1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ankit Jain of Gradient Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: How are the companies in the Valley that you’re investing in? Are they using offshore development centers where there is AI talent available?

Ankit Jain: Even in the last year, it has changed a lot. There is a lot of interesting AI development being done out of Ukraine. Both Pakistan and India have teams that are starting to specialize in AI. At least, one of our startups has a team out of Pakistan that is doing a lot of their AI development.

Sramana Mitra: Interesting. I have never heard that before. Let’s talk about your portfolio companies. Talk about some of the highlights. Especially talk about what stage you get them in. How did you encounter them? What did 

they have when you came into this project? What level of validation or proof of concept?

Ankit Jain: I’ll talk about some of our companies that are on our website because we haven’t announced all of our companies yet. One of our first investments was a company called Algorithmia. It’s a company up in Seattle that has created a platform that provides Microservices-as-a-Service a la Amazon Lambda or Google Cloud but tailored for the AI world. It allows you to manage all of your models, both within an enterprise and across the public market.

When we first met this company, they had a very strong public marketplace. They were just about to launch their enterprise product. Both Ana and I, having built teams that have needed this infrastructure, saw the power of what Algorithmia was offering. We leaned in pretty fast.

At this point, they had the infrastructure tested out, a proof point that thousands of algorithm developers were publishing to this platform, and a couple of beta customers on the enterprise side. Since our investment, the company has been growing at breakneck speed. They have customers across Fortune 500 companies and governments. It has been exciting to see them grow. They were getting ready for their Series A round.

On the other hand, I’ll talk about a company called Scotty, which we announced just a couple of months ago. Scotty is trying to become the layer in the autonomous world that powers tele-operations. We know we’re going to get to a fully autonomous world in 10 years or so. Everybody has a different feeling of when that will happen.

Scotty anticipates that there is going to be a transition period where you need the equivalent of an OnStar for your cars or drone where you need someone to take over. Think about your getting to the airport. In the last hundred feet, there are tons of cars trying to pull over to the curb. Maybe the autonomous car doesn’t have the perfect decision making in that second. Why not have a human tele-operator for that last hundred feet. Even at school, when you’re dropping children or picking them up.

We met them a while ago. At this point, they had a car with a couple of desktop-quality cameras strapped on to the top of the car. Since then, they’ve made a lot of progress. They’re working with all kinds of partners to make this reality happen. There was a very strong founder-market fit. There was an interesting early prototype. That’s what we look for in that market from a seed perspective.

Sramana Mitra: Are you mostly working on B2B?

Ankit Jain: It’s interesting. There’s a handful of companies that we’ve invested in that are B2B. There’s a whole set of them that are B2B2C. For example, there’s a company that we’ve invested in which is AllyO. They have a bot named Ally which helps with recruiting. If you, for example, go to a hiring page for some of the largest CPGs, in addition to have the job openings and information, there will be a little bot that comes up and says, “Can I answer something for you?”

This way, you can ask questions that you might not feel comfortable asking a recruiter. What we’re finding is people are comfortable asking Ally these questions. That’s B2B2C. There’s a handful of companies that we’re looking at pretty closely that are directly consumer businesses but nothing to announce at this point.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ankit Jain of Gradient Ventures
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