1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Lisa Chai, General Partner at Interwoven Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: From what I gathered, you are focusing on Vertical AI? Is that a correct observation?

Lisa Chai: We lean heavier towards Vertical AI, but it’s not a mandate.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Let’s double click down on Vertical AI. We’ll come back to what else you’re doing besides Vertical AI.

Vertical AI is coming up in conversations constantly right now. We are double clicking down heavily on Vertical AI. Earlier this week, I talked to an excellent founder who has built up to over $5 million in revenue in a healthcare AI space and is doing really well.

How are you thinking about vertical AI and what, what kind of things are you particularly interested in, you’re either looking for or have invested in?

You’re welcome to talk about some of your case studies of what you have invested in. And if you do that, I would like to understand why you chose to invest in those particular companies. What state did you discover them and what attracted you?

Lisa Chai: Right. We’re looking for areas where robotics, automation, and AI play a very big role. What industries are going through that massive demographic shift and a labor crisis? We have also seen the rise of e-commerce and how that’s training the supply chain critically today.

Then we look at our background and our investment team and where we have that domain expertise and deep network where we could help out. They tend to be areas in that manufacturing, logistics, supply chain, and healthcare. We do believe overall the AI, robotics, and automation span across all industries; we see their impact everywhere.

As for Vertical AI, where there’re use cases that we see are providing an immediate ROI, that’s when we really looked at some of these specialized industries. We need to make sure that there’s some type of defensibility in what you’re building.

We know that Vertical AI is going to be stickier and there’s going to be a higher switching cost. In supply chain industry, companies like UPS, FedEx, and DHL are the large gorillas. They’re looking at solutions so that they don’t have to switch out every six months.

In situations like that, if we know that a company like UPS is really evaluating your system, you have something that could scale within their organization, and you’ll have a successful installation experience.

This is how we are looking at it. We also understand that robotics and AI are relatively new, still emerging, and still evolving. We look for traditional industries that are going to invest heavily, they’re not going to stick it out, and they’re looking for some expertise and support, whether it’s coming through integrators or advisors or investors like us. We work very closely with the customers.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Lisa Chai, General Partner at Interwoven Ventures
1 2 3