1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yipeng Zhao of Embark Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about what trends you see in your deal flow. You’ve been investing for about a year. What have you seen in the deal flow that can be synthesized as key trends?

Yipeng Zhao: That’s a very good question. We see a lot of different trends. Last year, a lot of AI companies were coming out. For example, there’s AI for medical imagery or AI for workplaces. AI is definitely a trend that we’ve been seeing. This year, Blockchain is definitely picking up pace. There’re a lot of Blockchain companies.

Robotics is another trend. Those are the hot topics we’ve been seeing. Since we are based in LA, we also see a lot of consumer goods and entertainment stuff which we don’t really invest in. We’re seeing a lot of deals in the consumer app or the consumer product. The trend is always changing. Every couple of months, you see different trends.

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights of your portfolio that you’re particularly excited about? As you’re describing them, tell us about what is it about that company that really clinched it for you?

Yipeng Zhao: We have six popular companies already. Some of the companies are still in stealth mode so I can’t talk too much about it. One company we really like is a company called inVia Robotics. They just announced that they are financing automation for small-to medium-sized warehouses. That’s one of the sectors we really spend a lot of time on.

We really do believe that warehouse automation is the future of the industry. There’s a lot of demand for warehouse owners and e-commerce sites. A lot of them can’t spend millions of dollars to build new infrastructure for the warehouse. Our company developed a way to do retrofitting to make the ROI more feasible for small-to medium-sized warehouses so everybody can deploy robotics in their warehouse and make it cost-efficient. That’s one company we really like.

Another company is called Jiko. It’s basically a new bank infrastructure to create more secure and private banks. There’s a whole bunch of cyber security issues and hacks going on. I’m quite sure you’ve heard a lot about these issues. The company is building a new distributed infrastructure to control your own banking data and make it more secure and hopefully cheaper than traditional banks.

We have another company that is doing semiconductors for AI. I can’t disclose the name now. They make semiconductor chips for IoT devices or for local computing devices. There’s a vacuum in the edge computing space for AI. Edge computing in the future is going to be big.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yipeng Zhao of Embark Ventures
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