1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Darshana Zaveri of Catalyst Health Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the go-to market strategy for this company? What is your investment thesis around go-to market strategies? You mentioned early on that these companies don’t necessarily go to market on their own.

Darshana Zaveri: This company did exit. It was bought out in 2018 by Boston Scientific. We did the seed round and led the Series A. We had a new investor come in to lead the Series B.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Darshana Zaveri of Catalyst Health Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? You’re based in the Boston area. Where do you like to invest?

Darshana Zaveri: We’re pretty broad across the US. We’re a very small team ourselves. We’re two Managing Partners and a few folks in the back office. We tend to be New England focused just because of our location and where we tend to operate.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Darshana Zaveri of Catalyst Health Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Darshana Zaveri was recorded in April 2020.

Darshana Zaveri, Managing Partner at Catalyst Health Ventures, discusses the firm’s medical device-focused investment thesis, including the nuances of epidemiologic diagnostics that are currently immensely relevant. The Catalyst investment team also includes Managing Partner Josh Phillips and Principal Neil Swami.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures (Part 3)

Shruti Gandhi: The reason we don’t talk about our fund size is because of LP issues. We are a smaller fund. Those smaller exits are great for us in terms of returning the capital.

Oftentimes when you start a company and you’re thinking about a $15 million exit, that could be your ceiling in some ways. You figure out the market is too crowded and then you say, “If I raise another round, will I price myself out of an acquisition conversation?”

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You don’t need them to finish the product?

Shruti Gandhi: No. One of our companies barely had a deck.

Sramana Mitra: You want customer validation from their network. Then you want to take that concept and shop it around in your relevant network. If all that checks out, you’re okay with writing a check for the product to be built.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Shruti Gandhi was recorded in March 2020.

Shruti Gandhi is General Partner and Founding Engineer, Array Ventures, a fund focused on deep tech, enterprise-facing ventures.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Carbonara of Citi Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Just broadening the line of questioning, could you talk a bit about what your analysis of the current FinTech market? Where are the key opportunities?

Matt Carbonara: Payments moving into different parts of the ecosystem is one trend. You can think about verticalized SaaS companies with an element of payments becoming part of them.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Carbonara of Citi Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot of stuff that you said that we can double-click down on. Can you talk us through a case study of a company that you’ve invested that found significant go-to market leverage through the Citi customer base?

Matt Carbonara: There’s a company that we’re invested in called High Radius. They factor and use algorithms to match up payables and receivables for a company and the company’s partners. That’s an area where we’re partnered and selling our product together.