Yahoo. He also founded Nexus Mediaworks, which he says is the first local search engine optimization (SEO) company in Malaysia.

His experience is what allowed Lui to see a problem in current SEO offerings: the need for digital knowhow to use tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush to their best capabilities.

This is also what led him to develop NexMind, which automates SEO tasks through AI. It also uses the tech to help write blogs, develop Facebook ads, and create product descriptions, among other tasks.

NexMind has been profitable since 2021 – a year after it officially started functioning. Lui also said that the company’s revenue for the past 12 months was slightly less than a seven-figure amount in US dollars.

It wasn’t an easy start, though, as Lui shared that he and his co-founder Bernie Law – who bootstrapped the company since its inception – initially faced delays due to movement restrictions brought on by the Covid-19 pandemic.

Nonetheless, NexMind has gone a long way since then. The company now boasts over 1,000 clients across 72 countries, including the likes of Volkswagen, Panasonic, and Birkenstock.

These clients are drawn in mostly by NexMind’s SEO automation and content generation solutions. One of these is Text2Site, which enables users to create websites by filling out a form.

However, Lui said the company expects to have a more diversified pool of revenue sources in the next couple of years. This starts with Text2Social, which lets users publish social media posts across multiple channels through a single platform in any of the 17 languages NexMind supports.

The company is launching the service after raising an undisclosed amount of funding from 500 Global. There’s already big expectations for Text2Social, as Lui sees the new feature, as well as Text2Site, raking in more money in the coming months.

Here’s a short Q&A with Lui, edited for clarity.

What’s the elevator pitch for NexMind?