1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 1)

Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital, discusses how he is thinking about investing in AI. There’s a lot of confusion around AI right now. The hype is astronomical. Amidst this noisy environment, we’re trying to bring you some signal, some wisdom.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So let me double click down on the second one. I will come to the picks and shovels in a moment, but my observation is that to build a vertical application on top of an LLM, you obviously need to train in domain specific data. Now, there is a benefit to kind of constraining that model. You can tell me more technically how much of this is viable and how are people doing it. If you constrain the model to a small language model, the hallucination problem should go away or at least get much more manageable. Is that a correct statement?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 1)

Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital, talks about his AI investment thesis. It’s a wonderful discussion that not only entrepreneurs should listen to, but investors should also listen in to calibrate their own investment thesis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You must have seen in the media how we’ve advocated very, very seriously bootstrapped startups. As a forum, we have legitimized bootstrapped startups. So today bootstrap startups take a lot of pride. Ten years ago, the bootstrapped startups used to apologize for being bootstrapped startups. Today, they don’t.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a simpler question. Are these all B to B companies – businesses selling to hospitals or insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies?

Julien Pham: Oh, we do a little bit of everything. We have a few B to C, B to B, or B to B to C companies because end user oftentimes is the patient. If you remember, one of our important screening criteria of the quintuple aim is, how does it improve outcomes for patients? So we want to make sure that it somehow touches patients.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So in that context, what companies have you invested in and what’s going on?

Julien Pham: Yeah. So for Fund One, we’ve invested in 15 companies so far. We’re probably going to invest in another two or three before we kind of wrap up the investment period for Fund One and start investing out of Fund Two. But out of the 15 companies we’ve invested in since 2021, 11 of them are squarely into digital health across different sectors or conditions like mental health and maternal health.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Exactly, and the other thing on your empathy question, the fundamental issue around AI is that why is it even necessary for us to replace all healthcare with AI? It’s really powerful. Where AI is really capable and powerful is in diagnostics and non-siloed diagnostics.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So let me comment on that. I would like to double click down on some of your companies, but on the broad level, I’m very bullish about education as well. I’m extremely bullish about healthcare, no question and AI in healthcare. But the trouble in education is that in the short to medium term, I think there is tremendous potential in education. Especially personalized tutoring is something I’m very, very excited and bullish about. Salman Khan is giving lots of talks about what he is doing with Khanmigo. I think personalized tutoring is an incredible opportunity.