1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan of Emergent Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: FinTech is a segment where there aren’t a lot of humans in the loop. One of the great benefits that AI is delivering within FinTech is pre-approved loans within 30 seconds.

Alok Nandan: You’re absolutely right. If it falls within a certain range, then it will automatically get approved. Humans may only get pulled in when there are exceptions to the rule. You can still do some of that fast processing. The human is not reviewing every outcome that the model is doing. It’s only reviewing the exceptions.

I believe financial services are waking up to this. There are more and more accountability of the models being built in. The FinTech companies are definitely at the forefront of this in terms of adoption of these newer techniques.

Sramana Mitra: Which of your portfolio companies are you most excited about? Take us through an analysis of how you encountered this company. What did you see that triggered your interest?

Alok Nandan: One of our portfolio companies is Observe.ai. They are in voice analytics for call centers. I’ll give you a use case and then talk about their journey. Whenever we call customer support, there is a voice that says that the call may be recorded.

Most of these voice recordings are just sitting there. Once in a while, there will be a QA who will listen to the call and manually fill out a paper-based assessment. That’s what happens today. Observe.ai analyzes every voice recording that comes in. They use AI and machine learning and come up with a customer satisfaction score. They do these deep analyses. The company can get better call coverage and higher potential accuracy, all at a lower price.

We are very bullish on them. We led the seed round. They raised the Series A from well-known Valley VC. They’re executing quite well. They have two of the largest call centers in the world as their customers. They have companies like TripAdvisor and Square as customers.

The founders are two engineers. One used to be a software engineer at Twitter. The other guy was a software engineer at InMobi in Bangalore. They were classmates from IIT. They were just ideating when they met us.

We met them and we liked the team. We rolled up our sleeves and looked at different areas where we could build a product. That’s how we met them. The founder who was at Twitter moved back to Bangalore. Twitter had acquired a company there called JustDial. He was leading the engineering team there. After that, he left Twitter and started a company with his classmate from InMobi.

We helped them find a third co-founder who was a sales guy and who had worked in the call center industry. He was super bullish about this. He joined them full-time. The team got together and helped them get to product-market fit. We are actively helping them find more people to join and are bringing them potential customers.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan of Emergent Ventures
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