In a conversation with CNBC-TV18’s Shereen Bhan, Priya Ramachandran, Managing Partner at Foster Ventures; Jyotika Gupta, Partner at z21 Ventures; Kirthiga Reddy, co-founder of Virtualness; and Prukalpa Sankar, co-founder of Atlan share their insights on how artificial intelligence (AI) has become pivotal in transforming industries globally.
Priya Ramachandran emphasised that every company they consider for investment now has AI at its core. “Whether in healthcare or industrial sectors, we prioritise investments that leverage AI, machine learning models (LLMs), and data to revolutionise manufacturing and supply chains,” she stated.
Jyotika Gupta, echoes this sentiment, highlighting AI’s role in disrupting traditionally stagnant industries. She points to sectors like firefighting equipment, where innovation has been sparse for decades, as ripe for AI-driven advancements. Gupta’s vision extends to healthcare, where personalised AI solutions promise significant improvements in both physical and mental well-being, heralding an era of augmentation rather than mere automation.
Below are the excerpts of the conversation.
Q: AI is sort of on this explosive growth trajectory at this point in time, how are you weaving that into the way that you spot companies, the way that you work with founders at this point in time, and what you’re hoping to build out?
Ramachandran: If someone is going to be building software for a company like Procter & Gamble, it’s not going to be for one country, it’s going to be for like 100 plus countries. So we are going to be looking at building companies which is going to be compliant for different countries across the world. When we are going to be thinking of that particular angle, it’s not going to be the discussion on is AI going to be the main focus or each and every one of the software that is being built is going to be having AI inbuilt within that. So, every company single company that we are going to be looking at is going to be an AI company. But the main differentiation factor that Foster Ventures looks at while investing is, what are we truly focused on making the change in a lot of change needs to be happening in the healthcare side, similarly another non-penetrated market is industries. How are we going to be bringing in the changes of data, AI, or LLMs, which are being built with respect to manufacturing, with respect to supply chains? And that is one of the main focuses that we do when we are investing from Foster Ventures. So we look at what industry are they solving for. How are they solving this particular problem? How are these problems that are going to be solved truly going to be like helping out these industries or the verticals to be like having a true impact not just today, but for the next couple of decades that’s going to be like coming from the value generation perspective? So that is what we basically look out for when we are investing.
Q: When we’re talking about disruption and problem-solving, what’s looking exciting to you at this point in time? Where do you really see the impact being visible in the next three to five years? Everyone is betting on what AI will do in terms of transformation. But in terms of the next three to five years, where do you really see that big perceptible difference?
Gupta: I think one is industries where there has been no innovation at all. One of our companies started making nozzles for firefighters, and that industry wasn’t disrupted for 70 years. And so I think those are spaces that are there to stay for the next three to five years where there’s a strong need for using AI to bring a lot of disruption and change. I think the other space that I’m really bullish about is healthcare because there’s so much personalisation that needs to happen when it comes to both physical and mental health. And I think AI is going to disrupt that completely. It is going to give people a lot of leverage, which hasn’t happened in the past. So I see AI driving a lot of augmentation rather than automation, if you would say in the next three to five years.
Q: We’re now starting to see many young entrepreneurs, especially entrepreneurs out of India, wanting to build global companies and operate in almost a borderless world. How do you read that? And what is that doing to the kinds of investments that you’re making, the way that you’re looking at future investments as well?
Reddy: I think hybrid teams and looking at talent, as well as client bases across the world is here to stay. My company Virtualness, is a seed-funded company and we already have teams in seven different countries, including India, Dubai, Singapore, London, US. From a market perspective, we actually started with the United States and Indonesia as two key markets. We have just made the decision to say that India is too big, too large, too near and dear for us to ignore. So, that is another key focus area that you will see a lot about over the next few months. And the same thing from the investing side, we have investors who are explicitly looking at cross-border opportunities. One of my investors has seven ventures. And again, that connectivity point to the rest of the world and India, I’ve been able to send some amazing companies to them, and they have funded the best of the best. So that kind of cross-border investing, team building, and client base is here to stay.
Q: Who are you up against in terms of competition? And what have you been able to do in terms of being able to draw in clients so far? Money clearly is not a problem, because you’ve raised a significant amount of capital already.
Sankar: I will just step back a little bit about our founding story. Prior to this my co-founder and I founded a company called SocialCops. We did a lot of work in data science for social good. So we were building India’s national data platform, we did a lot of work with the United Nations on the global SDG agenda. And our model was that we were the data team. So we were very grateful to like work on some very cool problems. And that’s where we learned everything about building and running data teams. However, the reality is it’s really hard to build and run data teams. I remember some of my worst moments was when I got a call from a stakeholder saying the number on this dashboard is broken, we don’t know why and we’re going to show it to the minister in a couple of minutes. I remember jumping on my bed, I open up my laptop, there was a 2x spike overnight in the data and I have no idea why. I call four people- my project manager, my analysts, my engineer and no one knows why there was a spike. And that’s the reality of data. Data is complex because there’s a diversity of people, there is diversity of tools and that leads to what we call collaboration chaos inside organisations. So we tried to buy a solution. If there was a solution that existed which would solve our problem, we would have bought it. I tried three times over to do that, but we failed three times over, and the fourth time we built Atlan for ourselves.
Q: So you were trying to solve your own problem.
Sankar: Yes, we were trying to solve our own problem, we never meant to sell it to anybody else. And then we realised that we had made our team six times more agile in that time and then we said can we go help data teams around the world with this? So since we launched Atlan in 2020, we’ve scaled in the first year 10x, and then many, many times over, and a lot of that has just come to the fact that we understand the problem very deeply as we have faced it and we intended to kind of go solve the problem for the world.
What that has meant for us from a traction perspective is, that we are today working with maybe some of the top companies around the world. We are de-facto for data-first companies like Dropbox and HubSpot to some of the largest banks and e-commerce companies out there. So we’re powering their data infrastructure especially as they move into this AI world. For example, if you are looking at a dashboard, and you say this number doesn’t look right, you are a human, you can do that, but two years from now it’s going to be AI doing that. So how do you give AI the trust and context that it needs to help make these decisions?
Q: You couldn’t have done this from India though?
Sankar: We are still doing this from India. Our team is super global. We are in 21 countries, and a large part of our engineering product organization is in India. 70% of our customers are in the US.
Q: So sales will have to be run out of the US?
Sankar: Our sales operate out of the US. We think we are a new breed of company, which is fundamentally global first. We don’t have a headquarters and that has allowed us to build not just a company from the East or a company from the West, we are a global company, and we’re going to learn the best that we can from everywhere around the world.
