1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anupam Rastogi, General Partner of Emergent Ventures (Part 1)

Anupam Rastogi is General Partner at Emergent Ventures, a firm focused on B-to-B tech investments.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by getting you acquainted with our audience. Talk a bit about how you position your fund. Before that, give a little bit of your own background too.

Anupam Rastogi: I’ve been in the technology space for a very long time now. I studied Computer Science back in the 90s. I grew up in India and came over to the US. I started a career on the operating side, research, and then product management at larger companies and a couple of startups. These stints eventually had good outcomes.

During that time, I realized that I wanted to work for multiple startups at once. That’s how I decided to get into the venture. I’ve been in venture for the last 12 or so years. Emergent is a seed and early-stage venture firm based in the Bay Area. We write our first check at the very early stages – pre-seed, seed, and sometimes post-seed. We lead those rounds. Typically these are $1 million to $4 million rounds.

We focus on the B2B space broadly. Within that, companies that are focused on intelligent software. These are software that gets smarter with use. It could be across any number of business workflows or at the infrastructure layer. We have a portfolio of about 35 companies. We are investing actively out of fund two.

Sramana Mitra: How big is fund two?

Anupam Rastogi: Fund two is $76 million.

Sramana Mitra: You said you write checks between $1 million and $4 million. What do you need to see in a company? What needs to be in the company for you to feel comfortable writing a check?

Anupam Rastogi: The round sizes we come in at are $1 million to $3 million. Our own check could be between $1 million and $1.5 million. One thing we do is we are comfortable coming in early. These companies often have an MVP, have spoken with customers, and have some pilots.

We are not looking for revenues or momentum. The things we are looking for are much more qualitative. The team is, by far, one of the most important things we are focused on. In the few weeks that we are trying to get to know entrepreneurs more deeply, we try to understand the trajectory of these founders. What are their motivations? We look at resilience and how well they know the space.

The other big area is understanding the market and market readiness. That has different parts to it. We often introduce prospective investors to customers who could be customers or advisors. We sit through those meetings. That gives us a flavor if there is a market need for a product like this. What are the pain points? Are they willing to switch to something new? What would it take to have them pay for this?

The third big area is, we also figure out if we understand the space and if we can add value. We see a large number of deals and we are only able to do five or six. As we are conviction-driven investors, we are mutually self-filtering for that company where they have high passion.

Sramana Mitra: I’m reading your response to my question as you don’t do concept-stage, but you do pre-revenue stage ventures.

Anupam Rastogi: We do some concept-stage as well. We have done several companies which were one or two founders with just a PowerPoint. From there to early revenues, that’s the range.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anupam Rastogi, General Partner of Emergent Ventures
1 2 3