A Chat With Oluwasesan Kayode Yackson, Co-Founder And COO at ProtonLabs Technology Inc. Ltd. and TechRound SaaS66 2026 Judge

Oluwasesan Kayode Yackson is the co-founder and Chief Operating Officer at ProtonLabs Technology Inc. Ltd.

Please Introduce Yourself

I’m Oluwasesan Kayode Yackson, a senior software and DevOps engineer, entrepreneur, and Co-founder & Chief Operating Officer of ProtonLabs Technology Inc. I began my career in pharmacy, earning my bachelor’s degree before transitioning into software engineering and cloud infrastructure. Today, I combine scientific rigor, cloud infrastructure expertise, and operational leadership to build scalable, high-performance technology systems.

At ProtonLabs, I oversee our global cloud infrastructure, DevOps strategy, business operations, growth, and strategic partnerships. My focus is on making complex, high-scale AI infrastructure simple, resilient, and accessible so our products can reliably serve millions of users worldwide every day.

Can you tell us about ProtonLabs and the AI products you’ve built, including AskYourPDF, Cowriter.ai, Detect.ai and Simplicity.AI?

ProtonLabs is a UK-based AI company dedicated to developing practical solutions that simplify complex workflows and boost human productivity. We specialize in bridging the gap between frontier AI capability and everyday usability by building tools that fit directly into existing user workflows.

Our product portfolio includes:

• AskYourPDF: Our flagship document intelligence platform that allows users to extract insights, summarize research papers, and interact with complex documents via text, web extensions, mobile apps, and direct ChatGPT integrations.
• Cowriter.ai: An AI-assisted writing and deep research platform designed to help users produce high quality content and accelerate literature discovery.
• Detect.ai: An advanced AI-content detection tool built to help organizations and individuals verify content authenticity and maintain editorial integrity.
• Simplicity.AI: A smart AI form filler that converts static or scanned PDFs into interactive digital documents and auto-fills complex tax, legal, healthcare, employment, and immigration paperwork accurately in seconds.

ProtonLabs’ products now serve more than 5 million users worldwide. What do you think has been the biggest factor behind the company’s success and growth?

Our growth comes down to three core principles: solving real user pain points, moving with extreme execution speed, and taking distribution as seriously as engineering.

As a bootstrapped company, we’ve always had to maintain operational discipline. We focus less on top-of funnel vanity metrics like sign-ups and more on customer retention, willingness to pay, and organic word of mouth.

From an infrastructure and product perspective, a major driver was our multi-surface distribution strategy. We didn’t force users to change their habits; instead, we met them where they were already working— building integrations across the web, ChatGPT plugins, Chrome extensions, Zotero, mobile platforms, and robust APIs. When you combine high product utility with seamless distribution and high platform availability, organic growth naturally follows.

As a judge for SaaS66, what qualities will you be looking for when evaluating startups?

I am looking for companies that make complexity feel effortless. From an operational and technical standpoint, I will be evaluating four key areas:

• Clear Value Proposition: Can the founders explain in plain language who the customer is, what painful problem is being solved, and why their solution is significantly better than current alternatives?
• Technical Rigor & Reliability: Is the underlying cloud architecture built to scale securely, economically, and reliably as user demand grows?
• Distribution Clarity: Does the team have a clear, repeatable strategy for acquiring and retaining users without relying purely on paid marketing?
• Execution Speed: Can the founders demonstrate fast feedback loops between customer input and product iteration?

What separates a good SaaS business from a great one?

A good SaaS business builds a useful product, finds an initial customer base, and grows revenue by solving a visible problem. A great SaaS business builds a resilient, highly scalable system that becomes deeply embedded in the customer’s daily operations while maintaining relentless discipline around unit economics.

From an operational and technical standpoint, the differentiation comes down to four critical factors:

• Workflow Integration vs. Point Solutions: Good SaaS tools are nice-to-have utilities that live in an open tab. Great SaaS tools integrate directly into existing workflows—via APIs, extensions, and ecosystem integrations—making them essential and creating natural retention without forcing users to build entirely new habits.
• Unit Economics and Infrastructure Efficiency: Good companies scale revenue, but great companies scale margins. In AI and software engineering, managing cloud infrastructure costs, optimizing server operations, and ensuring high platform availability as traffic grows is what keeps gross margins healthy as you scale to millions of users.
• Retention Over Acquisition: Good SaaS focuses heavily on top-of-funnel sign-ups and marketing hype. Great SaaS focuses relentlessly on cohorts, usage depth, willingness to pay, and net revenue retention. If users aren’t coming back organically and recommending the product, growth is just an expensive illusion.
• Speed of the Feedback Loop: Good teams ship features on a schedule. Great teams shorten the loop between user feedback, system observability, and engineering deployment to continually refine the product based on how people actually use it every day.

What are the biggest mistakes you see SaaS founders making when trying to scale their businesses?

The most common mistakes I see stem from misaligned scaling priorities:

• Premature Scaling: Rushing to scale distribution, sales, or infrastructure before achieving true product-market fit and solid unit economics.
• Ignoring Distribution: Relying on the assumption that a technically superior product will sell itself. Technical founders must treat distribution and growth with the same architectural rigor as their codebase.
• Neglecting Cloud Cost & Architecture Efficiency: Overlooking infrastructure margins early on. In AI and SaaS, inefficient API usage or unoptimized cloud architecture can quickly ruin unit economics as user volume scales.
• Focusing on Attention Over Value: Confusing viral sign-ups with sustainable retention. If users don’t return or aren’t willing to pay, long-term growth will collapse.

If you could give one piece of advice to founders entering SaaS66 this year, what would it be?

Be remarkably concrete and lead with evidence.

Within your first couple of sentences, state clearly who you serve, the exact problem you solve, the measurable outcome you create, and how your approach is fundamentally different. Avoid vague jargon or long market histories.

Back up your story with hard metrics—retention, unit economics, customer outcomes, and growth trajectory. Finally, ensure you articulate your distribution model just as clearly as your technical architecture. Show us not only that you can build a great platform, but how you will get it into the hands of millions.

What are you most looking forward to seeing in the SaaS industry in the next few years?

I am most excited about the transition from isolated, chat-based AI tools into deeply embedded workflow automation engines.

We are moving past generic prompt-and-response setups toward autonomous, context-aware systems capable of retrieving complex data, executing background tasks across multiple tool stacks, and handing off work seamlessly to human operators when human oversight is required. Seeing these workflow advancements applied to heavy operational fields like legal, healthcare, logistics, document intelligence, and corporate administration represents a massive opportunity to redefine software productivity.