1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I am going to start double-clicking down on your AI investments. Vertical AI is something that we have seen a lot. I have one specific question that I want to stick around with you for a bit.

You may have read my PaaS article. For those of you who are listening and who may have not read the article, my thesis on PaaS is as follows: You have an AI SaaS company starting with a particular use case – a particular functional domain. They have a whole stack underneath that is often opened up as a platform to build up other verticals and functions.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Eric Benhamou is Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on where you are in terms of the fund. What fund are you on? What is the size of the fund? What is the fund strategy now?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How big is Viola’s current fund?

Daniel Cohen: We have a few funds at Viola. We have a venture fund and a growth fund. Overall, we manage $3 billion, which is a big number for Israel for sure. I focus my time on the venture’s early-stage side. The early-stage side is about $1 billion under management and five funds of $200 million each. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 1)

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

Daniel Cohen, General partner at Viola Ventures, discusses AI, PaaS, and deep tech investments.

Sramana Mitra: We have known each other for ten years. We have observed the industry for a very long time. We often have guests with whom we’ve had long relationships.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When you back these seed-stage companies, what are you looking for? It’s not inexpensive to build like this, so are you writing checks on a concept based on the background and domain expertise of the entrepreneurs? 

Ken Elefant: Most of our investments in Sorenson Ventures are pre-revenue. It could just be an entrepreneur with two or three folks with them. We are carte blanched to invest up to $5 million in ARR, so sometimes our investments have a little bit more. We are typically lead or co-lead in all of our investments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: On your point on needing smart engineers to do things, it has always been my observation that there are only a finite number of those people. We need abstractions and we need ways to enable and equip people who are not these really smart engineers.

This is one of the reasons why I find PaaS to be an interesting trend. It enables a large body of developers to develop stuff and things on top of stacks that they don’t necessarily need to build. You don’t need to be that savvy to be able to build a product and build a solution to problems. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When you are investing in such companies that are supplemental to other ecosystems like the Zendesk ecosystem and others, are they getting substantial support from those ecosystems?

In the case of Salesforce, they have a marketplace in AppExchange and Zendesk has been trying to support the ecosystem as well. What is the experience of company building for such a company that has other players that already have a significant presence in the market?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ken Elefant, Partner and Co-Founder at Sorenson Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Basically, the company can access each enterprise on their different levels of vulnerability and then present that as an opening part of the sales cycle.

Ken Elefant: They have invented this space called Attack Servers Management. They could go into an enterprise and quickly bring up an analysis that shows the vulnerabilities.