1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anupam Rastogi, General Partner of Emergent Ventures (Part 3)

Anupam Rastogi: I’ll talk about a more recent investment. They’re in the privacy space. They’re helping developers develop code that is more privacy-friendly. There are a lot of these regulations including GDPR in Europe where you need to be careful about what data is being stored, how it’s being stored and processes. Developers have to manually think about that.

This company has built a set of scanners to understand the privacy implications. That has a lot of intelligence around understanding what libraries are getting called. We co-led the seed round there. This was more in the pilot stage. We connected them to several people from our network who are close to the space, we sat through some of those meetings and got a good handle that this seemed like a wide need.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anupam Rastogi, General Partner of Emergent Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you elaborate on what it would take for you to do the concept stage? We see very few investors who do the concept stage.

Anupam Rastogi: Along with the other criteria, we are looking to see how much market development the founder has done. We come across entrepreneurs who have gone to 20 to 50 customers and they have processed that information in a structured manner. It’s not just based on just one empirical experience. It’s often based on 20 to 50 people.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anupam Rastogi, General Partner of Emergent Ventures (Part 1)

Anupam Rastogi is General Partner at Emergent Ventures, a firm focused on B-to-B tech investments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by getting you acquainted with our audience. Talk a bit about how you position your fund. Before that, give a little bit of your own background too.

Anupam Rastogi: I’ve been in the technology space for a very long time now. I studied Computer Science back in the 90s. I grew up in India and came over to the US. I started a career on the operating side, research, and then product management at larger companies and a couple of startups. These stints eventually had good outcomes.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Baumel, Managing Director of Ohio Innovation Fund (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: It’s great to hear about all these activities. We have seen many ecosystems come up through our work. We try to cover a lot of these companies. Utah is a very good example. They’re a bit ahead of you, because they’ve had sizable exits. That has created angels and seed money. Ohio probably has better bridges with New York than with Silicon Valley.

Also now, things have changed in Silicon Valley. As you know, people used to only want to invest in local companies. That is not the case now. Investors are happy to invest in companies as long as the business models are proven and are venture-scale business models. The globalization of entrepreneurship is in full swing right now. It’s wonderful.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Baumel, Managing Director of Ohio Innovation Fund (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You said earlier that your preferred funding round is Series A where you put in a million or so in that round. In some cases, you do some seed investment. Could you talk about how Ohio entrepreneurs are getting to Series A? Is there a seed ecosystem that is supporting or is there more of a bootstrapping tendency or bootstrapping culture that is going straight to Series A?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Baumel, Managing Director of Ohio Innovation Fund (Part 1)

Bill Baumel, Managing Director at Ohio Innovation Fund, is one of the pioneers of the Ohio startup ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some introduction to where you are with your work with Ohio Innovation Fund. What’s happening in Ohio as an ecosystem?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrus Oks, Founding Partner of Tera Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The other advantage you have is, there is a substantial enterprise software buyer market in Europe as well. The Indian buyer market is not as mature. Europe has lots of large enterprises that buy a lot of technology. You could build a substantial business catering to European enterprise customers. That’s one observation.

The second one is that language is an issue in Europe more than in India. In India, the business operates mostly in English. There’s a bit more of a language issue in Europe. English is, not necessarily, the lingua franca of Europe. In your region, English is more of the lingua franca.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrus Oks, Founding Partner of Tera Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How do the Estonian culture and entrepreneurial momentum play into your investment strategy? Are you looking for people to have developer shops in Estonia or some kind of backend in Estonia?

Andrus Oks: Estonia is very special. To put in context, it is a small country with a population of 1.3 million. We actually have 10 Estonian unicorns. Last year, it was more than a billion dollars in investment. This year, it’s already more than a billion dollars. This is very helpful. We achieved this quite fast as well.