1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Ibri of Mindset Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You have a very interesting investment thesis. What stage do you come in?

Daniel Ibri: We normally invest early stage. It’s normally pre-A, A, or post-A. It’s normally around Series A and we normally co-invest with local funds. We try not to lead the rounds. We co-invest with local VC’s and angels. We try to join the rounds as a strategic investor.

Sramana Mitra: These are Israeli investors that you have relationships with. Israelis lead. You come in as a follow to bring them into Brazil.

Daniel Ibri: Exactly. In the US, it’s the same.

Sramana Mitra: So you’re doing US and Israel companies coming into Brazil.

Daniel Ibri: Exactly, but not Brazilian startups.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about some examples. Talk me through some of the highlights of your portfolio that are representative of things that you have invested in.

Daniel Ibri: I’ll give you one example from Israel and one from the US. From Israel, we have a company called Taranis. This company is an agtech company. They just closed their Series B.

We’ve been investors since the beginning. We did seed round, Series A, and followed Series B. They do precision agriculture with several layers of information. We know that Israel is very strong in the agriculture space. We know that Brazil is a big market for agtech startups.

What we did is we helped them from the start. First of all, we brought the founders. We helped them explore potential ways of going to market, finding potential consumers, starting POC’s. Then after they start generating some kind of revenue of traction on the ground, we help them open the office here.

Brazil has very difficult regulation. You need to know the right people. We take them to the right people so they can open a branch here. Then we help them hire a country manager. Nowadays, they are really doing well. Brazil is one of their main markets outside of Israel.

Sramana Mitra: How many Brazilian customers have they added since you got involved?

Daniel Ibri: Considering farmers and indirect to distributors, probably more than 30.

Sramana Mitra: Fantastic. That’s awesome! Talk about a US one.

Daniel Ibri: Sure. There’s a company that will be closing their Series B soon called PayJoy. It’s from San Francisco. They have a B2B SaaS that helps vendors or retailers lock smartphones remotely.

Let’s say you’re buying a smartphone in a shop and you need to pay it on installment. What they do is, they install the software on your smartphone. It becomes a collateral for the credit operation. If you don’t pay the installment or don’t pay the lender, then your cell phone gets completely blocked remotely. You cannot use it anymore. They sell this to merchants or banking institutions to help them diminish their delinquency rates.

They have been doing this in the US. They have grown into Mexico. When we joined them almost a year ago, they started the efforts to go to other developing countries. They’re starting to go to Africa and some countries in Southeast Asia. They were willing to come to Brazil. The play here in Brazil here is very interesting.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Daniel Ibri of Mindset Ventures
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