1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: You invest in both healthcare IT and cybersecurity and your partners invest more in the life sciences angle of it.

Dafina Toncheva: Correct. I actually invest in cybersecurity and enterprise applications, mostly business process automation for various verticals.

Sramana Mitra: I know everybody is talking about AI and Blockchain. If you look at the last 18 months of what you’ve seen, are there nuggets that you could share that are overriding trends?

Dafina Toncheva: It’s a difficult question to answer because it’s broad. It depends on the angle. First of all, there’s a lot of deal flow. The seed >>>

423rd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Krishna Srinivasan, LiveOak Venture Partners

Krishna Srinivasan is Founding General Partner at LiveOak Venture Partners, a firm focused on investing in Texas. Great conversation!

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s build on that and understand your geographical preferences. Are you investing only in Silicon Valley or are you investing more broadly?

Dafina Toncheva: When it comes to cybersecurity, we like Israel a lot. It’s an area that we have been investing in for 20 years.

Sramana Mitra: There are lots of great security companies in Israel.

Dafina Toncheva: We invest in Israel but most of our investments are in the United States. Within the United States, we have made investments in the Valley, LA, New York, Atlanta, and Utah. I’ll tell you one thing. I, more and more, like companies out of the Valley, especially companies that >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alexander Ross of Illuminate Financial (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: These are banks in the UK? What kind of banks are we talking about?

Alexander Ross: These are tier-one and tier-two European and US banks. What we find is that given that every company that speaks to us will likely get an introduction to one of our bank partners if they’re relevant or one of our strategic investors, an increasing number of companies want to remain engaged with us and refer companies to us. About 70% to 80% of our pipeline is inbound at the moment across our strategic investors and strategic bank partners. The rest comes from conferences, outbound-themed outreach.

Sramana Mitra: What do you see as the trends emerging from the B2B FinTech space? How would you synthesize that?

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I don’t know if you have seen it on our blog. We have a Thought Leaders in Cyber Security series. Ray has actually been on it. He’s running a company these days. In that series, one of the questions that comes up a lot is, if you put yourself in the shoes of a CISO, you have to make decisions about which vendors to work with.

There are hundreds of vendors coming in with hundreds of point solutions. It’s really a complicated job. Let’s say your portfolio company in security, it’s very difficult to get these meetings. How are your companies dealing with this? What are you advising your companies to do?

Dafina Toncheva: That’s a very good point. That goes back to me saying that there’re thousands of companies with a similar marketing message. >>>

422nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Nihal Mehta, ENIAC Ventures

Nihal Mehta, Founding General Partner at ENIAC Ventures, provides a great set of insights into his definition of a full stack founding team. Either a set of co-founders who cover all the requisite skill-sets, or a solo founder who is a full-stack person – both configurations can work. Listen to the discussion for more color on the topic.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Dafina Toncheva of US Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: One small detail question. One of the issues of the current venture capital ecosystem is that Series A financing has become larger. A class of VCs has developed that does the smaller Series A checks. Then you are doing the traditional venture capital. You want to put in $5 million to $10 million. If an entrepreneur just wants $5 million Series A, would you do that round fully as a solo investor?

Dafina Toncheva: Yes. I would love that. I think the appropriate amount of capital keeps everyone disciplined and makes them more focused on achieving milestones that will set the company up for success for the next round. We will definitely lead a Series A financing that is on the smaller side. We’ve led a Series A financing as small as $4 million.

These things have changed quite a bit. What used to be a traditional Series A now edges towards a large seed. What used to be the seed, now is >>>

421st 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Evangelos Simoudis, Synapse Partners

Evangelos Simoudis, Founder and Managing Director at Synapse Partners, takes us on a deep dive into AI investing.

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