1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital (Part 1)

Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital, discusses the trends he is seeing in the Indian startup ecosystem.

Sramana Mitra: We will start today with a conversation with Gaurav Chaturvedi from Kae Capital. For the past three months, we’ve been having conversations about AI investment thesis with our friends in the investor community. AI is very confusing for lots of people right now. AI is sweeping through the industry like mad right now. Everybody wants to do an AI startup; and investors left, right, and center want to invest in AI startups.

So then comes the next question. What is a good investment? What is a good business to build that can attract investment? What are the implications of the various trends in our business? So that’s the conversation we’re gonna have first and then we’ll get to the entrepreneur pitches. Gaurav, welcome.

This is your first time here. It’s great to have you. Let’s get started.

Gaurav Chaturvedi: Thanks for having me, Sramana. Excited to be here.

Sramana Mitra: My pleasure. So Gaurav, why don’t you introduce yourself a little bit? Sasha from Kae Capital has been here before. We’ve had conversations with him, but I think this particular investment category is more up your alley in the Kae Capital portfolio. So let’s get to know you a little bit as well as Kae Capital’s work with AI startups.

Gaurav Chaturvedi: Well, thanks. Let me first start with a quick intro to Kae Capital. We are one of the very early stage funds in India. We typically invest across pre-seed and seed, and in some cases, pre-series A or seed plus. We are investing from our third fund, which is a $100M fund. Typically, we write first checks of $500K to about $3M and then double down into the company as we move forward.

I am an entrepreneur turned venture capital investor. I did an EdTech back in the day around 2006-2016 after my engineering. Then I sold that company and then joined Kae. I’ve been with the firm for about six years now. At Kae, I spend most of my time on B2B software. We also invest in B2B commerce, such as supply chain businesses – both domestic in India, as well as cross-border. In software, we have invested across application layer and SaaS companies in the past 10-12 years of our journey.

But more and more, AI is one area where we are highly focused. We have invested in application layers across AI. AI is one of the core themes that we are very excited about right now.

Sramana Mitra: So let’s double click down on the AI portfolio. It sounds like you are focusing entirely on the application layer.

Gaurav Chaturvedi: Yes, we are. Broadly, the stack has the foundation layer, the middleware layer, and then the application layers. We are typically very focused on the application layer, not as much on the foundation layer.

Sramana Mitra: So let’s do first some case studies of what you’ve invested in and talk about the analysis of what did you see? What prompted you to write those checks? Let’s do some examples.

Gaurav Chaturvedi: I’m very excited about our AI portfolio, where we’ve made investments across the spectrum. To give some context, I’ll mention one company in each area. On the B2B side, we’ve invested in a company called SuperAGI, which builds autonomous systems for enterprises that can be used across multiple use cases. Their initial focus is on sales, marketing, customer support, and coding. SuperAGI is a fully autonomous AI-powered system that augments—though it could replace—roles like salesforce and SDRs. For example, it can perform the tasks of a “super sales” agent or a “super coder.”

A lot of companies are building these kinds of agents, but what intrigued us about this team was their fresh approach. Instead of just creating an agent, they’ve developed a system that combines the agent with vertical, custom-built software for entire workflows.

When we talk about “super sales,” it’s not just an AI agent. It’s an AI sales agent trained specifically on sales actions. It’s a large action model that’s been trained on these tasks, paired with a custom-built system of record software—like a CRM or AI agent. CRMs up to now have been built for humans to interact with, but Super AGI has created their own system of record.

Their autonomous system handles the entire workflow end-to-end. We liked their originality in research and the innovative approach they took. They released their agent framework as open source initially, which is when we started tracking them. It quickly gained popularity. With a great vision and team behind it, we were impressed by their thesis: it’s going to be a compound autonomous system, not just a simple agent that performs tasks and delivers outcomes as a service.

Sramana Mitra: In this particular situation, what is happening in the market? So this company is now in the market; where is it getting traction? What is the experience of being in the market with this kind of offering?

Gaurav Chaturvedi: They started selling in the market only about four months ago with a product called SuperCode, which was also open source, and they got a great response from the community. However, they didn’t start monetizing it. Instead, they started monetizing their SuperSales product, which is generating a lot of inbound interest.

The founders are now based in the Valley, specifically San Francisco, and are pretty well known in the AI community over there. They are receiving significant interest, particularly from Series A to Series Z technology companies, as well as some large enterprises, who have started using SuperSales and SuperMarketing.

Sramana Mitra: So interest, not yet deals. Is that what you’re saying? Is that the stage of the company?

Gaurav Chaturvedi: These are still early. They have some tempting customers right now because they just launched it about two months back.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Gaurav Chaturvedi, Partner at Kae Capital
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