1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You have already cited some of your highlights. Can you talk about other companies that were really interesting companies out of your portfolio that are really emblematic of how invest?

Tim Guleri: I talked about the three buckets. I’ll give you examples in all three. The first one is next generation infrastructure. These are drones and next-generation cellphones. All these next generation physical infrastructure devices have very unique needs for software which runs inside of them.

I gave you an example of Ben’s practice. That’s easier to introduce because I just say, “Look at your cellphone. The motion sensor for that was Ben’s investment.” More recently, we’ve done companies in the 5G wireless space, next generation data center space. In security for instance, we have a company called Zimperium which does mobile edge protection. These are next-generation infrastructure companies.

Moving to intelligence, we have a lot of history. We’ve done new investments. Cleaning data when it comes into the data center is really important. We are very excited about a company called Zaloni which my partner Mark has done. For next generation AI and ML, we’ve done a company that spun out of UCLA called Falcon Computing. It’s infrastructure for the next generation AI. Then an AI application company which is a Tel Aviv company called Applitools. They’re in the AI-powered application UI testing space with 300 customers. It’s a very exciting use of AI in that context.

Finally, industry which is the third bucket. This is where you’re disrupting a business process with new techniques using AI. We’ve invested in Hire.com, which is disrupting the hiring process with a different business model and different technologies. Now, it is serving 3,000 customers and going really fast. Those are some examples in those three buckets.

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the last 15 months, what trends do you see in your deal flow that are worth calling out?

Tim Guleri: Certainly, I don’t think entrepreneurs ever sleep. There’s no dearth of deal flow. It’s actually stunning to me how many amazing companies are popping up. There’s a theme for vertical AI on the dimensions I talked about. How do we take true AI and incrementally disrupt that workflow? These are companies that are not process-centric. These are more predictive in nature. Their ROIs are very compelling when you put them on top of these business processes. We’re seeing that as a very defined trend.

I think some entrepreneurs are trying to reimagine these applications entirely. When I was a CEO, my frame of reference on top of which I built the application was a database. Imagine you don’t have the database, but you have AI and intelligence as a base architecture. In that context, the way you would build a business application would be quite different. Some entrepreneurs are actually taking it to that level and building it on these intelligence layers. I think we’re going to see massive disruption coming out.

It’s going to take a little while but we’re starting to see the beginnings of that. Obviously, there’s a lot of Blockchain and those conversations in the context of the enterprise. It’s still early but we’ll see some interesting companies come from there. I’m very bullish on some AI technique disrupting.

Sramana Mitra: It’s the biggest trend we’ve seen ever in enterprise software.

Tim Guleri: That is correct. It’s taking all the old rules, throwing it out the window, and having entrepreneurs look at it. I would say there’s a lot of painting a different color on an old technology. We look very deeply when a team comes in and says, “We’re AI.” We can really go quite deep into it if this is really a smart team in that domain. There are quite a few pretenders is the point I’m trying to make.

Sramana Mitra: Always when there’s a buzzword.

Tim Guleri: That is correct.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Tim Guleri of Sierra Ventures
1 2 3 4 5