Roundtable Recap: August 18 – A Discussion on Vertical Cloud

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:

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Featured Videos

Building a Capital Efficient Healthcare AI Venture to $20M: Deepak Gaddipati, Founder and CTO of VirtuSense (Part 1)

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?

Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 5)

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.

Video FAQs

From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 6)

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.

Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 4)

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.

Catching Up On Readings: Emerging Tech Hype Cycle 2022

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.

From Developer to Solo Entrepreneur to $5M+ Revenue: Sporcle Founder and CTO Matt Ramme (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: We have touched the big milestones in 2009. You have started monetizing enough to get yourself salaries. You have brought in the CEO who’s helping you monetize. What is the next inflection point?

Matt Ramme: From the very beginning, I had a link to send feedback. People had a lot of ideas. We would take that and we’d build it. We needed to not be the ones creating all the content. Everybody has these ideas. We need to let them do it. I already created tools just for ourselves. I spent most of 2009 getting the tools to a point where they can be publicly useable where anybody can create their own quiz.

Building a European EdTech Unicorn from Vienna, Austria: Felix Ohswald, CEO of GoStudent (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about Indian companies? There are a whole bunch of players that are doing really well like CueMath.

Felix Ohswald: Two markets that have always been quite advanced when it comes to education businesses are India and China. China had some regulation changes last year that made it difficult for these businesses to operate. In India, you have about 10,000 active EdTech companies. The thing is a lot of the players are focused on their core market. India is already so big that there is enough room for the companies to operate.