1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021 (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What are the kind of things that you have invested in AI? What is your investment thesis on AI?

Rajeev Madhavan: In AI, we have a company called Reflection which has been doing e-commerce. Today, when you shop on many of the websites, you and I would get the same webpage. You may get a small carousel where it would say people who bought this may have bought this other stuff. That is the level of automation.

With Reflection, the entire page and the entire experience including search and all the tools and utilities on the commerce are completely custom to the unique individual visiting the site. Maybe you have been looking for a leather bag and I have been looking for a leather shoe, and we type leather on the search.

It completely changes the aspect of the page. It curates pages on the fly and sending me and you differentiated web pages and emails. Maybe the best time to reach me is 6:00 PM and maybe for you, it’s 7:00 AM. It learns all of that and figures out the entire platform on what needs to be done.

It is curated and automated as a service so that you don’t need to have a large team to do all those things in e-commerce. That is on one end. We also have e-commerce for security, biology applications, and others. There are a lot of different things that are applied AI use cases that we look into. 

Sramana Mitra: What aspects of biology applications are you going after through AI companies?

Rajeev Madhavan: We have not announced products, but it is fair to say that DNA sequencing and other technologies are using AI now. There have been a significant amount of breakthroughs. Cutting edge RNA which starts from the DNA to the protein side is being done very well. I cannot talk about the products of the company because they have not announced that yet. There is a lot of work done on applied AI on that side. There are a lot of things that apply to different segments.

We have seen an application from blood flow being measured to different things that completely change the way we do the testing of things in AI. This is an area that we are looking at. We are looking at the intersection of biology and AI applications and not just biology applications. 

Sramana Mitra: Based on what I am observing, one of my theses is the whole Platform-as-a-Service trend that is picking up. Salesforce had started it a long time ago. They started it early in their journey. They built an enormous business not just on the application side but also on their platform.

A lot of great platforms have been built on that platform including companies like Veeva and Velocity. That playbook is being picked up by other people and other platform ecosystems are emerging. I have talked to a lot of people including a lot of AI founders who are currently building one application area, but they see that they are going to follow a PaaS strategy.

Comment on that. What are you seeing in your orbit?

Rajeev Madhavan: It is interesting that you raised that question. We have a company that uses the Platform-as-a-Service in some form or shape. We have a company called Robin.io. They have been extremely successful. They are now powering telco for vendors like Rakuten, which is brought up on 5G network and native cloud.

Their RCP uses Robin’s technology and platform underneath it to build the RCP platform. In this particular case, it is using the trends that are happening with the respective Kubernetes. Kubernetes itself is not the differentiation.

The fact of the matter is that it is becoming a commodity. Google has got Anthos. Amazon has EKS. How do you apply Kubernetes with the storage compute in a hyper converge manner in such a way that I can provide all the networking requirements on running a job on-premise and on the cloud? You can start a job here and be able to manage it on an e-cloud so that I am not beholden to one particular cloud alone.

I am completely free to make the changes based on which cloud is best for me for that particular application. They provide a Platform-as-a-Service for that. It can be hosted on-premise in any solution. You can run that anywhere. The company has been doing extremely well. They have been growing dramatically. They are doubling every six months or so in revenue. 

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures 2021
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