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.
That is also a unique part of our thesis that we see becoming even more and more relevant. You can’t just apply the same thing. You can’t put the same key in every lock. Some of those locks have very big prizes behind them if you can figure it out.
Sramana Mitra: This is something we’re watching very closely and doing a lot of case studies on. To build a solution for a vertical that is esoteric to the Silicon Valley technologist, you need domain knowledge. The metadata and the heuristic of a domain like soil analysis, a Silicon Valley engineer doesn’t have that domain knowledge.
Somebody else who has that domain knowledge frames it and then the engineer can do the actual plumbing of it. The actual domain knowledge and the vision of what problem needs to be solved and how that exists in the head of people who really don’t know AI or technology.
How are you seeing this gap being bridged?
Yanev Suissa: It is the right question. That comes down to the team. You’re absolutely right. You need to find teams that have merged technologists with business people who are in the field. One of the things we loved about Cloud Agronomics, which is now called Perennial is they have the agriculture business folks combined with brilliant technologists.
It’s one of the critiques I’ve lodged about some of the Blockchain technology we’ve seen. We just issued a term sheet for a company that uses Blockchain as part of its solution. We do like the concept and the technology, but you have a lot of 21 to 22-year-olds who’ve never worked in a business ever claiming to create products for large industrial systems and companies that they know nothing about how they work.
You’ve only recently started to see a maturity level where you’re bringing in deep people with vertical business experience alongside these innovative younger technologists who know this new space.
Sramana Mitra: This is top of mind for me right now. How do these teams come together? How do you put these kinds of expertise together? Deep tech and hardcore AI expertise is not sitting inside manufacturing companies. Where is that domain expert meeting the high-tech expert?
Yanev Suissa: A lot of this has to do with people, networks, and relationships. You can’t know everyone everywhere. That’s a basic premise of relationships and networking. We have a bunch of relationships across the Fortune 500 and government entities, but you don’t know everyone.
The way you access everyone is by knowing the key nodes. The ones doing the outreach and the ones trying to solve the problems and recognize they don’t have this DNA in their organization. They are the hunters, forward-thinkers, and the early adopters. There are usually a few of those in any one organization – not a ton, but some. Making those linkages is how you get things done in these spaces.
Maybe you’re the Head of Data for an agriculture company and you’re one of these innovative nodes who knows how to work across the organization, you may be reaching out to different technology developing. Those links are hard to find, which is why we only do four or five a year rather than 300 a year. Finding those links is where the secret sauce comes in.
