1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj, General Partner at BGV (Part 1)

Yash Hemaraj is General Partner at BGV, and Founding Partner at Arka Venture Labs. This is a very interesting discussion that goes into the nuances of high velocity Positioning and Go To Market strategies.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Nexus Venture Partners (Part 6)

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 about how you structure these deals. You’re getting in at almost an R&D level.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Nexus Venture Partners (Part 5)

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.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Nexus Venture Partners (Part 3)

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 has completely changed. AI has become one of the top budget items in the enterprise IT expenditure.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Nexus Venture Partners (Part 2)

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 lot of history of usage that has built up and some of that has started to monetize. There’s a little bit of a monetization model that is starting to emerge. Even if it hadn’t emerged yet, if there is substantial usage and value creation, there is a tried-and-true path of monetizing commercial open source in a freemium mode, where basically people start with free and then become premium.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jishnu Bhattacharjee, Managing Partner at Nexus Venture Partners (Part 1)

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.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Sailesh Ramakrishnan, Managing Partner at Rocketship.vc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Very interesting. All right, so now I’m gonna switch back to the more usual way I do the AI investment thesis discussion, which is to ask you about your firm’s perspective about AI investments and how are you thinking about it? What is your investment thesis in AI?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Sailesh Ramakrishnan, Managing Partner at Rocketship.vc (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So could you double click on your AI algorithm of finding companies and give us a case study of a company that you found with that algorithm? What were the heuristics of how you found this and what were you looking for? How did the algorithm find what you were looking for? How did it go about developing that relationship and finally investing in that company?