From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What did you do next?

Valon Xhafa: I wanted to start something else. I wanted to build something from scratch. I tried to use different matchmaking platforms for co-founders. I met my co-founder. We matched. I liked his profile. He was doing his Ph.D. in behavioral science. He was talking about how you can incentivize customers in online stores to make specific decisions.

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From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There were two things that you talked about in this case study. One is there are so many developers out there who want to be entrepreneurs. Very often, they don’t know which problem to solve or they don’t have the domain knowledge.

In your case, you went to this media accelerator and met journalists who had a problem they wanted to solve. This enmeshing of non-technical domain knowledge and a technical person creates very interesting company opportunities. That’s one way developers can become entrepreneurs.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 4)

Naganand Doraswamy: The fourth one is, we want to ensure that we have visibility for $10 million to $15 million. One of the thesis we have in the fund is to enable sub-$100 million exits for product innovation companies in India. If you want to get a $70 million to $100 million exit, you should have $10 million to $15 million in revenue.

Unlike large funds, our goal is, can you become a $10 million to $15 million company. You have an option when you get to that point. We stay with our companies until that point. Our fund can’t participate in Series B. Then we’ll make a call on whether we should exit or stay partially. If we decide to exit, that’s when we help the founders exit.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Our observation is that all deep tech out of India is going to be global companies, even the non-enterprise facing. What we are seeing though is people can validate with customers in India. They can get a dozen customers, get the product validated, get some revenue before coming out to the Valley. Especially in COVID, entrepreneurs love the fact that people are willing to buy without meeting them.

Best of Bootstrapping: Bootstrapping Evenica by Piggybacking

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

Evenica CEO Sadek Ali has built an e-commerce platform company for the mid-market within the Microsoft ecosystem. Read on to learn more.

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?

Sadek Ali: I was born in Canada. I grew up there. Most of my adult life has been spent here.

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Roundtable Recap: March 31 – Plug Your Methodology Gaps

During this week’s roundtable, we worked with two startups, both of whom need to plug some methodology gaps.

KwiKBio

First up, Justin Lancaster from Barnard, Vermont, pitched KwiKBio, a solution for citizan scientists to participate in biomedical research.

Bixpand

Next up, VJ and Sudipta Das from San Ramon, California, pitched Bixpand, a competitor to Zoho and Hubspot.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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From Developer to 2-Time Successful AI Entrepreneur with Exits: Behamics CEO Valon Xhafa (Part 1)

Valon is a software developer who made a successful transition to an entrepreneur and had a quick exit with his first venture.

His second venture is already at $5M+ in revenues with just a pre-seed round of financing. This venture, Behemics, has already received two acquisition offers. Fabulous story!

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the check size that you like to write?

Naganand Doraswamy: When we started the first fund, we said anywhere around $500K to $750K. Then we would participate with another $500K in the following round. The target was about $1.25 million per company. The second is double the size.

We’re looking at $2.5 million total per company. The first check can be anywhere from $750,000 to $1.75 million. We realized that our companies needed a little bit more runway to show the traction necessary to raise the next round. $1.25 million is too small an amount to make some decisions in companies.