Sramana Mitra: Just know, I have a slightly different question on capitalization of these companies. So you talk about these two kids from MIT who are commercializing their PhD thesis, I guess. You have this CalTech professor who’s commercializing his work in the domain of drug discovery using AI. Talk to me a little bit
Sramana Mitra: Other than H2O.ai, have you invested in any other open source AI companies since? Jishnu Bhattacharjee: We have invested in over twenty AI companies. Sramana Mitra: Talk about some of them. How are you thinking about what to invest in? Do some case studies.
Sramana Mitra: I think it depends on what timescale we are talking about because inside the enterprise, whatever application that you bring in, whether it’s non AI or AI, now everything is kind of in the AI domain. There are three things to consider – domain-specific understanding of what’s happening in that enterprise which includes domain-specific
Sramana Mitra: Since the hype cycle has been so rapid, enterprise and business buyers have made AI a priority now, which was not the case, right? When you started doing H2O, it was not that case. It was much more niche, much more selective, and much more difficult to get the buyer attention, and that
Sramana Mitra: Let me synthesize this point for our audience. In startups that are going the open source route, including non-AI startups, what is great is that developers with insights put something out there in the open source realm and start getting usage. Then, by the time they go out for investment, often there’s a
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Nexus Venture Partners, has been investing in AI startups for over a decade. This is an excellent and insightful discussion about his AI investment thesis.
Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Nexus Venture Partners, has been investing in AI startups for over a decade. This is an excellent and insightful discussion about his AI investment thesis.
Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Jishnu Battacharjee was recorded in November 2019. Jishnu Bhattacharjee is Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners, a fundamentals-focused firm that aligns with the 1Mby1M philosophy. Jishnu takes us through several examples of