1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your portfolio. What have you invested in? What’s interesting? Take a few highlights of your portfolio and walk us through what they are, why you’ve invested in them, and what is the thought process.

Nitin Pachisia: We’ve made 18 investments in two and a half years, which is reflective of our pace of about 8 to 10 investments per year. I believe we’re seeing about 1,500 companies a year but we like to maintain that pace to be able to dedicate enough time to every company we invest in.

In terms of the some of the examples of portfolio companies, we have a company in the driverless trucking space called Starsky Robotics. They are not the typical full autonomous company. They went through phases. They first looked at the remotely-manned trucks which gave them the data advantage to automate trucks on freeways and, hopefully in time, inroads. This is a company led by an American citizen and someone from India. That’s a company that’s moving fast.

Another one is in applied AI called Pluto. That was our very first investment. The founder has published seven or eight books on artificial intelligence. He’s a well-known blogger in the space. He’s done several TedX talks. They have taken something very elementary in the water infrastructure world where every piece of equipment is monitored and connected.

There is a ton of data throughout the infrastructure except what they’ve not been able to do is use that data towards a meaningful outcome such as preventing accidents or reducing energy consumptions. Energy makes 32% of operating cost in that world. Here’s a company that uses deep learning to save water and reduce the cost of water. It’s not something that you usually hear about.

Similarly, we have a few other examples of applied AI companies. Some of these have even created their own sensor technology to capture a very unique form of data, and now they can use that to derive something that was, prior to them, not available. For example, taking the ultra wide band radar data, which is noise waves and converting them into machine vision to be able to map indoors. That’s something that gives you the precision of a camera with the privacy of a motion sensor. That’s the missing piece when you think of indoor automation.

We’re seeing a lot of those sensor-enabled data which when you apply deep learning on them, gives you a whole new way of approaching the problem. Our last investment is in space tech. They’re using optical transmitters deployed on microstats to monitor methane gas emissions throughout the world. Methane is one of the top contributors to global warming. There’s a human sustainable earth element to it and it makes a lot of business sense because methane is a valuable gas. Companies want to capture it.

Also there are penalties and costs of not being able to monitor and capture it. Those are some examples of some of the portfolio companies on the consumer side. One of our portfolio companies is Lily. It’s basically taking a perception engine approach to understanding the emotional and perceptive side of the shoppers and then using that to help them discover the right products.

It’s not so much about what you want to buy than showing the most personalized experience of what you want to buy. Let’s understand why you’re looking to buy something so that we can come to the right path on what you should be looking at.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. Have you had any exits yet?

Nitin Pachisia: It’s too early for that. If we had any exits, they won’t be big ones. We just started two and a half years ago and we’re investing at pre-seed stage. So, no exits yet but we’re very excited with where our portfolio companies are trending.

Sramana Mitra: Which investors do you like to co-invest in for pre-seed or do you write the checks by yourself?

Nitin Pachisia: It’s very situational. Fortunately, we have a very large relationship base. We know a lot of angels. We know a lot of VCs who like to do pre-seed as well. Depending on the needs of the founders and depending on who would make a good co-investor in that particular situation, we’ll either do the round ourselves or bring in angels or micro-VCs who are investing at pre-seed with us.

In other situations, we make an investment and the founders make some progress over the next three to four months and then they will go out and raise a little bit more pre-seed capital before going out to raise a formal seed round. It differs.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures
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