1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s focus on the pre-seed and seed first. Are you investing in concepts? Are you looking for a certain amount of proof point? What is the sweet spot?

Bhaskar Ghosh: If you look at founders, products, and market, we focus heavily on the founder and on the market size. We are not looking for product-market fit. We are not even looking for a product. We tend to gel closely with highly technical entrepreneurs. There is bimodal DNA there. We do back first-time entrepreneurs coming out of schools. We have a very strong campus program at Yale, Caltech, MIT, Harvard, and Stanford. We tend to back founders out of these campuses fairly heavily.

We also find ourselves backing second-time entrepreneurs from our network. They tend to be domain experts and mostly highly technical founders. Highly technical founders and high TAM would be the common pattern. As we do larger seeds, we tend to look for something to have been built already or maybe an open-source project that is already in production.

Sramana Mitra: What about geography?

Bhaskar Ghosh: We still see a majority from the San Francisco Bay Area. In the vertical SaaS, we do see New York expanding a bit. We see Boston expanding. Something to call out at this point is that we have become much more serious about the India-US corridor. We just wrote our first large Series A check to a company coming out of the Freshworks ecosystem in Chennai. We’re written three or four seeds too. We’ve also started writing checks for startups in the LatAm. We have investments in Israel and UK too.

Sramana Mitra: What trends are you seeing in your deal flow right now?

Bhaskar Ghosh: I’ll probably give a slightly boring answer to start off. We still see a very heavy and very productive ecosystem around open source projects getting productized. That continues to be a fairly ripe area. Given our background, that’s something we continue to focus on. We continue to see legacy verticals whether it’s healthcare, logistics, travel, e-commerce, and fintech getting unbundled and becoming API first.

We see a propensity of not only workflow automation but also of verticalized infrastructure. As enterprises are pulling on the software side to become more data-first, AI-first, cloud-first, and security-first, we are seeing a fairly secular trend in startups in software startups in that area. I would say that continues to be important. We are seeing second-time entrepreneurs coming into the fore in these areas.

Sramana Mitra: That doesn’t surprise me. Entrepreneurs cannot stop being entrepreneurs. What are some companies that you have invested in especially in the pre-seed stage and seed stage?

Bhaskar Ghosh: In the data, analytics, and privacy infrastructure area, there’s Acryl which is building the enterprise-grade version of LinkedIn Data Hub. The founders are very serious senior data, storage, and infrastructure leaders that I work with during my time at Yahoo and LinkedIn. The project hit an inflection point.

In the AI-driven privacy infrastructure area, we did a pre-seed with Lightbeam with very senior technical leaders and builders coming out of Nutanix and LinkedIn, some of whom I worked with. Both structured and unstructured data is an extremely important area which is not as well built into and as well understood as it should be.

Some of the others are Nilus, which is one of our API infrastructures companies which has built a platform that democratizes and scales access to mail, contact, and calendar. We were there right when it was started. If you look at the Python pandas ecosystem, we did a seed and pre-seed in a company called Pondor which is coming out of Berkeley’s RICE lab. It’s building on an open-source project.

The company that we are starting now, which will remain in stealth, is going to be in the enterprise security democratization area. We’ve also backed a company called InfraHQ out of Waterloo with veterans from Docker. They’re doing fairly deep and open source in the area of identity and access management for cloud infrastructure.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bhaskar Ghosh, Partner and CTO at 8VC
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