1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Are they coming to you with just the concept? Are they coming to you with some idea about what customers are looking for? What tells you that you want to give $250,000 to these two guys?

Shuly Galili: Founders typically find us through our network. For many of them, they understand that UpWest is the destination for them in order to have this kind of process validation. What we look for are founders with domain expertise. When they build something that is related to networking ,or to healthcare, or to any kind of vertical, they have to have that domain expertise.

It’s important for us that they have some idea of the market, or which vertical they’re going after and maybe have an initial idea and assumption about the problem they’re trying to solve. They don’t necessarily need to have all the answers for us. A lot of times, this is the process that we go through with them in order to find the design partner that helps them to zero in on solving a particular problem for a customer and then building a proper product for that.

We focus on strong entrepreneurs with strong backgrounds, and pretty big markets. They don’t necessarily need to have the product already. In some cases, we did invest in founders who already had a couple of customers in Israel and were able to test it locally. There are good things and bad things about that in our opinion. Testing it in your local market doesn’t necessarily mean it will work in your real market. Most of the time, most of the founders we’ve invested in really wanted the first customer to be in the real market.

Sramana Mitra: These 70 companies you have invested in, can you give us examples of areas that you like to invest in?

Shuly Galili: You look at Israel. There are the things that you would typically expect out of Israel. We know that Israel is very strong in enterprise and cybersecurity. We do have investors in about five companies who build cybersecurity solutions. Probably one of the most advanced companies in our portfolio is SentinelOne in the endpoint security domain. It’s a company that is now close to 400 employees. They reached incredible scale worldwide in terms of customers and raised over a $100 million.

This is a company where the founders came out of Checkpoint. They knew that they wanted to build the next-generation anti-virus. They did not want to wait until somebody local tested it. They came with us to test it locally with some pretty big customers that are still with them today. They were able then to scale here in the US leaving engineering in Tel Aviv.

We’ve also looked at other areas where Israel is very strong. You look at some deep technology areas. We’ve invested in a company called Airobotics. This is an autonomous drone technology company. Look at the platform of drones as a machine that can collect a tremendous amount of aerial data using computer vision and AI.

In 2015, we invested in Airobotics. At that time, that area of drone technology was pretty early. This month, Airobotics opened their Arizona headquarters. They’ve expanded to many areas that are serving industrial players. They have scaled tremendously. We’ve invested in other companies that are more SaaS and marketplace-related like HoneyBook that is serving the events planning industry. They’re based out of San Francisco and Tel Aviv.

In the last few years, we focused heavily on companies that are using AI to implement in new and old industries. We’re looking at companies that are doing predictions for smart cities in terms of congestion and accidents as well as companies applying AI to more industrial side of things in order to predict downtime or production of both manufacturing or chemical and oil & gas.

The broad scope of things that we look at is pretty interesting. We are very sector-agnostic. We like to look at a wide range of things. We believe that out of Israel, you see a lot of diverse entrepreneurs who come with really interesting backgrounds. Some of it is very technical. Some of it is not. They’re looking to solve problems in huge markets. This is where we like to provide them their first start.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shuly Galili of UpWest Labs
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