1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures (Part 3)

Shruti Gandhi: The reason we don’t talk about our fund size is because of LP issues. We are a smaller fund. Those smaller exits are great for us in terms of returning the capital.

Oftentimes when you start a company and you’re thinking about a $15 million exit, that could be your ceiling in some ways. You figure out the market is too crowded and then you say, “If I raise another round, will I price myself out of an acquisition conversation?”

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You don’t need them to finish the product?

Shruti Gandhi: No. One of our companies barely had a deck.

Sramana Mitra: You want customer validation from their network. Then you want to take that concept and shop it around in your relevant network. If all that checks out, you’re okay with writing a check for the product to be built.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shruti Gandhi of Array 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 Shruti Gandhi was recorded in March 2020.

Shruti Gandhi is General Partner and Founding Engineer, Array Ventures, a fund focused on deep tech, enterprise-facing ventures.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Carbonara of Citi Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Just broadening the line of questioning, could you talk a bit about what your analysis of the current FinTech market? Where are the key opportunities?

Matt Carbonara: Payments moving into different parts of the ecosystem is one trend. You can think about verticalized SaaS companies with an element of payments becoming part of them.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Carbonara of Citi Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: There’s a lot of stuff that you said that we can double-click down on. Can you talk us through a case study of a company that you’ve invested that found significant go-to market leverage through the Citi customer base?

Matt Carbonara: There’s a company that we’re invested in called High Radius. They factor and use algorithms to match up payables and receivables for a company and the company’s partners. That’s an area where we’re partnered and selling our product together. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Matt Carbonara of Citi 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 Matt Carbonara was recorded in March 2020.

Matt Carbonara, Managing Director at Citi Ventures, discusses the fund’s activities and focus.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepak Jeevankumar of Dell Technologies Capital (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In a cyber security startup, I don’t think anybody other than the founder who’s the product visionary can close those deals with the first few customers. Only a founder who has deep enough knowledge of the product and space can position on the fly.

Let’s talk about a couple more case studies of companies that you’ve invested in that you’re particularly excited about. What do we learn from that? What do we learn about trends? In the enterprise, where are we going?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashish Jain of 3Lines Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to do another example?

Ashish Jain: Let’s take one from India. I would not even call it emerging anymore. India is going through Innovation 3.0. 1.0 was around business process outsourcing. 2.0 was around IT services companies.

These founders are looking beyond replicating. They are looking into supply chain, platforms for IoT, automation. Arzooo is one of them. They are ex-Flipkart employees. They saw an opportunity to digitalize the supply chain for B2B retail. They are executing it perfectly.