Hema Veeraragavathatham

I participated in a “SMART MANUFACTURING” panel with Gayathri Radhakrishnan, Rohini Chakravarthy and Abhijit Supekar (moderator) last week at TIECon 2024. The coolest part of the panel was 3 Women VCs talking about a topic that has not traditionally been discussed by women. I never imagined I’d see this in my lifetime. Things have indeed changed! We had a very lively discussion of whether we can expect lights out factory in 5-10 years. Automation is happening in all stages but full automation manufacturing is tough because it requires human like adaptability. It is not converting text into instruction or code - it is about precision. Robotics + AI is making this happen and we will get there. AI is going to bring the cost down for complete solution for example: there are robotic arms that can do more tasks and learn like a human and not just some specific tasks. Also check out our portfolio companies Micropsi Industries and RGo Robotics that are making it happen in this space. Thanks to Anshu Bahadur Hrishikesh Sathawane Nilesh Dixit for organizing the panel and Anita Manwani and Surbhi Kaul for making this happen! #TiECon2024 #AIUbiquity

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Had a great conversation with my friend Vignesh Rajagopal for his podcast Fika Bytes, where he speaks to a variety of hardware tech founders about their experiences creating and launching tech products. During this podcast, we deep dived into the challenges of starting a tech company, how we were able to bring Pulse Devices, LLC to life, and some of the most important lessons I've learned as an entrepreneur. Check out the episode here: https://lnkd.in/eP5Rf4YF P.S. if you're a hardware tech founder that wants to share your story definitely reach out to Vignesh!

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Big News: The Official Day Zero is here! 🤩 Thrilled to announce the official launch of Fibr and to celebrate our funding led by the visionary Accel, 2am VC, and my mentors Kunal Shah and Yamini Bhat At Fibr, we obsess over micro insights. One such hypothesis was that landing page personalization is often overlooked, yet is a super-critical tool to reduce CAC in the cookieless era. Like every market creation opportunity, testing this hypothesis took us some time. We decided to only go out and launch when this hypothesis was completely tested. And guess what? We saw a 10-15% increase in conversions from partnerships with large enterprises in the broadband, insurance, and interior design sectors across geographies. If you are a mid-market/enterprise marketer struggling with CAC, we would love to help. Here’s the kicker: Share this post and tag a fellow marketer who needs to hear about this! Both you and your friend’s company will snag 2 free months with the enterprise version of Fibr Web personalization product. Only 20 slots for this early bird offer. DM me to seize this exciting offer and let’s revolutionize your marketing together! Read the full news here: https://lnkd.in/gx_EQtx5 Thanks, ADWEEK AdExchanger for the mentions. #Fibr #Launch #MarketingRevolution #Personalization #CAC #Martech #FundRaise

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Worth reading: Generative AI is not going to build your engineering team for you. So, so good - peppered with gem quotes and observations- chuckle. https://lnkd.in/gZBKtU4X Thanks to Eric Brooke for sharing.

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I first met Mike Maples, Jr in 2010, when Founders Network was just an idea. Over the years, Mike and his team at Floodgate (special shoutout to Arjun Chopra) have been great mentors, sharing their insights and guiding our founders. Most recently, their advice played a pivotal role in helping us launch Founders Network Fund. Today, Mike shared the key ideas with FN'ers from his new book Pattern Breakers (https://a.co/d/buKBd5O ), which explores the insights he’s gained from backing companies like Twitter, Twitch, and Okta -- and which put him on the Forbes Midas List 8x. This is the most important book on startups in the last ten years, according to Steve Blank. My notes on the key concepts of his talk: 1) Inflections – "not a trend but a change event that represents a turning point in our ability to provide empowerment." e.g. The GPS chip in iPhone 4s 2) Insights – "a non-consensus and right insight about the future that's powerful and non obvious and leverages inflections." e.g. Lyft = GPS + strangers driving you 3) Founder future fit – "Living in the future before other people live in the future and then try to build what's missing in the future." If you're a founder, check out the book. Grateful for the impact Mike and Arjun continue to have on both me and the Founders Network community!

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Back in Bangalore, but an exciting few days in Boston and NYC with the Citizen Stack team as they take the India Stack on the road, including at the UN.   What was built in India, for India, is a monumental achievement in showing what is possible when imagination, will, and dedicated group of spirited volunteers (ProductNation/iSPIRT) combine the best of technology, public policy, legal frameworks, and private sector participation to create the rails for citizen inclusion and the delivery of public goods.   This is such a significant story for world that few outside understand for myriad reasons—including complacency and complexity—and so large and difficult to grasp (at least in the west) that when one looks at what India has achieved in such a short time it feels like the stuff of science fiction.   Having seen this story unfold, from the early days of Aadhaar, the well-worn assumptions about how India consumes, transacts, travels, saves, and invests, have been rewritten and will evolve with new stacks in health, agriculture, and data protections. Given India’s average age is 28, there is a whole generation that is going to experience a vastly different set of public goods and services that would have been unimaginable a decade ago.   For starters, India has: ·     Authenticated 1.4 billion people with a digital identity ·     $230 billion of monthly UPI transactions and on track to hit 1 billion transactions per day in the next 2 years ·     Reduced the time to open a bank account from 6 days to 1 hour ·     Efficiently administered 2 billion covid vaccination doses over 18 months, without adding an additional clinic   Having set a benchmark for inclusive growth, low cost delivery, consent, and data privacy, the story has now gone global. It was inspiring to hear directly from numerous UN participants (France, Philippines, Ethiopia, among them) on implementing elements of what India has open-sourced to the world. Specifically, the Modular Open Source Identity Platform (MOSIP), which was developed at International Institute of Information Technology Bangalore provides a flexible and scalable identity platform that caters directly to the needs of diverse populations, including those in remote and underserved areas. Already implemented by 18 countries, representing 110 million people, MOSIP-based systems are on track to providing a legal and verifiable ID for the remaining billion world citizens that still lack one. Thank you Sharad Sharma and Jasminder Singh Gulati, and your teams for including me on what I hope is the beginning of many Citizen Stack events around the globe. What a time to be proud of what India has given the world. #ExportQuality #IndiaStack #Aadhaar #UPI #DPI Amie Patel Pankaj Jain Vaibhav Parikh Anurag Saxena Digital Public Goods Alliance Ravi Tyagi

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Big shoutout to Avinash Joshi, our Co-founder and CTO, for an amazing talk at #RailsWorld! He shared how Cravd is using #Rails to build our marketplace for hiring home chefs, offering fresh meals cooked in YOUR kitchen. What’s more exciting? We’re integrating AI to personalize menus for each family. 🍽️ Our goal is to create a "majestic monolith" using Rails and AI, making it easier for chefs to offer tailored meals based on customer preferences. 🔮 The future of home-cooked meals is here, and we can’t wait to share what’s next! #Cravd #AI #TechTalk #RubyOnRails #FoodInnovation #HomeChef

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Will we need websites at all? How can you compare the current AI boom with the age of oil exploration? What does it mean when we say in the world of AI, compute vs. data will have gravity? During the Antler India Residency 4 that concluded recently, we had our good friend Hemant Mohapatra stop by to chat with founders re: his and Lightspeed's take on AI, and especially AI for India, incl. one of their marquee investments Sarvam AI. Sharing our interaction w/ Ishavasyam Dash

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The second panel at our Startup Fundraising Summit featured advice from VC investors Ashwini Anburajan (Side Door Ventures), Sumeet Shah (VHS Ventures) and Jessie Lam (Alinea Ventures) about navigating the fundraising process. In this workshop, the audience asked about real life situations and our investor panel shared their thoughts Here’s their advice: 1. Clear & Simple Pitches Cold emails and decks should be concise and impactful to catch attention quickly. 2. Prioritize Stage & Sector Fit Focus on investors who understand your stage and sector rather than just big names. Early-stage founders benefit from “super angels” or small funds who get their space. 3. Tell Your Story Clearly outline your vision without overloading details, so investors can dive into feedback and questions. 4. Recognize Genuine Interest Phrases like “keep me updated” may signal low interest. Look for investors who ask detailed questions or reach out proactively. 5. Build Trust with Updates Keep investors engaged with regular, targeted updates. Relationships built now may lead to support or future investment. Fundraising is a journey. Share your progress, and think of it as building connections for long-term success. Full video below, if you were there share your insights in the comments.

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💼 Collections, Collections, & Collections! 💼 As we approach December, it's crunch time for law firms to collect on outstanding invoices. This is a critical period to ensure cash flow is maximized before year-end. In this insightful article by Saurabh Mehra, published on Law.com, you'll find strategies that many of our customers and law firms have successfully adopted to improve collections and drive stronger financial outcomes. 📈 Don't miss the opportunity to implement these proven practices and finish the year strong! #LawFirmOperations #Collections #CashFlowManagement #LegalTech #Finance #LawFirmStrategy

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We're excited to announce our partnership with Kunal and Arunram (former Co-Founder and CTO of Blockdaemon) in leading a $4.0M seed round into Arya. Arya is building an AI-native human capital management system for healthcare workforces. By automating key skills across scheduling, payroll, compliance and employee onboarding, Arya's product allows healthcare services organizations to let their teams focus on care while removing considerable human intervention. We believe healthcare is one of the most compelling markets for agentic solutions, tackling a market measured in payroll instead of technology spend. Most critically, we believe solutions like Arya increase the surface area between clinicians and patients to drive better outcomes, while reducing massive costs and time delays. Since growing ARR 6x yoy, we believe Kunal and Arun represent the types of founders we are lucky to back at Twelve Below: ambitious, humble, technically-oriented and first principle thinkers. https://www.aryahealth.ai/

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During yesterday's LibreQoS APNIC webinar, I posed the question: won't more bandwidth solve these problems? As Herbert Wolverson said, yes, more bandwidth is good, but, still these problems remain if queueing is done incorrectly. Here's my take on why bandwidth alone is not as good as bandwidth + good queueing policies: Generally it was believed that 'data is important, so don't throw it away; hang on to it and send it later'. In practice, this has proven to be suboptimal as two issues may emerge: 1) latency increases for some flows due to heavy demand from other flows using the same bottleneck link, 2) even a single flow can have excessive latency due to aspects of typical TCP behavior (referred to bufferbloat) when the buffers grew large enough that the data being buffered was retransmitted anyway. It turns out that not all data is equally important. Active Queue Management is the art of deciding priorities, both in deciding what data to throw away, but also in allowing some later arriving data to be transmitted ahead of data in another connection that arrived before it. These problems have been studied, and good solutions have been found by using certain queueing policies in routers and switches, referred to as “fq_codel’ and “cake”. These track the different flows not by classifying the data, but by watching the behavior. Flows that send relatively little data (DNS lookups), or at a measured pace (video chat) have priority over flows that send a lot of data as quickly as possible (App and System updates, Video and ISO downloads).

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I’m thrilled to be announcing that Notion Capital is leading the $15m Series A investment in Cogna today. In the industry, we like to think that software has been eating the world. But when you look at the data a better description would be more of a nibble. Depending on what source you look at the software industry represents between 5-8% of global GDP. Contrast that with the services industry that represents between 60-70% of GDP and worth around $25 trillion on a global basis. Most services have been out of reach for the software industry. They have either been too complex or too specialized for off the shelf software to access in any economically viable way. But that’s beginnning to change with GenAI leading to the emergence of ‘service as a software.’ Cogna is at the forefront of this opportunity - building precision software at scale and delivering huge productivity gains for traditional industries. We know Ben Peters & Lars Mennen well having backed their previous company Five AI that was acquired by Bosch in 2022. And we’re very excited to be backing them again together with Hoxton Ventures & Chalfen Ventures Read my full blog post on why we invested here. Radu Bozga Ben Peters Lars Mennen Bryan Gartner Mike Chalfen Hussein Kanji Kirsten Connell https://lnkd.in/eh8mhcJb

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I'm excited to finally share what Sunder Karthik and I have been working on for the past four months: Lintbook, The Cash Flow App. Here is a 90 second demo - https://lnkd.in/gB7prnVs Why did we build Lintbook? 💬 Navigating Tough Money Conversations Talking about money, especially in a relationship, isn’t easy. Personally, I lean toward saving for the future, while my partner prefers to focus on the present. Both perspectives matter, but finding a financial balance requires ongoing, honest communication. Lintbook was born from our own journey of trying to bridge those gaps, and it’s designed to help you do the same. 📈 Focusing on What Matters, Not Rigid Budgets One of the biggest reasons we created Lintbook was to move away from rigid, joyless budgeting. Budgets can feel like crash diets - they’re hard to stick to and often make you feel restricted. Instead, Lintbook focuses on tracking cash flow in a way that fits your life, without sacrificing the things that matter to you. 🔧 Built from the Ground Up with Intention When we first came up with the idea for Lintbook, we didn't want to create just another finance app - it was about crafting a tool that we’d want to use ourselves. Instead of packing it with features that can overwhelm users, like automatic bank syncing or endless charts, we kept it simple and intentional. The idea was to give people more control over their finances, without the extra noise. So why did we take this back-to-basics approach? For us, it’s like “flintstoning” - going back to the way our parents did it, manually entering expenses into a ledger. That process is grounding. It puts you in control and invites conversations when you’re ready, without the flood of automated data overwhelming you. Spending just a few minutes tracking our income and expenses has transformed our relationship with money, reducing anxiety and helping us focus on how to grow our cash flow. We hope Lintbook brings you that same sense of peace. Key Features: 📸 Itemized Receipts: Snap a picture of your shopping receipt, and we’ll itemize it for you. (Special shoutout to Peter Marsh for helping build this) 🔄 Automated Recurring Transactions: Plan your regular bills or income. ⏰ Never Miss a Bill: Get reminders for upcoming and overdue payments. 📊 Sub-Transaction Tracking: Break down large expenses for better clarity. 💡 Insights: Identify large expenses and view aggregates such as yearly taxes paid and category based spend 📅 Plan Ahead: Add future transactions to avoid surprises. 🤝 Collaborative Money Management: Work together with your partner at your own pace. 📝 Manual Ledger with a Modern Twist: Track your expenses with intention, just like our parents did. Available exclusively for iPhones in the US 🇺🇸 🔗 Download Lintbook https://lnkd.in/gv6Vm-mP 🌐 Learn more: www.lintbook.com Thank you for your support! I can’t wait to hear how Lintbook helps you on your financial journey!

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I've spent multiple semesters in the SAC and learned a lot about my own investment thesis, learning the mechanics of investing and meeting fascinating startups! If you're on the fence about angel investing, this is a good starting point

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In my last post, I promised to share some highlights and takeaways from the "AI at Scale" panel at the VentureFizz conference at SVB. As I described it, the panelists (Bob Mason, Raj Aggarwal, Sumita Palanisamy, Chris Puzzo and David Xiao) made no grand promises about #GenAI being a cure-all; instead, they highlighted real, practical use cases where GenAI and #PredAI work together. And on top of that, they dug into how GenAI is reshaping data science and software teams—something every tech leader has on their mind. Highlights and Key Takeaways Here’s what really stood out to me from the panel: Use Cases: When asked about their most interesting GenAI applications, just about everyone described use cases that combine GenAI with PredAI. For example, one company developed a sales tool that uses GenAI to summarize research for sales reps and PredAI to pick out the hottest prospects to target in those critical last few days of the month. Or a marketing company that uses GenAI to draft personalized emails, while PredAI handles who gets which email, when, and why. App Design Patterns: These examples actually lay out a pattern for many AI applications in enterprises. The winning combination is GenAI + PredAI + traditional software. One architecture approach is to think of where an app needs deterministic, contextual, or statistical outputs—and apply software (if-then-else logic), GenAI or PredAI appropriately. Organizing AI Teams: One of the big questions was how to organize teams to create these next-gen AI applications. I liked Dave's approach on what they're doing at Klaviyo: Data Scientists Embedded in Engineering: Embedding data scientists within engineering teams means AI development happens alongside other software, not in a vacuum. Investing in MLOps: Building strong #MLOps infrastructure lets data scientists deploy and monitor models at scale, making a huge difference when it comes to real-world impact. Full-Stack Engineers with GenAI Skills: Full-stack engineers are increasingly integrating GenAI into products, with data scientists providing oversight. This trend shows how accessible GenAI is becoming—and that PredAI needs to follow a similar path soon! What I hear from #AIML leaders from all stripes is the pendulum is swinging in enterprises from GenAI-or-bust to a balance of GenAI + PredAI + SW. And PredAI needs a step change to enter the GenAI era. Months-long cycles for developing and deploying models just don't cut it anymore. It’s amazing to see that the vision we’re building at FeatureByte is actually taking shape across different industries.

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Rebalance Cohort 07: Introducing one of the most energetic (and mindblowing!) scientist-duos 👩‍🔬 👨‍🔬 we've ever met in the last few years, Shruti Kutmutia and Dr. Pranav Nair who were recently part of Rebalance's 7th accelerator cohort that concluded in August 2024. <Applications for Cohort 08 are currently open! Link at the end of the post> Shruti and Pranav are long-standing friends who decided to start BacAlt Biosciences together on a mission to develop green alternatives to synthetic biopolymers found in personal care, agricultural practices, textiles, and many other industries. They have discovered a breakthrough platform to develop green biopolymers on a mission to address hidden plastics at the source.🫧 🤯 Hidden plastics are a $66Bn opportunity! Some cosmetic products contain as much plastic added as ingredients as the plastic they are packaged in. 🧴 87% of the top-selling cosmetic products contain microplastics (bulking agents, emulsifiers, opacifying agents, film formers, glitter, viscosity regulators, etc). 🧼 With growing awareness and impending bans globally, a wide range of industries that have relied on plastics in their formulations are now forced to pivot to green ingredients in record time. 💄The green ingredients market is worth $54.8Bn currently and growing at a CAGR of 16.5% It's not easy to traverse the journey from the lab to a VC pitch! If we can make this journey even a little easier and worthwhile for academia that are venturing into entrepreneurship, we'll feel we've done some good. It warms our hearts when we see feedback like this for our program because we know put our whole heart in it as a team. 🥹🥹 Thanks Shruti Singh for recommending us! You can watch it below or on YouTube: https://lnkd.in/g_MRzUjk Applications for Cohort 08 are closing on 15 October 2024, apply on this link if you're a female-founded/co-founded startup and are looking to accelerate your journey from 0-1 or raise capital: https://shorturl.at/45z7W More about us: www.therebalance.com CC: Vikas Kumar Pallak Jain

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