1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What trends do you see in your deal flow? 

Rajeev Singh-Morales: We are a fund that is mostly B2B. We don’t a have an industry focus. There are certain areas in pharma and biotech which are extraordinarily hot right now. We don’t invest in that. We do invest in digital health. That is really quite interesting right now. Everything around telehealth and remote diagnostics and remote healthcare in the US and in Europe is gaining a lot of attention.

We still have a debate as to how the shift that has occurred during the last year will remain. It’s clear that people are getting much more comfortable in getting healthcare. One of the things we’re seeing in US and in Europe is mental health as a growing investment thesis. We’ve invested in RubiconMD which was founded by an immigrant. It’s now scaling nicely. They provide specialist consults to general practitioners.

There’s another one. In March and April of last year when the pandemic hit, there was a lot of anxiety about what’s going to happen. Very quickly, it became obvious that e-commerce slowed down and then accelerated. Anything associated with e-commerce continues to be very interesting. We focus on the backend. There’s a lot of focus on BNPL as well.

The last one is ESG, which is this impact investing. There’re green technologies, but there’s also more broader societal impact. We’ve invested in one hardware company called Submer. These provide emergent cooling for the data centers. The problem with data centers is they generate an extraordinary amount of heat. They consume a lot of electricity. Is there a way to reduce their footprint? One of the potential technologies is emergent cooling. Think of it as big boxes with liquid where you stick the servers in. They’re based in Europe. We like those kinds of companies.

We invested in one company called Clarity AI which does ESG scoring for funds. More and more investors care about the ESG component. None of these are new. One other trend is business process automation. What we like about this is there’s been a lot of tech about machine learning and AI and applications of that to the enterprise space. We’re still in the infant stages of that, but it’s picking up. We like to invest selectively in that.

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to go back to digital health. We have exactly the same principle. We don’t do biosciences or pharma, but we do digital health. Digital health is a big field and there are a lot of sub-pockets in there. The telehealth has been hugely accelerated. In the western world, one of the gating items was the insurance companies were not as proactive in paying for telehealth than they are now.

Insurance companies have altered their policies and that has given telehealth a big boost. In countries where healthcare systems are already mature, telehealth is an opportunity to leapfrog. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Singh-Morales, Founder and Managing Partner at Alma Mundi Ventures
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