Roundtable Recap: April 1 – Virtual Companies Becoming Ubiquitous

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sumant Mandal, Co-founder and Managing Partner at March Capital. Sumant emphasized the impact of Covid on virtual companies and remote teams and discussed his investment thesis.

VXPass

As for our entrepreneur pitch, we had Zachary Weiner from Miami, Florida, pitch VXPass, a digital record service for Covid vaccination and testing.

Resource

Next, we had David Casey from Berkeley, California, pitch Resource, a cryptocurrency based barter marketplace.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I encountered Platform.sh a couple of years ago. I haven’t talked to them since, but it’s good to hear that they are thinking in this direction. I’ll look into that closely and see what additional coverage that deserves. Please go ahead and give us another example. 

Eric Benhamou: I have a more recent example. We had an investment that was just announced last week. It’s a young company called Evinced. They focus on an important emerging problem called digital accessibility. Websites have to be digitally accessible to everybody and that includes people with physical impairment.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Cohen, General Partner at Viola Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In the first one that you talked about where you are doing transcription, what vertical applications are you going after? 

Daniel Cohen: Most of their revenue comes out of the education industry. These are online courses that need to be transcribed. That market has been growing so fast because of COVID. Everything is happening online. That has been their main market. They are also operating in the legal market, which is a large market as well. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I have another question along those lines. When you are doing AI, typically machine learning and large data sets are involved, what are you seeing in your portfolio or deal flow in how entrepreneurs are accessing that data?

You are talking about taking the technology risks out, but you need data to take the technology risk out in AI companies. What are the best practices that you are observing in your orbit? 

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.

522nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Laurel Touby, Supernode Ventures

Laurel Touby, Managing Director of Supernode Ventures, talks about pre-seed investing in Latin America.

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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.