1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021 (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I encountered Platform.sh a couple of years ago. I haven’t talked to them since, but it’s good to hear that they are thinking in this direction. I’ll look into that closely and see what additional coverage that deserves. Please go ahead and give us another example. 

Eric Benhamou: I have a more recent example. We had an investment that was just announced last week. It’s a young company called Evinced. They focus on an important emerging problem called digital accessibility. Websites have to be digitally accessible to everybody and that includes people with physical impairment.

It turns out that even if you don’t have any physical impairments, many websites are not truly digitally accessible. This means that there are many fields that you cannot click on or there are descriptions in extremely small font sizes. There are a lot of UI/UX problems that impair digital accessibility for everybody. This is particularly true for people who have physical impairments.

We are proliferating applications, so we cannot solve these problems by having vast armies of QA engineers check all these different versions every day. You need to have a toolset that automates the identification and the mediation of these problems.

That is what they do. They leverage AI that fits the model described before. They have a toolset and a stack that today is being used by QA engineers down the drain but maybe in two or three years, it will be used by DevOps engineers in application creation. It will shift left and go upstream. That is an example of the PaaS optimized for a specialized product. 

Sramana Mitra: How do you see this trend or structure of company building evolving? In the case of Salesforce.com, we saw two things. We saw Salesforce.com become a gigantic success story with a force multiplier effect on its valuation.

We also saw great companies being built on top of Salesforce.com and in their rights became very successful companies. Veeva is my favorite example. I have known the founder of Veeva for a long time. They built that company for $4 million. They raised more money, but they never really used it. They probably delivered $600 million worth of revenue with just $4 million in investment.

It does work when you play it right. It works if you have a good marketplace and you choose a good PaaS. How do you see that angle develop? 

Eric Benhamou: You are right. Companies like Salesforce.com have created vast ecosystems which make it possible for a new generation of companies to live within it. We certainly view this as an opportunity because we build value by stack levels. If you come in an environment that already has a fully deployed Salesforce.com CRM system, then you can take advantage of all the capabilities and APIs to create different kinds of value.

By the way, Salesforce.com, for all its successes, does not do everything perfectly, so there is a lot of opportunity for entrepreneurs there. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eric Benhamou, Founder and General Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures 2021
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