1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Damani, Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund (Part 1)

Anirudh Damani is the Managing Partner at Artha Venture Fund. We have a terrific discussion on the Indian Startup Ecosystem and its trends.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s get you acquainted with the audience. Tell us a bit about Artha and your background.

Anirudh Damani: I have had a very interesting journey to becoming a venture capitalist. I started out as a door-to-door salesman in Texas. During my first seven months at the job, I knocked on a hundred doors a day. I was responsible for selling long-term energy power contracts to homeowners in West Texas.

592nd 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Heather Hiles, Imminent Equity

Heather Hiles is Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity, and a pioneering entrepreneur in the Black community. Heather also has deep experience in financing Black entrepreneurs, as well as on the education side to close knowledge gaps at scale.

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592nd Roundtable Recording with Heather Hiles, Imminent Equity

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

Roundtable Recap: October 6 – Spotlight on Black Entrepreneurs

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Heather Hiles, Founder and Managing Partner at Imminent Equity, and a pioneering entrepreneur in the Black community. Heather also has deep experience in financing Black entrepreneurs, as well as on the education side to close knowledge gaps at scale.

Block Transfer

As for our entrepreneur pitches, first we had John Wooten from Atlanta, Georgia, pitch Block Transfer, a peer-to-peer stock trading platform.

StyleAStar

Then Victoria Christopher from Nigeria pitched StyleAStar, a B-to-C Customized Fashion business.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Where are you looking right now? What verticals are underserved where you think such large opportunities exist? What kinds of verticals are you looking at?

Yanev Suissa: We have a bet in the AgTech space. We’ve done a few in the health insurance space and the HealthTech space. We are increasingly looking at the manufacturing and industrial spaces. We think that cyber-physical systems is an interesting place.

Sramana Mitra: IoT kind of stuff.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 4)

Yanev Suissa: We are also very comfortable going deep on the vertical side of things rather than just horizontally. You could build multi-billion dollar businesses in verticals that aren’t as familiar to the Valley sometimes like agriculture. Climate tech is one of those verticals that has emerged. Insurance is one a lot of people talk about. Manufacturing is another one. Those are areas where the Valley is not as well plugged in or connected.

Cloud Agronomics, for example, is a vertical company up and down the AgTech stack. They can help you analyze soil and agriculture over billions of acres in real-time. They can help you understand the carbon sequestration in your particular land. They are able to do a lot of things in one particular vertical well.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: India has been incredibly productive. Europe has started producing interesting companies. They want global customers and they want to set up shop in the US. European firms often prefer the East Coast. Is that a model that you are okay with?

Yanev Suissa: Oh yes. We’ve never been a five-minute-away firm. I grew up at NEA as a VC. We were always bi-coastal. It is the reality of the VC world. I do think you’re right about seeing the development teams being built elsewhere and more of the business and sales teams being in the US. I’ve seen that quite a bit.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yanev Suissa, Managing Partner and Founder at SineWave Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When something fits your investment thesis, what do you want to see in the company when you’re doing a seed investment? What is the earliest stage check that you’re comfortable writing and what do you want to see? Do you want to see paying customers or a certain MRR?

Yanev Suissa: A lot of these firms have, what I would call, nonsensical rules. Some of that is indicative of how a startup is performing, but I don’t think it should be a barrier. Our seed deals are not pure tech risk in that a product is already developed. It may not have all the features and it may not be in scale, but it’s deployed in some way so you can test it and play with it.