1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan, Founder General Partner at First Rays Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to do another use case like that one?

Alok Nandan: Let me give you another one that is public. This is a company called Blitzz.io. There are two founders. One of them is a technical founder. He was in another venture-funded company. He was the Director of Engineering there. The CEO was also in another venture-funded company that went public then she was in SAP’s accelerator program.

The problem that they are going after is around data replication. A lot of data today even on fortune 500 companies sits on on-premise servers and databases. Cloud is a megatrend but to move beta bytes from an on-premise database like Oracle data to a cloud database like a Snowflake or Databricks takes a long time. Every time something changes, you don’t want to copy the whole database over to the cloud. You only want to copy the changes over. Copying the changes with the data is very hard. It is a hard computer science problem.

That is what these guys are going after. It’s how you keep two databases in sync where one database is sitting on-premise and the other database is sitting on the cloud. How do you keep these two in sync in a performant cost-effective way? That is the problem that they are solving. It is a data infrastructure problem. There is no fancy AI unit. There is very little UI. The goal of the innovation is how you do this data replication between in-premise to cloud or cloud to cloud in a cost-effective and performant manner.

Sramana Mitra: Can you do an analysis of the infrastructure space that you are investing in where you have identified open problems that you want to invest in – one that you haven’t yet found an entrepreneur team to invest in.

Alok Nandan: Absolutely. I am passionate about data infrastructure. As you know, Snowflake is one of the largest IPOs in the history of the US. Within the data infrastructure space, I will give you a couple of examples. One is data lineage. Let’s say you are an Uber customer. That account information about you with Uber is not just sitting in one database; it is replicated across 20 to 30 databases.

Jeff Bezos talked about specialized databases for specialized use cases in his 2019 annual letter. What has happened in the enterprise today is that there is now a fragmentation of those databases. There is a graph database, T-value database, document database, relational database, so on and so forth. There are hundreds of types of databases. Database lineage helps you track the databases when someone makes a change within one database.

This is different from Blips. Blips are more about on-premise to cloud and cloud to cloud. This is within on-premise also. Let’s say you make a change and update your phone number in your Uber account. How does that change get traced through all these other databases that are sitting in the Uber infrastructure? That is a hard problem that is not solved. There is a company called Manta. It was recently funded by Bessemer.

I am actively looking for companies like that. If there is a company like that, I would love to talk to them. That is an example. There is another one in cybersecurity as well. After Solarwind’s supply chain attack, many prominent CSOs have said that if you are an organization, you should assume that you have been breached. Assume that the attacker is in your organization. The first line of defense has been breached. What is the second line of defense?

Typically, the second line of defense is identity. You continuously authorize those who are accessing the data. Assume that there are characters already in your organization, what else do you do? The next step is identity security. With anybody who is trying to access your data, whether it is customer data or internal data, you need to make sure that they have the authority to access that data. You also need to make sure that they are doing it on the right computer and not their personal laptop. This is possible in a remote environment.

How do you make sure that data access and data governance in this remote environment is followed where attackers could already be in your organization? There is a term for this. It is known as an insider threat. It is a well-known term. That is another example. We are actively looking for solutions for these insider threat attacks.

Sramana Mitra: Very good. All this is helpful to make entrepreneurs out there become aware of what open problems are being sought by investors. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Alok Nandan, Founder General Partner at First Rays Venture Partners
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