April DLT Monthly Meeting Summary - "Innovation Investments from the VC Community"

For the April 2024 DLT member meeting, we invited three guests to share their perspectives on where innovation is occurring:

1) Fellow DLT member, Gamiel Gran, from Mayfield

2) Candace Widdows from ICONIQ Capital

3) Matt Carbonara from Citi Ventures

Gamiel’s discussion:

• Gamiel began with a discussion on the potential of AI as a transformative force across various industries (similar to the shift from traditional data centers to cloud infrastructure).

• He shared five layers of the AI stack, with cognition as a service emerging as a key area of opportunity.

• AI has the potential for significant productivity improvements and to create new user markets.

• The three-horizon model could prove helpful for organizing one’s own ambitions and investments.

Candace’s discussion:

• ICONIQ is a multi-family office turned venture capital fund.

• They focus on next generation technology entrepreneurs, with a portfolio of 120 companies - largely in the enterprise sector.

• They have also invested in Gen AI and she mentioned Write and DeepL (for translation).

• They also focus on the importance of security and the company is cautious in investing due to compliance regulations.

Matt’s discussion:

• Citi focuses on investing in firms that can be helpful to Citi.

• They have been focusing on investments in various areas including data, developer tools, cybersecurity.

• They have also been investing in new database types, LLM models, and their applications, with interest in autonomous agents, model training and deployment, and in AI-specific application areas (i.e., Glean).

• They are also building more applications with APIs, focusing on API management, security and testing as well as the need for cyber.

The membership shared their perspectives and feedback on the current technology landscape:

• There is a fragmentation of software solutions and there is a need to consolidate in order to minimize costs.

• Some discussion was about how to implement AI solutions - and how to pick the right vendor platforms, SaaS offerings.

• One member shared a three-tier strategy for AI implementation

• Another member voiced concern about the quality of data scientists and the efficiency of doing in-house AI development.

• One member shared some success in the insurance space with using GPT models.

• Regardless, AI pursuits should be managed to align with corporate strategic goals.

If interested in presentation decks, please contact John Williams at john@samudra.group.