1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Laurel Touby, Managing Director at Supernode Ventures 2021 (Part 1)

Laurel Touby, Managing Director of Supernode Ventures, talks about pre-seed investing in Latin America.

Sramana Mitra: How has COVID been? How have you been? How has the business environment for you been?

Laurel Touby: It started pretty rough just like what everybody experienced. We didn’t know what to expect. In terms of working, it was demotivating. Then, over time, we realized that the early bird gets the worm. If we don’t get out there and hustle and get into great deals, then we are never going to be successful as a venture fund. We started speeding up our activity around June. We are almost done allocating our first fund. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about that. What size fund are you about to finish allocating? What kind of investment thesis have you worked with over the last year? What are you investing in? What other trends are you seeing?

Laurel Touby: It’s a small fund; it’s a nano fund as I would like to say. It’s about a $5 million fund. We are doing 35 to 40 investments into pre-seed and seed-stage companies. We reserve a lot of the capital for follow-ons into the best companies that we have invested in so far.

We have been deploying the capital for about three years now. We are right on pace to where we want to be. The sectors that we focus on are early-stage B2B FinTech enterprise, the guts of an organization’s software, and tech. We love software across industries. We are sector agnostic.

Sramana Mitra: What about geography? Do you focus in New York?

Laurel Touby: A lot in New York because that is where our power base is. We have a smattering in other places. We seem to see a lot of great companies in Latin America. We have gotten into a few companies down there.

You can go to our site, supernode.vc, and see our portfolio there. We have most of our companies there. We are not stuck in one geography or location. It is important for a fund to be generalist, lightweight, and nimble because so much is happening.

Tech is revolutionizing so many industries. Before you know it, there is a new tech stack you need to be concerned with. For example, years ago, people were talking about cleantech and VR, and then a lot of people lost their shirts who started funds that were just focused on those two because the tides changed.

Institutional investors didn’t want to follow on to the next rounds, so a lot of companies went under because of that. Now, the generalist fund is where we think it is at.

Sramana Mitra: We talk to investors constantly. The theme that is ubiquitous is AI investing. Everybody is looking for AI deals. Especially in B2B, everybody is looking for some form of real AI. There are also specialists who are doing FinTech with a specific focus.

Let’s talk about the companies in your portfolio that you are particularly excited about. Take one or two examples from the US and maybe one from Latin America. We have had quite a few Latin American investors here as well.

Laurel Touby: I am not partial to any one company. I am like a mother duck. I have all these beautiful children, and I love them all. If you want, we can talk about one that might be exiting soon. We will have a possible exit with Braze.com which is a marketing technology company. It is into mobile marketing automation.

They help enterprise corporations communicate through various mobile channels. For example, if you get push notifications or messaging through your apps the chances are high that Braze is powering those communications. That is one that we are excited about.

There is another one that we are excited about. It might not be exiting soon, but it is coming to market soon. It is called New Age Meats that is into cellular agriculture. This is a company where they create meat out of cells and then they mix them with plant-based products to create a pork sausage. They have been working on that for a couple of years. It is the future.

Plant-based and lab-grown pork and other proteins are the future. When we look forward five to ten years ahead, we will look back on this period and say, “Really? We were slaughtering animals? Why would we do that? Why would we grow animals for slaughter?”

It’s hard to realize how much a part of the future we are building right now with all these technologies and all these founders. We are in the most exciting times in history.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Laurel Touby, Managing Director at Supernode Ventures 2021
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