1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrus Oks, Founding Partner of Tera Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The other advantage you have is, there is a substantial enterprise software buyer market in Europe as well. The Indian buyer market is not as mature. Europe has lots of large enterprises that buy a lot of technology. You could build a substantial business catering to European enterprise customers. That’s one observation.

The second one is that language is an issue in Europe more than in India. In India, the business operates mostly in English. There’s a bit more of a language issue in Europe. English is, not necessarily, the lingua franca of Europe. In your region, English is more of the lingua franca.

Andrus Oks: I agree with that. Lately, the English language is much more commonplace. It’s evolving quite nicely.

Sramana Mitra: Before we finish, would you like to talk about a couple of your investments and their value proposition? Also talk about how you encountered them, what stage were they in, and what was it about them that compelled you to write the check.

Andrus Oks: Sure. This is one of my first investments. It’s a company called GrabCAD. It wasn’t a special case from the beginning. Usually, startups are very focused. These guys were working with three different pillars. They are like LinkedIn for CAD engineers. Initially, they had CAD services online. They executed so well. When they started, none of those things existed online.

Sramana Mitra: You’re talking about CAD libraries for mechanical design?

Andrus Oks: Yes, exactly. This caught quite a lot of attention. Then they started building CAD functionalities into the browser as well. We had a really nice exit with them.

Sramana Mitra: Who bought the company?

Andrus Oks: Stratos.

Sramana Mitra: I did quite a bit of work in a CAD company in the early 2000s. Was it any particular CAD platform that they were building models on?

Andrus Oks: Multiple.

Sramana Mitra: Very cool. Let’s do one more.

Andrus Oks: I have another portfolio company that has excelled by pivoting. When I talked to them, video ads were time-tested in university labs by complicated eye-tracking machines. Getting panelists in university labs is a hassle. They wanted to make it simpler. This wasn’t compelling. When I thought that this was interesting to invest in, they had figured out that they could, without those eye-tracking devices, do it algorithmically with any webcam. This is more scalable and more interesting.

Then they discovered that emotions are more valuable than eye-tracking. If you can detect emotional responses, customers are more interested in that. After that, they discovered that attention is even more interesting. They developed the industry-leading capability to detect attention. In the past few years, they branched out to other nearby use cases.

Sramana Mitra: What use case do they monetize primarily?

Andrus Oks: The main product is attention measurement and emotion tracking.

Sramana Mitra: In what use case?

Andrus Oks: Ads measurement and media placement.

Sramana Mitra: Very cool. We were very excited about the whole globalization of entrepreneurship which is our mission when we launched in 2010. It’s wonderful to see that evolution. We constantly provide our platform to showcase those movements. Thank you for coming and sharing.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Andrus Oks, Founding Partner of Tera Ventures
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