1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Manu Rekhi, Managing Director at Inventus Capital Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: And what is the AI angle in this? How are they using AI?

Manu Rekhi: They built their own data sets, and they’ve sewed together different LLM, multimodal models to be able to make sense of this whole piece. For the actual training sets of doing this with thousands and thousands of project managers to be able to figure out what works well, they use circular workflows instead of a linear process like Gantt charts.

So, anytime anything’s delayed, the impact over everything else gets reassessed very quickly, whereas the traditional charts would require a lot of human intervention to use their judgment to fix things. So all the previous knowledge of judgment on how things will impact the downstream effect of a project can now get done in seconds with the AI models.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Interesting. It’s more of a workflow application though rather than the LLM kind of application. There’s a tremendous amount of real workflow management going on, which is defensible. Vertical workflow is defensible.

Manu Rakhi: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: Manu, I know your firm has a particular emphasis on the India Silicon Valley corridor. Could you talk a bit about how you work with founders and geographically, how do you like them to be configured or on approaching you and so on?

Manu Rekhi: Yes, absolutely. Our thesis had been with the India US corridor. Whether the Indian founders moved to the US for university and then they stayed on to actually build a company here, or they stayed back in India and build a company. So, it didn’t matter where you ended up.

Now, we do seriously prefer that companies, even if they’re built in India, are headquartered in the US or Delaware. The legal structure in the US is far simpler. We prefer companies that are building for the global market, not just for the India market, because although India software market is a decent size and is growing, it’s nowhere close to the global market, especially the US market. So, we prefer our founders to have sites here as well.

We don’t do much consumer domestic in India because the companies can stay in India. We had a sister company in India called Athera ventures. That’s how we split up our India focus. So, we now focus more on global Indian companies.

Sramana Mitra: B2B Global is done out of Inventus is what you’re saying.

Manu Rekhi: We also do consumer companies, but they’re focused globally as well. But they’re mostly US founders like Poshmark with Manish was based here. We have Flam, the founders might be in India, but they’re moving here as well. That’s a sort of a consumer/ B2B, B2C company as well.

Okay. So we’ll make exceptions, but our traditional is probably 70% enterprise, about 20-25% is consumer.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Manu Rekhi, Managing Director at Inventus Capital Partners
1 2 3 4 5