Team
We have together invested, incubated, grown 15+ leading AI companies
Umakant Soni, General Partner
Before co-founding AI foundry, Umakant co-founded piVentures, a $35m early stage fund for AI (India’s first & only AI focused fund), investing in close to 15+ leading AI companies in India (Sigtuple, Niramai, Locus.sh & others). He also advisor at generative AI startup, Pixis. He has spent more than 10 years in AI space (Founded India’s first AI bot startup in '09) as an entrepreneur, strategy thinker and investor in enterprise, healthcare & logistics. He is also co-founder of ARTPARK, India's first AI & Robotics technology park promoted by IISc and seed funded by DST & GoK to the tune of 230 cr($32mn). He is an advisor to Govt. of India in AI policy and research ecosystem creation. Ex-Director India for Science Inc., he spent time in strategy and innovation roles at Wipro Ltd., one of the leading IT Services companies. IIT Kanpur Alum. Abstract painter in his spare time.
Subhashis Banerjee, General Partner
Subhashis is an entrepreneur, investor and investment banker from his background and has previously worked for Standard Chartered Bank Real Estate Private Equity Fund, Tata Housing Development Company, Sequoia Capital, Tishman Speyer Private Equity Fund. He also confounded and served as CIO(Chief Investment Officer) at ARTPARK, growing an ecosystem of 19+ AI startups. He also co-founded AI foundry, an investment company with aim to build leapfrog AI companies and ecosystem. He has been deeply involved in PE deals for both the residential market and office market as an investment banker and advised companies in domains like AI, financial sector, travel & logistics, defence apart from real estate. An alumnus of IIT Kanpur, IIM Calcutta he is passionate about wildlife conservation.
We provide risk capital for AI & robotics companies
We partner with companies and people, who are looking to create really disruptive shifts by leveraging AI & Robotics wave. We believe that future belongs to "AI first companies", who would leverage "Human like AI" to create massive impact in business and society. We would like to talk to you if you have figured something unique in leveraging, data, talent, domain and research while trying to build your company. Here is a quick checklist for you, if you are a good fit for us.
Thesis
“Once a new technology rolls over you, if you're not part of the steamroller, you're part of the road.” - Stewart Brand, Writer
Human like AI
Shift is starting
"Human like AI" will disrupt our physical and digital world. ChatGPT & GPT4 are early examples of this shift, which are disrupting marketing, content and consulting industries. Next is physical intelligence, which would disrupt things currently done only by human beings. Ability to autonomously move anywhere coupled with the ability to grasp and manipulate things will change multiple industries including most of the infrastructure verticals.
AI driven experience economy
Intelligence economy worth $15.7tn by2030
We are going to end this decade with 7.5bn connected human beings and 30-50 Bn connected and intelligent machines (Cisco research), in what we call the beginning of the AI driven experience economy. Transitioning from the Knowledge Economy, in the upcoming Intelligence Economy, we will be deriving more than 90% of the value in what we call digital intelligent intangible experiences built on top of an increasingly digital-physical world. This wave is going to create a new economic value of more than $15.7tn (PWC research), almost 5 times the current GDP of India. This massive intelligence shift is going to change our businesses, lives and even society based on the choices that we make in building AI today.
Intangible value creation
Potential large winners in a blue ocean
The "Intelligence Economy" will create new winners driven by intelligent automation and extreme personalization in form of digital intelligent intangibles. These two vectors will create the most value (>90%) and companies capturing these value streams are likely to end up as large winners. Some of these companies will be north of $1tn in marketcap in next 10 years. Human like AI, will allow for far higher value creation than it is possible right now (by multiplying human effort), leading to massive growth of economy and prosperity not seen earlier.
