Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So, Series C is the last round of funding, or is there more?

Building a Venture Scale FinTech SaaS Startup: Mike Whitmire, co-founder and CEO of FloQast (Part 1)

Mike has raised over $300M and built an over $250M ARR FinTech SaaS business. Now, AI offers FloQast an opportunity to further strengthen their product roadmap with deep domain knowledge.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Last question—when you write a pre-seed check, what do you want to see in the company?

Nick Davidov: In the founder. At pre-seed, it’s often just one or two founders and maybe an idea.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s come back to the wrapper question. You started off by saying Perplexity is a wrapper on top of other LLMs.

Nick Davidov: Yes. Perplexity is actually very lean. If you compare how much money they raised, they haven’t spent much of it. They still have the majority in the bank. That’s their superpower.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Marina and Nick Davidov, DVC (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’re not the only ones who invest only in repeat founders. Most of the venture capital industry does the same. It’s very hard for first-time founders to raise money because of that. We help a lot of first-time founders, and it’s a real challenge.

Let’s go deeper into your AI investment thesis with a more specific question.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Vinit Bhansali, Takshil Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. I’m sure you hear this in AI conversations in particular. This conversation today hasn’t been as AI-heavy as usual, but in those discussions, domain knowledge comes up a lot.

People who can extract real value from enterprise AI and workflow are those with deep domain knowledge. They understand what’s happening and where they can add value by working through those processes.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Vinit Bhansali, Takshil Venture Partners (Part 1)

Vinit Bhansali, Founder and General Partner at Takshil Venture Partners, discusses how his firm is investing in India.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: Alex Benik, Encoded Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So the real question then is, in the vintage that you are currently investing in, that’s going to start maturing in the five- to seven-year period, AI is also maturing greatly when it comes to acquisitions. It complicates the build versus buy question quite a lot, right?