1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The other point I want to make in this discussion is that AI is not only generative AI. There are many, very powerful problems that are being solved with AI, but not necessarily generative AI.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double click down on your current portfolio. Let’s discuss the AI company that you have invested in and let’s also discuss the five to seven AI SaaS companies that are bringing in AI co-pilots. So, let’s do some case studies and understand these trends a little bit from the ground so that you can talk with real experience.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital (Part 1)

Naganand Doraswamy, Managing Partner and Founder at Ideaspring Capital, discusses how he is thinking about investing in AI. There’s a lot of confusion around AI right now. The hype is astronomical. Amidst this noisy environment, we’re trying to bring you some signal, some wisdom.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: So let me double click down on the second one. I will come to the picks and shovels in a moment, but my observation is that to build a vertical application on top of an LLM, you obviously need to train in domain specific data. Now, there is a benefit to kind of constraining that model. You can tell me more technically how much of this is viable and how are people doing it. If you constrain the model to a small language model, the hallucination problem should go away or at least get much more manageable. Is that a correct statement?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator AI Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 1)

Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital, talks about his AI investment thesis. It’s a wonderful discussion that not only entrepreneurs should listen to, but investors should also listen in to calibrate their own investment thesis.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: You must have seen in the media how we’ve advocated very, very seriously bootstrapped startups. As a forum, we have legitimized bootstrapped startups. So today bootstrap startups take a lot of pride. Ten years ago, the bootstrapped startups used to apologize for being bootstrapped startups. Today, they don’t.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m asking a simpler question. Are these all B to B companies – businesses selling to hospitals or insurance companies or pharmaceutical companies?

Julien Pham: Oh, we do a little bit of everything. We have a few B to C, B to B, or B to B to C companies because end user oftentimes is the patient. If you remember, one of our important screening criteria of the quintuple aim is, how does it improve outcomes for patients? So we want to make sure that it somehow touches patients.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Julien Pham, 3CC Third Culture Capital (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: So in that context, what companies have you invested in and what’s going on?

Julien Pham: Yeah. So for Fund One, we’ve invested in 15 companies so far. We’re probably going to invest in another two or three before we kind of wrap up the investment period for Fund One and start investing out of Fund Two. But out of the 15 companies we’ve invested in since 2021, 11 of them are squarely into digital health across different sectors or conditions like mental health and maternal health.