1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy of Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: One question that arises from this discussion that I would like to explore is, how do you view long sales cycle enterprise deals? It sounds like the kind of technology that you like the most are these deep technologies catering to large enterprise customers where there is typically a long sales cycle.

If you’re doing little deals, you can get into some amount of recurring revenue quickly. You can start showing MRR.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy of Mobile Foundation Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What sized checks do you write?

Karthee Madasamy: Right now, we write between $1 million and $3 million. We may go up to $4 million. We keep about one-to-one reserve for follow-on. We can lead a round. For larger Series A’s, we follow. 

Sramana Mitra: If it’s a $1 million check, you can do that yourself?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Karthee Madasamy of Mobile Foundation 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 Karthee Madasamy was recorded in December 2019.

Karthee Madasamy is Founder and Managing Partner at Mobile Foundation Ventures. He discusses issues related to startups selling deep tech to enterprises.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan of Emergent Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: When they started Observe.ai and when you wrote your first check, they did not have yet a product?

Alok Nandan: They were building something else when they met us. Over the course of the next six months, they iterated and pivoted and eventually arrived at this idea. Initially, we wrote them a small check and then we doubled-down over the course of a year. It was an extended dating period. At the same time, we were actively helping them ideate.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan of Emergent Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: FinTech is a segment where there aren’t a lot of humans in the loop. One of the great benefits that AI is delivering within FinTech is pre-approved loans within 30 seconds.

Alok Nandan: You’re absolutely right. If it falls within a certain range, then it will automatically get approved. Humans may only get pulled in when there are exceptions to the rule. You can still do some of that fast processing. The human is not reviewing every outcome that the model is doing. It’s only reviewing the exceptions.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan of Emergent Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do you define seed in your world view? I’m sure you’re watching this trend out there. The seed has fragmented. It’s pre-seed, seed, post-seed, pre-Series A, small Series A, large Series A. Where in that continuum have you positioned yourself?

Alok Nandan: You’re absolutely right. There’s a lot of noise around what exactly is seed. Our viewpoint is, if you think about the entrepreneur’s journey, the first round tends to be their own capital or some friends and family. Then there is a large gap to get to a Series A.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan of Emergent Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit about trends. If you look at the last 18 months of your deal flow, what are you spotting?

Alok Nandan: One of the big trends is AI. The next trend is around the explainability or accountability of AI. How do you make sure that the machine learning models are explainable to a human being? That is an important trend which will apply to most of our portfolio companies as well as other companies out there.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan of Emergent 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 Alok Nandan was recorded in September 2019.

Alok Nandan, General Partner at Emergent Ventures (USA), discusses explainable AI in the context of his fund’s investment focus.