DeVC

My role at DeVC is split into 3 broad areas:

(1) Fund OS
- Venture Capital funds also require an OS (tech + process) to handle deal flow, track its portfolio & offer services to their portfolio founders.
- I am responsible for managing our AI Analyst (hence, we don't require human Analysts)

(2) Investing
- I meet (aspiring) founders at different points in their journey. We may invest in their companies.

(3) Community & Content
- The DeVC community consists of our Collective (founders/executives who invest alongside us) & other well-wishers. We run regular DugOuts for founders across Bangalore, Mumbai & Delhi. Now 20 editions in with 1,000+ unique attendees.
- On the content front, we publish a monthly newsletter & much more (still WIP)

Investments attributable:
(1) Regional snack foods product (Angel round)
(2) B2B construction chemicals specialist (Pre-Seed round)
(3) Voice AI foundational model company (Seed round)
(4) Insurance Middleware vendor (Angel round)
(5) Casual edutainment game (Seed round)

Anti-portfolio:
(1) Swish
(2) Alienkind
(3) Offline MFD business (unannounced)

Associate Vice President

InsuranceDekho

Joined InsuranceDekho along with my team from Verak as part of our acquisition in April 2023.

I was part of the team which started distribution of small business insurance ($ multi-million revenue line) and I kick-started our integrations with ONDC to offer embedded insurance options (1st to market).

Associate Director

Verak (now, part of InsuranceDekho)

I co-founded Verak Inc in October 2020; our first product - BimaPe - allowed customers to get a unified view of their family's insurance via a wallet offering. The product leveraged the India Stack to fetch policyholder details in an instant & used a proprietary machine learning model to decode the policy TnCs in simple words for consumers.

Verak Inc raised a total of $1.85M in venture financing with participation from Sequoia Capital India & Lightspeed India Partners. We were also a part of Y Combinator's W21 accelerator programme.

In September 2021, our first product - BimaPe was retired. And, the team focused on a new SMB insurance offering. We pioneered an end-to-end WhatsApp based journey for MSME owners in India with multi-lingual support from prospecting to purchase to after-sales support. The company on-boarded 5,000+ MSMEs in its first year of operations with a 8% self-serve purchase rate and subsequent 60% renewal rate.

Verak was acquired by InsuranceDekho in April 2023.

Founder

FinTech Innovation Lab

I was the start-up lead in London for the FinTech Innovation Lab. This was a fun one year stint as the 3rd & junior most member. FIL is incubated by Accenture.

Analyst

Asia InsurTech Podcast

Asia InsurTech podcast is Asia's first podcast dedicated to InsurTech and innovation in insurance 
featuring entrepreneurs, thought leaders and investors.
The podcast can be downloaded or streamed via your favorite application or may be accessed via the AIP website: https://asiainsurtechpodcast.com/

Ambassador

Laka

As an Insurance Product Manager at Laka, my role involved product design using the Jobs-to-be-done framework, product pricing, market research and product benchmarking.
Laka's unique business model, approved by the FCA, involves charging customers in arrears at the end of a calendar month. "Premiums" are computed for an individual customer as their respective share of the true cost of claims within an assigned risk pool.

Insurance Product Manager

Insureblocks

Founded by Walid Al Saqqaf, Insureblocks serves as a leading educational resource for blockchain, smart contracts and distributed ledger technology (DLT) in the insurance industry and beyond. My role was research based and focused on InsurTech in emerging markets.

Research Analyst

Willis Towers Watson

Involved in a commercial lines motor insurance technical pricing project for a leading UK insurer. My role was focussed around data cleaning and development of risk models using proprietary WTW software.
Assisted in a capital model migration for a Lloyds syndicate.

Insurance Consulting Summer Intern

Worked on a reinsurance premium pricing project for a leading European insurance firm.
Prepared regulatory documents as per the IRDAI (Insurance Regulatory and Development Authority of India) guidelines for an Indian general insurance company.
Developed Excel tools using Visual Basic to support a Life insurance modelling project for a reputed Indian life insurance firm.

Summer Intern

Involved in the development of an excel model to calculate Matching Adjustment (MA) spread for Solvency II and IFRS Valuation Interest Rate (VIR).
The spreadsheet model was used to reconcile key results with those extracted from a parallel Prophet model.
Gained significant knowledge about various facets of Actuarial work, in particular, projecting and discounting cash flows, risk adjusting cash flows using different methods, grouping cash flows as required and calculating IRR's.

I’m a founder-turned-VC who has been through the rollercoaster — raised money from Y Combinator & Tier 1 investors (Lightspeed & Sequoia) in 2020. Made every possible mistake — yet somehow landed an acquisition offer in 2022.

Along the journey, I discovered my interest in private market investing by putting my own money to work. Now, I’m very lucky to get paid to do what I used to earlier pay to do.

My friends describe me as digitally omni-present but physically absent. Due to certain circumstances, I prioritize spending time with my family and therefore it may appear that I am ‘absent’ from time to time.

(*) My individual private investments (in order of investment date) include:
1. OneCode (Seed)
2. BlueLearn (Pre-Seed)
3. Stoa School (Seed)
4. JarApp (Seed)
5. Hilo Design (Pre-Seed)
6. FastJobs (Seed)
7. EzoBooks (Angel)
8. FinSire (Seed)
9. CarEasy (Seed)
10. RevRag AI (Angel)
11. Cautio (Pre-Seed)
12. Jimmy’s Cocktails (Series B)
13. ToHands (Seed)
14. CirclePe (Seed)
15. Boba Bhai (Seed)
16. SaveSage (Angel)
17. Kubo Care (Angel)
18. gAI Ventures (Angel)

(*) Please note that I no longer make individual investments as of May 2024.

List of attributable investments at DeVC:
1. B2B | Specialty Chemicals — Pre-Seed  round
2. D2C | Regional Snacks — Angel round
3. SaaS | Voice AI — Seed round
4. BFSI | Insurance Middleware — Angel round
5. BFSI | Collections Tech — Angel round
6. D2C | Edutainment/Gaming — Seed round 

Outside of work, I read a lot (150+ books now), write some essays (1000+ now) & regularly hit the gym or go for an outdoor run. I spend a lot of time with my family in Mumbai & a few close friends.

You can find all of my book recommendations, book notes, podcast recommendations, historic investment memos & old blogs on my website which is linked in my profile.

Views expressed on LinkedIn are my own and do not reflect those of DeVC, Z47 (f.k.a Matrix Partners India), fund LPs or any other affiliated partners. None of my posts should be treated as legal or financial advice. Endorsements are specifically called out.

According to MIT, 95% of organizations are getting zero return from GenAI pilots

MIT conducted 50 interviews, surveyed 150+ leaders & studied 300+ AI projects to highlight the “GenAI divide” i.e. despite $40bn+ in spending on AI projects, only 5% of companies are able to extract real value.

Sharing 3 key takeaways for startup founders from this report ⤵️

(1) What do Enterprises want from AI products?
~60% of respondents rank “ability to improve over time” as a key selection criteria for GenAI vendors
~63% demand that their AI tool “retains context”
~66% want the AI tool to “learn from feedback”

(2) Employees are adopting AI even if their company isn’t - ChatGPT is your competitor too!
~ 40% of companies surveyed had an Enterprise AI plan
~ 90% of employees are using AI for work purposes

Anecdote: During diligence of a Legal AI company - several junior legal associates I spoke to admitted to using Perplexity or ChatGPT for their case work despite their employer having a “no AI” policy or no Enterprise subscription!

(3) How can a startup become a trusted AI partner for Enterprises?
67% of companies are choosing to buy AI solutions from a strategic partner (NOT a vendor)

MIT provides a sharp framework:

(a) The startup & Enterprise have to approach the contract as a strategic partnership

(b) The startup has to do deep work i.e. understanding of processes, product customization, change management

(c) Because of (2), the startup needs to have on-site resources (”FDEs”)

(d) With FDEs, the startup must source problem statements bottoms up where ROI can be established

(e) Use cases identified in (4) tend to be more operational & back-office in nature; which is where the real unlock is.

Through DeVC Fund I, we've seen these Product Principles (memory, context, deep integrations, RLHF loops) work wonders for our portfolio companies - Confido Health, Revspot, Atica Global amongst others.

For the 5% of companies who cross the GenAI Divide - the prize is huge e.g. $1M+ annual savings on outsourced risk management, $2M+ annual savings in document processing etc.

➡️ Given the size of these savings, any startup which becomes a trusted AI partner (as defined by MIT above) stands to unlock a huge TAM i.e. trillions of $ in (outsourcing) labor budget, not just the $ billions of IT budget.

#ai #startups #technology

Rahul Mathur

Pre-Seed Investor @DeVC || Prev: Founder @Verak (acq. by ID)

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