1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Yes. When you see these deals that are starting to find some velocity early on and coming to you with that as one of the proof points, what are you seeing? What kind of go-to-markets are you seeing that are giving them this kind of velocity? I understand that it takes fewer people to build software right now because of all these AI copilots and this and that.

So, yes. At the MVP building part and the actual product building part, there has been a lot of efficiency that have come on the wings of AI, but what are you seeing in the go-to-market motions in the Indian companies that are finding some velocity as they come to you in your pipeline?

Piyush Kharbanda: Yes. I generalize this because we’ve to invest in companies that are globally relevant. So, you’ve to look at companies that are doing this in the US or in Europe, for example, as well.

In general, what we are seeing is that these companies have a very high quality better than MVP that is early into the market with gains and enterprise virality in that the product. They’re significantly better at solving specific problems that these companies have faced and have not had the ability to solve.

Let me give you a few examples, right?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Piyush Kharbanda: Think about voice applications in clinics or a provider to a payer interaction where there is a bunch of back and forth that happens on calls between a provider and a payer. Some of these problems had not been addressed at all.

So, if you are providing care as a care operator (CO) and you have really not been able to call your patients, or if you have a claim as a provider, and this claim has been disputed by the payer, you’ve really not been able to get on a phone and explain and provide all the details and documentation. With a bunch of these new voice AI applications, you’re starting to see immense traction on these problems that were earlier than now, not addressed at all, or were being done in a very unscientific manner.

Now, when you launch these kinds of applications, being a small business or a large business doesn’t matter, the uplift that they get in terms of their overall business problems and their own solutions is just so dramatic that the traction is just going to go through the roof.

Now, the question that we often end up asking from a framework perspective is, how sustainable is this? Is this a flash in the pan? Are there incumbents who will come and eat up your cake and launch a product or an adjacent product from their distribution strength that will take away all the advantage that you have in being early in the market?

In each of these segments, there are incumbents. In many cases, the early leadership could be pretty ephemeral. We saw this specifically in the medical transcription space where we saw a bunch of companies go very early into the market for medical transcription in clinics, and then the incumbents with their regulatory and the distribution edge were able to come in and build partnerships centered around their own products. Abridge and Epic is one example. Then the early incumbents were left clutching at straws.

Just to round it all up, the overall thing here is the same as it was in software investing, which is to identify what’s the long-term sustainable mode. Often enough, the answer lies in founder-market fit, founder resilience, and the ability to execute.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Piyush Kharbanda, General Partner at Vertex Ventures
1 2 3