During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Tae Hea Nahm, Managing Director and Co-founder at Storm Ventures, who emphasized and articulated his firm’s specific interest in investing in vertical cloud startups.
You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:
According to a recent report, the global online language learning market is expected to grow 19% CAGR from 2022 through 2026, translating to an incremental growth of $30 billion during the forecast period, Online language learning service provider Duolingo (Nasdaq: DUOL) recently announced their quarterly results that surpassed market expectations.
>>>Deepak has built a capital-efficient fall-detection company from Peoria, Illinois with a backend engineering team in Rawalpindi, Pakistan.
It’s an impressive entrepreneurial journey with a mission-driven company that is making real impact in the lives of seniors with fall risk.
Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?
>>>Sramana Mitra: Talk about financing. Before the pivot, you raised $3 million. What happens after the pivot?
Felix Ohswald: We raised $600 million in all.
Sramana Mitra: What was the next round immediately after the pivot?
Felix Ohswald: We pivoted in 2019. We had 12 months where we tested out a couple of things. At the beginning of 2020, we raised our Series A round of €8 million from a VC firm in New York and London. With that money, we pushed in our international expansion.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What is the financial engineering of an acquisition like this? You have not raised any money for this company, right?
Matt Ramme: Correct.
Sramana Mitra: Private companies acquiring private companies is very complicated to pull off. Talk a little bit about that.
>>>Sramana Mitra: You said you talk to parents to map out a journey. Can you double-click down on that a bit? How much tutoring does a family require?
Felix Ohswald: On average, a family consumes eight sessions per month. That’s two sessions per week. One session is about 50 minutes in our case. On average, one kid has about two teachers. Over the whole learning journey of the kid, the child uses up to two teachers. Most of the time, this is in one particular subject. In a market like Germany, the number one reason why families take tutoring is that a kid struggles in a subject.
>>>This report from Gartner analyzes 2022 Gartner Hype Cycle for Emerging Technologies. They fit into three main themes: evolving/expanding immersive experiences, accelerated artificial intelligence automation, and optimized technologist delivery. For this week’s posts, click on the paragraph links.
>>>I’m publishing this series on LinkedIn called Colors to explore a topic that I care deeply about: the Renaissance Mind. I am just as passionate about entrepreneurship, technology, and business, as I am about art and culture. In this series, I will typically publish a piece of art – one of my paintings – and I request you to spend a minute or two deeply meditating on it. I urge you to watch your feelings, thoughts, reactions to the piece, and write what comes to you, what thoughts it triggers, in the dialog area. Let us see what stimulation this interaction yields. For today – Age of Innocence V
Age of Innocence V | Sramana Mitra, 2021 | Watercolor, Pastel, Brush Pen | 9 x 12, On Paper