1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures (Part 1)

Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures, discusses the Europe – US bridge for tech startups.

Sramana Mitra: Your name is so interesting. It seems like there is a whole story in your name and your firm’s name. Do you want to start with a little bit of background?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: There is one question that I want to ask you today. In the deal flow that you are seeing and your analysis of the market, what are some open problems that you have identified where you are looking for deep tech teams to solve those problems? Are there any that you are looking to invest in?

Karthee Madasamy: We are more thematic than very tight thesis-driven. We look for large deep tech-related transformations in traditional industries like automotive, manufacturing, agriculture, and biology. We don’t try to figure out the exact market problem. We let the entrepreneurs bring that to us. They are the ones on the ground looking at the problem.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: In the scenarios where are you doing deep tech and you need to bring in a CEO to manage a tech-savvy team going after an interesting market opportunity, what nuggets or lessons from the trenches can you offer as guidance to our audience?

Karthee Madasamy: It’s a hard question. I sympathize with you. It’s not easy to bring in an outside CEO. Oftentimes, it’s not the right fit. It’s just a theoretical fit. It doesn’t work a lot of the times. The first thing you need to be clear about is what the need of the company is and then bring in a person who is going to solve that. The immediate response is bringing in a salesperson. For me and the companies, being only sales-focused does not happen for a long time. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: We have been doing 1Mby1M for over a decade and with our experience, technical founders can be taught the business side. I would say that the biggest achievement of 1Mby1M is teaching technical founders this accelerated mini-MBA that gives them all the pieces that they need to put things into perspective at least for that early stage.

In a deep tech deal, you are going to spend quite a bit of time just building the product and talking to customers to figure out what products you are doing. You don’t gain anything by bringing in a salesperson at that point. It is a founder-led sales process at that point. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on deep tech and seed investing in 2021. What check sizes are you writing and what does a team need to have in place for you to be willing to write that first check?

Karthee Madasamy: We invest between Seed and Series A. A lot of our stuff is with Series A. We selectively do seed, post-seed, or pre-Series A. Our check sizes range from $500,000 to $3 million. Our seed is probably $1 million to $2 million, but we’ve also done $3 million and $500,000. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Your portfolio is almost entirely enterprise-focused companies, right? You do B2B enterprise businesses?

Karthee Madasamy: That is correct. 

Sramana Mitra: Let me underscore what you are saying. When we started getting into this COVID mode of doing business, the buyers were not used to buying technology just based on a Zoom meeting. This is true unless it is a small deal size telesales-oriented sales flow.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy, Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 1)

Karthee Madasamy is the Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures. We discuss the nuances of Deep Tech investing.

Sramana Mitra: Karthee has been here before. We are going to catch up and level set on how COVID has been and how the ecosystem around us is evolving. Welcome back. It’s great to see you. 

Karthee Madasamy: It’s great to see you too. Thank you. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jon Staenberg, Managing Partner at Staenberg Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Would you write the term sheet? Would you lead?

Jon Staenberg: I used to a lot. At this point, I am not. To help in a situation, I would rather see a focused institutional firm. For me, pricing is not the signal that I want to give to the market. I would like to find the furthest focus on that particular category, startup, or stage to price it so that people can get behind that where I can say, “Okay, they have done deep due diligence. They are going to be really involved. Let’s see what the market bears are saying.”

I don’t have good stats to back this up, but valuations have been all over the map. Compared to when I was pricing rounds, I still get a little heartache over valuations. I was asked to price recently and I thought that I was way too high. I said that I was going to invest, I liked the people a lot. It ended up rebounding amazingly and the price was higher.