1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Mo Islam, Partner at Threshold Ventures (Part 1)

Mo Islam, Partner at Threshold Ventures. discusses his firm’s AI investment thesis. We had an excellent discussion on AI-enabled drug discovery, AI-enabled medical imaging, etc.

Sramana Mitra: We are going to start today’s meeting with the conversation with Mo Islam from Threshold Ventures. Welcome Mo, I don’t think you’ve been here before. I believe Heidi connected us.

Mo Islam: Yes. I think my partner Heidi knows you. She’s been with the firm a long time; I’ve worked closely with her. She runs our startup podcast, which everybody should listen to because it’s fantastic.

Sramana Mitra: So, Mo, give us a little bit of an overview on your path to venture capital and set some context about Threshold Ventures. Of course, Heidi has been here before, but then I want to focus most of our discussion today on your firm’s AI investment strategy.

Mo Islam: Sure. So, I’d be happy to give you some of the context. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate you guys putting this together. Especially for all the founders, it’s a very cool mission in terms of being able to democratize access to this type of information.

I’m a partner at Threshold Ventures. I’ve been with the team since the inception of the firm. I was also involved with the predecessor DFJ where I started my venture career and worked for a number of years. I tend to focus on our AI infrastructure and frontier tech investments. Before becoming a VC, I was an engineer and technical staff member at Intel. Interestingly, CIA had a strategic investment arm involved in funding startups to provide the intelligence community in the US and the defense industry with the latest and best technology.

I started my career as an electrical engineer, coming from a technical background before becoming a VC. I tend to gravitate towards companies building unique technology and novel IP. A lot of what we do is help take these innovations to market and build real businesses around them.

I’ve backed everything from drug discovery companies to AI-enabled applications and hardware companies, even down to the chip level. Our areas of focus are broad, but we tend to be very early-stage investors, typically in seed, Series A, and Series B rounds. We like to get involved with companies soon after they’ve built their initial product and help take them to market and scale up into real businesses.

The firm has backed a number of fantastic companies over the years. In the DFJ days, it was SpaceX, Tesla, and Box. With Threshold, we’ve invested in companies like BetterUp, LaunchDarkly, Twilio, and Livongo. We’ve invested across various sectors and multi-billion dollar companies, which has been really exciting. We’re in the age of AI now, entering a new super cycle, which is incredibly exciting.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with how you are thinking about AI. What is your mind map of how you are processing the age of AI? Where are the opportunities that you are particularly interested in?

Mo Islam: Sure. We think of AI as a new enabling technology. We’ve been investing in AI for quite some time, with deep learning emerging around 2012. Everybody’s very excited about generative AI today, but analytical forms of AI have already created phenomenal companies over the last 10-12 years, showing real market value.

We’ve invested in AI applications in medical imaging, diagnostics, and drug discovery. The exciting thing for us is that AI is presenting a new platform shift. Past platform shifts like mobile and the internet created significant value and businesses. We believe AI, especially generative AI, is the next platform shift.

Our perspective is that AI is bringing in this new platform era, especially with respect to generative AI, where phenomenal businesses can be built. We already have some early massive companies, like the LLM providers, on which application-level companies can be built. Apart from OpenAI and Anthropic, we’re seeing a lot in open source as well.

At a high level, several big platforms have emerged within this AI platform shift. Where we’re spending a lot of time now is at the application layer, looking at companies that are built on top of these LMS to provide real business value.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Mo Islam, Partner at Threshold Ventures
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