Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Yamin Durrani, CEO of Kami Vision (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get into the use cases. You’ve talked about a variety of verticals in which you have businesses. Let’s start with the home vertical. You said you have partnerships with several brands within the home segment. Tell us more about the use cases.

Yamin Durrani: If you look at the home segment, the typical approach that a brand takes is to build an end-to-end solution. We look at different brands like GE Lighting, which already have a strong presence in the home segment. They want to compete in the space of home security. Their pain point was there was no software stack that provided the backend infrastructure. That would have taken them close to two years and $5 million to $8 million.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Janam Mehta, Partner of Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Have you invested in a PaaS company?

Janam Mehta: Purple.com is an e-commerce platform company. Healthflix is a very good example. They’re an EMR. They use data to help pharma with their research and give them insights. That’s a very good example of aggregating data from SaaS and making it a platform business.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not very easy to get platform companies to go to market as platform companies before Series A.

Thought Leaders in Artificial Intelligence: Yamin Durrani, CEO of Kami Vision (Part 1)

This discussion explores the cutting-edge use cases in Computer Vision across Home, Health, Retail, etc. Excellent perspective on viable GTM strategies.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to yourself as well as to Kami Vision.

Yamin Durrani: I’m the CEO of Kami Vision. The company started in the US in August 2020. We focus on providing AI services across the globe.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Janam Mehta, Partner of Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Campus Fund and JSW Ventures.

Janam Mehta: JSW Ventures is a $40 million fund. We’re largely Series A focused. We do up to $2 million in the first check and around $4 million throughout the life of an investment. We are largely SaaS and platform focused covering enterprise health, consumer, finance, and agricultural industries. We are not a corporate venture capital. JSW is an anchor LP in the fund, but we’ve raised institutional capital. 20% to 30% comes from the general family of the JSW group. They are the largest steel manufacturers in India. They’re increasingly getting into different industries.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evan Zimmerman, Chairman of Jovono (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another example. You’re doing a very good job of illustrating what attracts you. Keep going. Let’s do a couple of examples.

Evan Zimmerman: Zeekit is another company we invested in. We led the Series A with some friends of ours. We co-led their Series A which was their last round of investment before they sold to Walmart for over $200 million. They had a SaaS business that was growing quickly and had a number of really prominent customers.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Janam Mehta, Partner of Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: The other trend that is equally interesting are companies that are being built in India facing the Indian market. The FinTech sector is a really interesting sector. The health tech sector is really interesting. The EdTech is really interesting. They are crowded, but that is bound to happen in a booming market. With time, it will become clear which ones make it.

Of course, there is a unicorn mania going on. There is a lot of excessive funding. I don’t believe that just the ones that are going to get the maximum amount of funding are going to be the ones that are going to win those spaces. They have an advantage which is a capital advantage. They also have a disadvantage of not having the discipline in how to manage cash. We’ll see how all that plays out. Right now, there’s a correction going on. The bottom line is, there is movement.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evan Zimmerman, Chairman of Jovono (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the geography focus?

Evan Zimmerman: We mostly invest in the US but we actually have done a number of deals outside. The people who invest in the US primarily do so for a few reasons. For some people, it’s because they don’t feel that they can understand the local market. There are also some logistical and legal considerations. We’ve done a number of deals in Israel and UK. You’re seeing a lot more funds going to Latin America, but we haven’t done a deal yet.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Janam Mehta, Partner of Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures (Part 1)

Janam Mehta, Partner at Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures, discusses the progress of the Indian startup ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about a bit of your background as well as what are you up to with the investments.