1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures (Part 1)

David Evans, Managing Partner at Sentiero Ventures, discusses his firm’s AI investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Today we are going to start the conversation with David Evans from Santiero Ventures. David, if you could please unmute your line and tell us what Santiero Ventures is doing, that would be great.

David Evans: Awesome. Thank you for having me. I really appreciate the opportunity and really love what you’re doing with One Million by One Million. I’m the managing partner at Santiero Ventures. We are an early seed-stage venture fund focused on AI-enabled B2B political software. We’ve been investing in AI since before it was cool, and I’ve worked in AI for a long time.

Sramana Mitra: So tell me more about what you did before the venture firm. When you said you worked in AI, what kind of AI did you work in?

David Evans: I started my career in AI building predictive models for NASA in the late nineties. We were predicting whether there would be enough components of the space suit available for the spacewalk associated with putting up the International Space Station. The ultimate irony is we’re talking about the space station coming down now. I was part of putting it up in the late nineties.

Sramana Mitra: All right. And how big is Santiero Ventures? What is the fund size?

David Evans: We’re a $15 million fund right now.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. And what check sizes do you like to write?

David Evans: We typically invest anywhere from $250,000 to $750,000 per investment. Total allocation per individual deal is somewhere between $1 million to $1.5 million.

Sramana Mitra: And you said B2B is your focus?

David Evans: Everything we do is B2B, generally verticalized software.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Define seed for me. You said you’re seed stage. What do you want to see in a seed deal that would make you comfortable writing checks?

David Evans: Absolutely. We’re a bit of a tweener — kind of a late pre-seed or an early seed. We don’t have any minimums in terms of revenue, but we want to see a company with a full product ready and some proof of market. Generally speaking, that means early signs of market traction — user adoption, paying customers in enterprise software, maybe a couple of pilots with enterprise organizations.

We’re not a true seed fund that says, “Don’t talk to us until you have half a million dollars in revenue.”
We’ve made investments ranging from zero revenue and just pilots to companies doing over $2 million in annual revenue.

Sramana Mitra: Okay. Now I’m going to focus the conversation on what you are doing in AI — your AI investment thesis. But because you talked about your stage in quite a bit of granularity, there’s a question I want to ask that’s very contemporary and on a lot of minds right now.

You know, there’s this trend with tools like Vibe Coding, No Code, Cursor, and Lovable — all these apps let you get an MVP out quickly. Especially in vertical B2B and also in B2C these days, there’s a lot going on. MVP development is happening very rapidly, and getting it into the hands of customers is accelerating.

What are you seeing, and what is your point of view about this phenomenon?

David Evans: I think it’s something we’ve been seeing for a long time. The speed and pace to MVP or concept just keeps getting faster and faster. There are a lot of low-code tools now — you can use Webflow or Airtable to build an early proof of concept to get in front of customers.

The challenge we see, especially in vertical B2B software, is that there’s still a good 18 months between conception and a complete product, what we call the minimum sellable product — and that’s a key distinction.
MVP is the minimum viable product — the minimum you can put in front of someone. Minimum sellable product is the minimum set of features, functionality, workflow, and user interface required to actually start to develop repeatable sales. And that still takes about 18 months.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: David Evans, Sentiero Ventures
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