1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So let’s double click down on some of the companies that you have invested in and tell us a bit about the situation. At what stage did they come? What did they have already? What did you see that compelled you to invest in those companies? How do you see the potential? Let’s do two or three examples.

Jukka Alanen: Absolutely. So far, we have invested in 14 startups out of this fund – all in this area of creating more enabling autonomous operations and AI agents. They do transform a number of areas. Some of them are focused on engineering, some on sales, financial services, insurance, healthcare, and so on. They are, again, related to this thesis – something broke through the status quo in terms of manual, inefficient operations that ties up a lot of human work and then how we can radically automate that.

One company that we invested in is called Wand AI. Wand AI provides AI agents for knowledge workers in the enterprise to analyze data, gain insights, and automate work. Using AI, you can do that massively and radically faster than what you could do with traditional or manual analytics or classical analytics tools. They’ve also built it for enterprise use cases. Things like ChatGPT weren’t really designed for enterprise data analysis and insights.

I think we were the first fund that invested in them. There were a few angel investors already involved who had started working with them. Then we joined them in building this company out. Since then, they’ve raised a lot more capital and their valuation has gone up. They’re having some very interesting success with customers. BY the time we invested, they had already built an MVP type of product and had assembled at least a good starting point for the team.

There’s another company that is still in the stealth mode, so I can’t share the name of the company. They are providing what you could call an AI engineer to manage software reliability. When you have issues with software, then the AI engineer can at least serve as the first line of defense to try to manage those issues and troubleshoot and try to fix those issues instead of tying up human work on that.

Sramana Mitra: At what point is that AI engineer inserted? Is that in the corporate IT environment or is it during a software development? At what point is this person or this agent being inserted?

Jukka Alanen: That would be when you have digital applications and services. Typically, these types of issues are especially relevant in consumer facing applications. Fixing reliability issues can tie up a lot of engineers time, so if AI can help you diagnose and fix those issues at least as the first line of defense that can save a lot of time for engineering teams. Many of these engineering teams today have to spend a lot of time on that and it takes away from innovation. So that’s where it really fits in.

It’s used in the operating environment where it then works on these kinds of issues. As to the stage where we invested, we invested together with a few angels. Later on, they did a larger VC seed round.

Sramana Mitra: So you want to do another one?

Jukka Alanen: I’ve got 14 companies in the current fund already and we’re adding 20-25 more. I’m always excited to talk about them as we enjoy working with entrepreneurs, but I know we have limited time. So I don’t want to spend too much time in going through individual companies.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Jukka Alanen, Rebellion Ventures
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