1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Anupam Rastogi, Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: So, when you look at these companies that you have invested in and are looking at your deal flow, could you summarize a bit of what you would like to see?

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Anupam Rastogi, Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures (Part 1)

Anupam Rastogi, Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, discusses his firm’s AI investment thesis.

Welcome to the program, and let’s talk about what you are up to with Emergent Ventures and AI. We started with this watershed moment of generative AI coming into the picture in 2023 and now almost two years hence, AI has moved at a breakneck pace.

So, my first question is, where is your head vis-a-vis AI? How are you parsing all the happenings of the world? How are you framing your investment thesis and so on?

Roundtable Recap: March 27 – The Realities of Pre-Seed Funding

During this week’s roundtable, we had extensive discussions about the realities of pre-seed funding. If you’re in the market for such investment, please review.

Tesser Payments

As for the entrepreneur pitches, up first we had Geetha Panchapakesan from Mountain View, California pitch Tesser Payments, a concept-stage FinTech venture.

Water Current Power

Then we had Michael O’Malley from New Bedford, Massachusetts pitch a hydro-energy idea.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

>>>

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What else are you looking at, thinking about, interested in investing in in terms of AI companies? What are you looking for?

Raju Reddy: For me, Sramana, pretty much all my investments have been at a very early seed stage.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: The other really interesting area that I find very promising is that there are a lot of services companies out there and there’s so much AI technology right now to make services efficient. You almost can productize your services.

If you have a hundred clients that you’re providing services to, you should be able to use AI to dramatically get margin out of those businesses, which is another interesting development for bootstrapped entrepreneurship, in particular. As you know, we support bootstrapped entrepreneurship very, very seriously.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You know, we’ve had several discussions on AI-enabled drug discovery in, towards the end of last year. We have covered AI-enabled drug discovery on our blog quite extensively. It’s an area that I think is super exciting and super promising.

Now, the conclusion that was coming out of those discussions was that drug discovery platforms that are out there, like Adam Weiss, for example, are selling only to the large pharmas. So, if you’re a researcher at a university or if you’re trying to do a startup in drug discovery, you don’t really have access to the infrastructure that you need to be able to develop your products.

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Software development is getting hugely streamlined, right? The co-pilots are becoming extremely effective. So, you don’t need as many people on the software services side as well. There are a lot of co-pilot products that are getting sold into that business. So, there’s a whole market emerging out of efficiency in the software development ecosystem.

So, let’s talk a little bit about these companies that you mentioned as use cases and case studies of what you’re investing in. Cognida and Critical River are two that you just mentioned. Could you talk to us about what these companies are doing and how these models are playing into their situations?

1Mby1M AI Investor Forum: Angel Investor Raju Reddy (Part 1)

Entrepreneur, Angel Investor, and Board Member Raju Reddy discusses his AI investment thesis.