1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Warren Packard, AI Fund (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So, talk about some case studies of problems that you have chosen to double click down on and run this process on.

Warren Packard: We now have 46 companies in our portfolio that those are almost all from fund one. We have a number of different case studies, and I’ll point to a few.

We co-founded a company called GV Health, a primary care healthcare company that is located in India. The whole notion was that accessibility to quality primary care for 1.4 billion people is not evenly distributed. So, how can we take advantage of the mobile phone to provide that first line of care for individuals across India and ultimately across the world.  

AI, of course, provides a tremendous technology to provide that type of functionality, as long as it doesn’t hallucinate. We were able to co-found this company with a seasoned industrial entrepreneur in India and we found an incredible entrepreneurial CEO, who went off and trained their own large language model that performs at the top of the list Hugging Face primary care medical app.

We were able to recently launch this company. It is being rolled out in India, and we’ll start rolling it out into other countries starting later this year. It’s a very exciting endeavor because it democratizes access to healthcare, which is so important for all the people across the world. It’s a great use of AI.

Sramana Mitra: Let me ask a question that’s I’m sure on many minds. Why India? You are based in Silicon Valley. Doing incubation work like this is not easy to do remotely, but you’ve chosen to do something in India, and that is not even India. The India-Silicon Valley corridor is very adept in doing B2B SaaS that is targeting global markets and now B2B AI that’s targeting US markets and global markets, but born in India and validated in India, but now you’re going after Indian B2C play.

So tell me more about why did you choose that problem to solve?

Warren Packard: You know, it really starts with the people. We were approached by this industrial entrepreneur, Sanjay Reddy. He had already built out a fleet of ambulances across India, I believe, servicing about or 250-300 million people in India. He had already this knowledge of the healthcare system in India. He had already scaled a business in India. He wasn’t going to run this venture, but he had this passion. It’s a double bottom line – you’re helping the people. Ultimately, you’re looking for a profit, but it really does start with helping out a population because he had this specific domain expertise.

We were further able to find an entrepreneur who’s really a global CEO. This is an individual who was born and raised in India and came here to the United States for education. I actually had met him back in the early 2000s when he was at Stanford University, and then he had moved back to India. It was just the right talent. This is obviously a very global talent pool that we can tap from.

GV Health is an exception for us. Most of our companies are founded in the United States. It’s a great example of entrepreneurship being able to arise anywhere and these challenges, uh, well at the scale, if we can service 1.4 billion people, we feel we can certainly service another 6.6 billion people across the globe, especially since large language models in AI don’t really know language boundaries.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Warren Packard, AI Fund
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