GFT Ventures Q2 2024 Update
Welcome to the Q2 2024 newsletter from GFT Ventures! We hope you will benefit from our fund updates and portfolio company highlights, as well as our overall industry observations and thought leadership exchanges. Please feel free to share our newsletter with your colleagues and friends using the “Share” button at the bottom of this post. Any additional questions or comments may be directed to team@gft.vc. And you can always visit our GFT Ventures website to learn more about us.
GFT Ventures - Looking Ahead to the Second Half of 2024
This first half of 2024 has seen some amazing developments in the fields of AI and Data Science, and we remain equally excited about the remainder of the year. Although there is certainly no shortage of new, emerging startups (i.e. everyone wants to be an AI company now), we are being extremely picky with respect to those we deem actionable. We continue to look for stellar management teams solving the hardest problems for the largest markets utilizing the power of “pattern recognition” from data. And we make sure we can enter at reasonable valuations that will (upon successful execution) generate meaningful returns for the fund. Two new portfolio companies impressed us enough during the previous quarter to merit investment from the fund, and they are spotlighted as part of our newsletter below.
One area that has become particularly interesting to us this year is robotics. Although we have been tracking this space closely for several years, we were previously struggling to find companies that both met all of our criteria AND offered the potential for a large return on investment within a reasonable timeframe. That all changed in April when we made a small investment in K-Scale Labs after meeting three extremely brilliant roboticists who are working, literally, out of a garage in Palo Alto.
Robotics is fast approaching its inflection point, revolutionizing fields as diverse as manufacturing, healthcare, logistics, and everyday consumer services. We now see many more robotics companies making impressive strides, using advancements in AI and sensor technology to develop smart, autonomous systems that improve efficiency and safety. By supporting these innovative startups, we’re not just expecting strong financial returns but also contributing to advancements that can enhance productivity and quality of life.
Thanks again for your continued support of GFT Ventures. We are actively looking at and closing new deals, and we look forward to telling you about some additional new and exciting investments in the next few months. As we have stated previously, GFT Ventures firmly believes that the AI advancements, and associated startups, we are seeing today represent just the beginning of a multi-decade trajectory of data-driven computing progress. We expect this new generation of companies to give rise to some of the most valuable technology franchises the world has ever seen.
With Gratitude,
Jeff Herbst and Jay Eum
Founding Managing Partners, GFT Ventures
Featured Portfolio Companies
GFT Ventures invested in Knit’s Series Seed round
What it does:
Knit redefines the state-of-the-art for market research utilizing AI. The company leverages the power of patterns gleaned from unstructured qualitative data, as well as quantitative data, to help brands get a quicker and more holistic understanding of their target audiences. The platform consists of several AI agents, each trained to perform a critical step in the consumer research process — generating surveys, gathering responses, analyzing qualitative/quantitative data, and creating reports. The company’s key capability is “knitting together” both quantitative data and unstructured qualitative data to deliver a fast, human-level understanding and interpretation of survey data. With Knit, consumer research that used to take weeks and tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars can be done at a fraction of the cost in just hours or days.
Why we found it exciting:
Having spent 8 years in the consumer insights industry, Knit’s founder and CEO Aneesh Dhawan has a deep understanding of current consumer research methodologies and their limitations. He leveraged his unique insights to build an end-to-end consumer research platform that is truly AI-native. Knit’s one-stop-shop approach is differentiated from a long tail of competitors who are often focused on specific tasks of the research process such as survey programming, data collection, or analysis. Knit’s platform provides support over the entire research journey and benefits from richer feedback loops, thereby enhancing the quality of insights and making outcomes more actionable. Further, unlike legacy platforms that can only integrate AI to a limited extent, Knit’s AI-native design allows for a complete reimagining of the user experience for complex research workflows. We’re optimistic that Knit will emerge as the winning AI research platform for consumer research and are excited to support their vision to become the operating system for consumer intelligence for every major enterprise brand.
GFT Ventures invested in K-Scale Labs
What it does:
K-Scale Labs builds open source humanoid robots that can be applied and programmed for multiple applications. With prior experience gained at Tesla and elsewhere, the founders have unique insights on building an open source hardware-based ML flywheel, and have also demonstrated progress on the hardware front itself (i.e. a functional 4-foot humanoid robot with a BOM of <$10K). The K-Scale Labs long-term strategy is to open source their robot design, allowing others to build and improve upon it. Such an open source strategy will enable K-Scale to quickly collect extensive datasets, ultimately creating the most optimized models for humanoid robots due to this huge data advantage.
Why we found it exciting:
We were particularly impressed by founder and CEO Ben Bolte’s vision for building the best humanoid robot company, which can be distilled into two key ideas:
1. Integration of Hardware and Software: While robotics hardware is becoming commoditized, building a useful robot requires integrating the hardware with the AI/ software models. Therefore, both aspects must be developed in tandem.
2. Focus on the Model: The enduring value of humanoid robots lies in their "brain" (the model) rather than their "body" (the hardware).
We invested in the company just prior to its appearance at the YC W24 demo day, confident in the team’s robotics expertise and innovative approach. After a very warm introduction from a friend of GFT Ventures (one of Jeff’s former Nvidia colleagues who joined through a strategic acquisition), we quickly recognized the strength of the team and the opportunity and moved rapidly to complete our investment.
GFT Ventures in the Spotlight
Jeff Herbst interview on CNBC: GTC takeaways & future of GFT Ventures
Jeff Herbst was featured on CNBC Squawk Box on March 19th to discuss his takeaways from NVIDIA’s GTC 2024, the insatiable demand for accelerated computing, and GFT Ventures’ focus on next generation AI software applications.
Jeff speculated that the demand for computing horsepower will increase a millionfold over the next 10 years, powered by developments of large models that use trillions of parameters, multimodal systems, and countless new software applications. He also highlighted GFT Ventures portfolio companies Artisight and Qortex as examples of AI software companies improving the efficiency of their ecosystems in healthcare and adtech, respectively.
Watch the full interview here.
Jeff Herbst spoke on The Modernist Summit’s VC Panel
Jeff Herbst was featured as a panelist on the Venture Capital Panel at the packed Modernist Summit held at AGI House in Hillsborough on April 27, 2024. The Summit was an all-day, intimate gathering of some of the most influential startup and VC leaders in tech. The panelists shared their current favorite investment theses, strategies for identifying and selecting outstanding companies, as well as their biggest successes and regrets in their investing careers.
Jay spoke at the Takeoff Tokyo Investor Day hosted by Revere
In April 2024, Jay Eum was featured as a panelist at Revere TakeOff Tokyo’s VC session titled “Unlocking Opportunities - The Synergy between CVCs and Micro VCs in Deal Access” alongside other investors from Foothill Ventures and BGV. He also introduced GFT Ventures to a community of GPs and LPs as a part of the event’s Investor Day Presentation.
Jenny spoke on a panel session for Korean AI startups
Jenny spoke at Korea’s Ministry of SME-sponsored information session for Korean AI startups visiting the SF Bay Area in March 2024. These companies were selected by the Korean government as some of the country’s most promising AI startups, and investors from GFT Ventures, Altos Ventures, Softbank Investment Advisers, Spider Capital and Volition Capital offered the founders advice and insights on expanding their business to the US market.