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 "Intelligence 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.
Focus
We need to focus the fruits of seminal moment in human evolution to real problems that we are facing today
Aging is real
By 2100, we might deline by 2bn people
Aging is real and is here. In Europe more than 19% of people are older than 65 years and in North America 17%. Even India, the most populus nation on earth will start the decline in population by 2050. By 2050, India will have 300mn people above the age of 60, almost the same about of people that US have. Even today, India has 12mn people who are 80+ years, more than the population of Greece or Belgium. In Japan more than 30% of people are above the age of 65 years. For us to keep our societies functioning at full tilt, we would need to build AI & Robotics that can help plug the productivity gap safely, while also taking care of the aging population to help them age gracefully. We need to build technology that will help us augment our cognitive and physical abilities as we age.
Climate change is real
If temperature on our planet rises by 4 degrees by year 2100, vast areas of London, New York, Bangkok, Mumbai, Bay Area and other major cities will likely be underwater by the end of the century, based on current climate trajectories that will cause massive sea level rise. As a result of rising water levels, coastlines will be significantly altered, and many cities will become uninhabitable, displacing more than 250mn people. Not only that storms and extreme climatic events will penetrate further into landmass, causing challenges at scale we have not seen before. Further extreme weather events like heatwaves will be more frequent and long-lasting, causing droughts, global food shortages, mass migration, and increased spread of infectious diseases as habitats and ecosystems gets disturbed. Planet scale intelligence getting built with LLMs and digital twins needs to be deployed to solve this global challenge in a real manner, not like the green washing that is the norm. It will take significant technology insight, collection of global data, talent applied at scale to move us towards a sustainable future.
Age of abundance & SDG
Breakthrough science with AI &
We are close to the age of abundance with breakthroughs in AI & Robotics and their application in solving SDGs via breakthrough scientific innovations. This acceleration of breakthrough scientific discoveries across many fields including genomics, food science, advanced materials, space, quantum and others has the potential to create sustainable development for all of us. Protein folding problem and application of AI showcased the power of creating simulations that were very close to experimental efforts. This is clearly showing the pathway for democratisation of science and its application into creating novel solutions to enable SDGs(Sustainable developmental goals) at scale for all of humankind.
