Sramana Mitra: Let me ask you what you are seeing and how you’re processing this exception, which is usage-based pricing, right? SaaS became so popular because it was subscription pricing, and subscription business models are very attractive to investors, whether it’s public market investors or private market investors. It’s extremely popular because of its predictability and the fact that it’s recurring.
>>>Manu Rekhi, Managing Director at Inventus Capital Partners, discusses his firm’s AI investment thesis.
>>>Sramana Mitra: I see. I’m going to go a little bit to a 30,000-foot level and ask you to comment on what else you’re seeing in India that we should keep in our vision, in terms of trends or developments or concerns. What’s going on?
>>>Sramana Mitra: Interesting. I gave a talk recently at Kellogg about Indian startups: Past, Present, and Future. The recording will be available soon. We’ll publish it and you can take a look. One of the things I said is that India has this background in the services industry; the services industry came out of low-end services, BPO, et cetera. But now with human-in-the loop AI services, wherever there is a do-it-for-me scenario, this is actually to India’s advantage, especially if the services can be done from India.
>>>Sramana Mitra: What have you invested in that has passed all these diligence tests and emerged as something that looks like it could stand on its own without getting blindsided.
>>>Sramana Mitra: Deep domain knowledge is where a lot of those exit barriers come from, right?
>>>Sramana Mitra: Yes. When you see these deals that are starting to find some velocity early on and coming to you with that as one of the proof points, what are you seeing? What kind of go-to-markets are you seeing that are giving them this kind of velocity? I understand that it takes fewer people to build software right now because of all these AI copilots and this and that.
>>>Sramana Mitra: When you say you write the Series A checks, what are you looking for in the ventures that you’re willing to come in at the Series A? Let’s start with your specialty, which is worldwide B2B SaaS.
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