1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anupam Rastogi, General Partner of Emergent Ventures (Part 3)

Anupam Rastogi: I’ll talk about a more recent investment. They’re in the privacy space. They’re helping developers develop code that is more privacy-friendly. There are a lot of these regulations including GDPR in Europe where you need to be careful about what data is being stored, how it’s being stored and processes. Developers have to manually think about that.

This company has built a set of scanners to understand the privacy implications. That has a lot of intelligence around understanding what libraries are getting called. We co-led the seed round there. This was more in the pilot stage. We connected them to several people from our network who are close to the space, we sat through some of those meetings and got a good handle that this seemed like a wide need.

We also like how the entrepreneurs are taking that feedback, processing it, and articulating their vision to prospective customers and also how they have the long-term vision. Often that’s one thing we see – marrying the short-term vision of customers versus the long-term vision. We’ve seen some of those there. We led a round there recently.

Sramana Mitra: Enterprise B2B deep tech and AI have been very hot for several years now. What are you seeing that is new? Where do you think we are going vis-à-vis this market?

Anupam Rastogi: We are starting to see the AI-led software approach as well. It’s the fourth wave of software from mainframe computing, on-premise computing, and cloud. Each of those waves has been a multi-decade long. The other trend then gets superimposed on that. Each of those waves has been orders of magnitude larger than the previous one.

We see AI-led software on its 5th year or a 20 to 30-year trend. It’s going to be well beyond just replacing existing software. Early signs of that is just reinventing how businesses are done. A lot of the flows are human-led, software can take up a lot of those. This is more at a micro-level. It lets humans be more efficient at their work. Across most functions, we are seeing a lot of activity. I can give you another example.

There’s a company called Present where we are investors. They are looking to reinvent how business communications are done in the context of business presentations. Today, you start with an empty PowerPoint. There is already so much data in there and proven best ways of communicating ideas. This company leverages AI and a lot of data in millions of slides to help you get started. A company like this could reinvent how business communications are authored.

We also have a lot of companies that are reinventing sales or marketing. Specific industry verticals is another area where we see a lot of intelligent software. We have a company that’s reinventing the media and entertainment industry and how content is procured and found. Another trend is a lot of companies building meta software that will figure out which software to use or software that helps you write software. Then dashboards to manage all these data.

Sramana Mitra: What about this craze on metaverse? Do you see that being relevant in the B2B realm?

Anupam Rastogi: Given that we are focused on the enterprise B2B side, we are starting to see some overlaps in the periphery. We have a company that is in the media and entertainment space. There are about half a million content producers of scale globally. This company indexes all of that using AI. That’s not a focus area but just following that segment from afar.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

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