Investor Spotlight: Khosla Ventures - Let's get more solutions to patients. You can find more about her investment approach here. All Rights Reserved. Most successful entrepreneurs don't have track records. Because there's bigger players with huge software and process and resource advantages. The Q&A was hosted by Rene Haas, the president of Arm’s IP products group, and a former executive with AI chipmaker Nvidia. She has led and helps manage Khosla Ventures’ investments in companies including Zendar, NoMagic, WaveOne, Korbit, Analog Inference, Windborne, and Rosebud. Can you share your insights about that? I think that's where software algorithms in AI may be today. The firm provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. And one more thing. The really volume markets are under five watts and $5 and a couple of hundred TeraOPS. Sandhya led the team that built an entirely new Advertising product business for Skype from pre-revenue to $100m that laid the foundation for the company’s planned IPO and eventual sale to Microsoft for $8.5 billion. When a technology plays out a certain way, it makes rapid progress in the beginning and then starts to peter out. The question of how architecture maps to different types of algorithms, and algorithmic approaches, is a little too early to predict, and that will determine what architectures work best. Haas: 2020 has been a very turbulent year. So you have to adjust strategy as an entrepreneur and entrepreneurs do that fairly well. Haas: Quantum is something that has been written about for a long time and now you're starting to see some things product-wise that are looking a bit more real. In 2020, he was listed No. Top Investors 2019/2020. Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. © 2021 EnterpriseAI. The things we are most interested in is very specialized applications for quantum computing. Vinod Khosla (born 28 January 1955) is an Indian American billionaire businessman and venture capitalist.He is a co-founder of Sun Microsystems and the founder of Khosla Ventures.In 2014, Forbes counted him among the 400 richest people in the United States. Replika AI Confidant Raises $6.5 million in Series A.2 Funding On Heels of the Personal Chatbot Opening to 1.5 Million Users on the Waitlist Khosla Ventures leads investment round in the AI … Others have fundamental long-lasting advantages and if you're doing the startup, focus not on the tricks that give you a 5X improvement, because others will catch up to those tricks, either on software or hardware. Khosla Ventures, Jennifer Fonstad, Bojiang Capital(BoomingStar Ventures for the US fund), +5 WorkWhile raises $3.5M to bring more flexibility and benefits to hourly work TechCrunch David is a partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on consumer Internet, enterprise, advertising and financial services. In 2014, Sandhya was named a World Economic Forum (WEF) Young Global Leader, and she sits on the Advisory Board for the WEF’s Future of the Internet Global Council. Khosla: There's many different markets, you have to be clear. That's where the big opportunity is. Khosla: In certain dimensions, I think that's true. Haas: What is your own investment philosophy, particularly when it comes to tech companies, and how does your overall portfolio, reflect that philosophy? That's the price point I look at as differentiated enough for edge devices to do a lot of interesting things. Sandhya was previously the founder and Managing Partner of Deep Ventures, a seed investment firm focused on entrepreneurs who were tackling hard, unsolved problems through the use of AI/ML. Necessary cookies are absolutely essential for the website to function properly. But that's Microsoft, Google, IBM and others. Insights . So, I wouldn't be afraid of that. You start to see price points that go from tens of pennies to a few dollars that go into these very high volume devices. You can do hardware tricks and there's half a dozen which are very common in hardware and half a dozen that are pretty common in software, like reducing the model size. Now, I don't worry about AGI. Samir is a founding general partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on health, sustainability, food and advanced technology investing. We manage a main fund that supports early- and late-stage investments and a seed fund for developing very early-stage experiments. Examples of investments: 7 Cups of Tea, Airo Health, Nightingale, Kip Health, Simple Habit, Darmiyan. Do NOT follow this link or you will be banned from the site. She was an early investor in One Concern, LunchClub.ai, Helm.ai, Forethought.ai, Fireflies.ai and Intersect Labs. And what implications does that have for hardware architectures? We've seen a lot of startups, but I wouldn't say we've seen radical innovation in architectures or performance or power efficiency. Khosla Ventures has made 847 investments. There's clearly one class of algorithms around deep learning and things like that. Number of investments: 5. And then there's this emerging area of what quantum computing might do in hardware. Sandhya Venkatachalam Sandhya is a Partner on the Investment Team at Khosla Ventures and is passionate about helping founders transform industries through the use of AI/ML and other new, emerging technologies. Khosla: When there's radical innovation, it's still interesting. There's a market for edge devices where the criteria are very different. And then you get to share in the human labor saving, which is where the large opportunities are. Autonomous driving is the one area where that's mostly true, but not completely true. With over five billion dollars under management, the firm focuses on a broad range of areas including consumer, enterprise, education, advertising, financial services, … Can you deliver that 20X, 50X over what the traditional players will do for your market? It provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on technology. Neuro Insights (Paid Subscribers Only) Annual Insights … Rosebud.ai The start-up is backed by brands like Y Combinator, Khosla Ventures, Amplify Partners, Lux Capital, and several angels including Ilya Sutskever, co-founder and Chief Scientist at OpenAI. I do want to encourage the folks out there trying to build products. Subscribe to EnterpriseAI Weekly Updates: Vinod Khosla, a co-founder of the former Sun Microsystems and a longtime technology entrepreneur, venture capitalist and IT sage, makes billions of dollars betting on new technologies. Khosla Ventures "Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies." Everybody really gets there. A long time ago, 25 to 30 years ago, when you looked at Lego blocks, it came in large yellow, white, red, black and blue blocks. You can't afford to spend lots of money on that. I think they have to adapt to the times and be much more thoughtful, maybe even more radical in their approach. I am not discouraged. When you think about competing with the software support ecosystem, like Nvidia has, how can startups really rely on the strength of their architecture alone? But opting out of some of these cookies may affect your browsing experience. The firm prefers to provide venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. What advice would you give to tech entrepreneurs who are pushing through a recession and the remarkable situation involving the COVID-19 pandemic, while trying to build a product and build a company? That's why I'm tracking what quantum computing may do for algorithms. I do think that there is lots of opportunity. A Tabor Communications Publication. 353 on the Forbes 400 list. In the data center, whether inferencing and training are the same architecture or the same software stack even, I still think it's open for debate. Haas: Model performance has been increasing slowly in the field of AI. Haas: How large is the economic opportunity around AI and what do you think drives it? Khosla gave his remarks at an “Ask Me Anything” Industry Luminary Keynote at the virtual AI Hardware Summit earlier in October. Khosla Ventures invested in 2012. It takes very special talent. So, it depends on the pace of development of a technology or deployment. We can talk about any of these, but what's really interesting to me is how much innovation we are seeing. And there were three or four types of components. Do the same challenges apply, relative to being a horizontal versus vertical business or do you think there are some different opportunities there? Wipro Ventures picks up minority stake in Silicon Valley-based cybersecurity startup Vectra Networks 28 Apr, 2016, 07.23 AM IST. You also have the option to opt-out of these cookies. Whenever it takes lots and lots of resources, then the big companies have an advantage. With over five billion dollars under management, the firm focuses on a broad range of areas including consumer, enterprise, education, advertising, financial services, … Whether you call it, AI or AGI, I think this area will be able to do most economically valuable human functions within the next decade. When money is not cheap or not easily available you spend less, and take more time doing some fundamental work and getting it right. And if so, which areas are you most excited about? U.S. Software models themselves are getting to a level of saturation. Or do you look at it and say it's still years away from being commercially viable? But that's not for everyday use. Khosla, who is ranked #353 on the Forbes 400 2020 list, has a net worth today of $2.6 billion, largely earned through his investment successes in the tech field. Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm that manages a fund supporting early and late-stage investments and a seed fund for developing very early-stage experiments. Combined with several grants from the National Institutes of Health (NIH), this latest raise brings the company’s total funding to […] There is a training market in the data center. Kanu is a Principal at Khosla Ventures, focused on investments in ML / AI-enabled applications, robotics / autonomous systems, and hardware acceleration. The Q&A was hosted by Rene Haas, the president of Arm’s IP products group, and a former executive with AI chipmaker Nvidia. And how do you anticipate it is going to change the landscape of business? So, if you can replace a security analyst and do their job, or have one security analyst do the job of five security analysts, or have one physician do the job of five physicians, you're saving gobs of money. The firm was founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. And then there's the selling, and the sales or marketing usually ends up costing the most. Now, you couldn't build the Sydney Opera House out of Lego blocks back then, but then they got all these specialized components. So, hard to tap. I'm actually quite encouraged about the opportunities in this area. With over five billion dollars under management, the firm focuses on a broad range of areas including consumer, enterprise, education, advertising, financial services, … Unlike other funds, it prefers to do investments alone. Haas: Building on that a little bit, there are a lot of AI hardware startup companies. Sandhya was the Head of Corporate Development and Vice President of Product at Skype, reporting to the CEO, post the spinout from eBay. They focus on large markets and short innovation cycles … There's an inferencing market in the data center. Every speaker, every microphone, every sensor. Here are edited segments from that 30-minute Q&A, which centered on questions asked by viewers of the virtual conference: Rene Haas: What has been the most significant technological advancement in AI in the last year or two? Founded in 2004, Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm based in Menlo Park, California. Khosla Ventures has made 125 diversity investments. Being a philosopher, I do worry about AI and AGI being used for most valuable economic functions human beings do. Out of these, the cookies that are categorized as necessary are stored on your browser as they are essential for the working of basic functionalities of the website. Khosla: Silicon Valley is very good at recognizing thoughtful, clever people -- they don't have to have a track record. I do see plenty of those kinds of opportunities still. I think that still needs to be told. The progress on the hardware side, just scaling hardware, has been stunningly valuable as GTC-3 shows. Housing and construction: Technology will transform how we maximize space and how quickly we create and design buildings. Now's a good time to trade off for more compelling product and postpone some of the sales and marketing while the markets are uncertain. Great and multi-dimensional teams to go after the problem, even if they haven't done it yet. Any cookies that may not be particularly necessary for the website to function and is used specifically to collect user personal data via analytics, ads, other embedded contents are termed as non-necessary cookies. I think material science with quantum computing is going to be interesting, possibly some financial services products based on quantum computing. We focus on next-generation energy projects, new materials, mobility, the Internet and silicon technology. I think for a while we'll see more of a bifurcation, but if I were to predict five years from now I think we'll see more unification around the types of algorithms that do certain economic tasks well. Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. You can find more about her investment approach. Radical changes, yes, and I think that will happen, but it's just very hard to predict today. And probably the thing we've learned in semiconductors, having access to process technology and process nodes that others don't – that’s where the software ecosystem gives them such a large advantage. Khosla: We like the higher-risk, higher-upside things. Much of it is horizontal in nature. My bet is that each will be good at certain functions. Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems. On the edge, what's clearly going to be important is power efficiency. Khosla: I think the best ideas survive turbulent times. Khosla Ventures has had 114 exits. This website uses cookies to improve your experience. Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. I think that would be a different architecture than the stuff in the data center. Not just your standard quantum computing Shor's algorithm, etc. There are alternative approaches that still need to be discovered. On May 1st, Alex Morgan from Khosla Ventures will present an … Prospect Insights. So surprises are possible, and people who take specialized approaches in market segments, there can be very interesting innovation to be done. Ben is an investment partner at Khosla Ventures focused on mobile, Internet and ecosystem businesses. Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. Khosla Ventures says that it focuses on people, not plans. I think if you're not in the hundred TeraOPS per watt range, it's going to be hard to sustain a large advantage. Yes. So would I say I'm open for architectures? With over five billion dollars under management, the firm focuses on a broad range of areas including consumer, enterprise, education, advertising, financial services, … So, plenty of these interesting options. She has started and scaled new businesses from scratch, sold startups to large technology companies and acquired startups on behalf of those technology companies. Then there's the building of the technology. But the way I look at it, if we can replace human judgment in a task, you're saving far more money than selling a chip or a computer or something. Find out which companies Khosla Ventures is investing in, as well as the disease indication and therapeutic approach of every investment! If you see the kinds of large jumps, like 20X, 50X, 100X, then that's really interesting. He founded his VC firm, Khosla Ventures, in 2004. Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm run by people who listen to, analyze, and advise entrepreneurs. It may give more of an advantage to the large cloud providers – the people who can build, 500,000 CPU, GPU systems. Those are really interesting now. The firm is based in Menlo Park, California and manages investor capital as well as earlier funds funded by Khosla. Some are well funded, some with high burn rates. There's a whole lot of tricks both on the models on the software side, on the hardware side. Khosla Ventures topped the list with 53 deals—six of those were conducted in the last year and 13 took place in the last two years. So, it might be we just need different types of algorithms to explore the capability of end-use systems. That's when people with the best ideas or with passion for a particular vision, leave those companies. The Company invests in consumer, enterprise, education, advertising, financial services, … Khosla Ventures, the eponymous venture firm helmed by longtime Silicon Valley rainmaker Vinod Khosla, is raising $1.1 billion for its latest venture fund, according to … That could belong to both these combination software and hardware systems, I think that opportunity is orders of magnitude larger than any estimate I've seen today. When we did the Nextgen product to compete with Intel, we very quickly got to 50% market share of the under $1,000 PC market, where we were competing on an x86 architecture with Intel. But given how complex quantum is to use, such as the the interface between quantum and the regular computing world, and the full stack of software and how it runs algorithms, I think specialized algorithms will do better there. You can find more about her investment approach here. The firm was founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. In the meantime, the traditional digital data center, even the digital edge, will probably belong to the larger players. Khosla Ventures provides venture assistance and strategic advice to entrepreneurs working on breakthrough technologies. Stage: Seed . So, I do see very good startups during turbulent times in general. Building great teams is probably the single piece of advice I give to entrepreneurs. Before becoming a VC, Sandhya was both an entrepreneur and an executive. Accelerator/Incubator Insights . The possibilities explode exponentially, so the combinations allow a lot more flexibility on what can happen, what systems can do. We have one effort in drug discovery for quantum computing. But, entrepreneurs usually find specialized paths to get to that first MVP product, that early traction, and then use it to broaden. And I see most digital efforts sort of in this one to 10 TeraOPS per watt power range. Khosla: I think there will be classes of algorithms. Rajesh is a Venture Partner at Khosla Ventures. ITOCHU's latest investment in Khosla Ventures is one of many investments in leading venture capital firms around the world, including the U.S.A., Israel and China, made by ITOCHU over the course of many years. Prior to Deep Ventures, Sandhya was a General Partner at Social Capital, co-head of the Growth Fund and the lead for AI investments. This website uses cookies to improve your experience while you navigate through the website. But the outsize role of hardware in building models that are much more powerful, trillions of parameters per model, and how effective they can be, has been surprising. One example is Ginger.io, the 24/7 digital therapist that uses on-demand, AI-based triage services to interact with patients. In training, especially for the really large algorithms, probably not so much. Other seed funds like to combine their resources, risk, and opportunities with other funds. The firm was founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems. Khosla: In the big company world, it's definitely time for the big companies to be investing, and they're investing heavily. With over $5 Billion under management, the firm focuses on a range of areas including consumer, enterprise, education, These cookies do not store any personal information. We just don't know which improbable is important. What surprised me most is there's been great progress in language models and algorithms. The Johnson & Johnson Innovation, JLABS (JLABS) Meet with… Series helps life sciences entrepreneurs, as well as the academic community, connect with potential partners including corporate venture, VC's, Angels and other investment entities. Vinod Khosla, Founder and Partner of Khosla Ventures, believes that AI, 3D printing, and medicine hold the potential to create impact and disruption in the future. Founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla of Sun Microsystems fame, the Menlo Park-based firm's most recent healthtech investment occurred earlier this month, when it led a $21 million Series C for Neurotrack, the provider of a platform that addresses Alzheimer's … We also use third-party cookies that help us analyze and understand how you use this website. And then there's this really surprise thing of what quantum computing will do, and what kinds of algorithms that will run. Instead of needing 10 million or 100 million cats to recognize a cat, they're saying ‘can we do it from 10 cats?’ So, maybe data becomes a lot less important. Probably a lot sooner. On the flip side, we are large investors in companies like Vicarious, which are taking that AGI in a very different approach. Still, there's less room for it in the data center, more room for it in the edge, but every time I say something like this then some really clever person surprises me with a counter-narrative that actually is pretty compelling. Looking at the last four years of AI chip startups, are you bullish, in general, looking back? I haven't seen that happen in this particular area. The fund focuses on technology investments as most venture funds do. And when I say power efficiency, it's really TeraOPS per watt, which is performance per watt that is really the key metric. Roofstock, which makes it easier to buy a home as an investment property, just raised $50 million in new funding January 07, 2020 Tags Khosla Ventures SVB Capital lightspeed venture partners Sandhya is a Partner on the Investment Team at Khosla Ventures and is passionate about helping founders transform industries through the use of AI/ML and other new, emerging technologies. It is mandatory to procure user consent prior to running these cookies on your website. We've looked at a dozen of those and chosen not to jump in. Khosla, who is ranked #353 on the Forbes 400 2020 list, has a net worth today of $2.6 billion, largely earned through his investment successes in the tech field. Founded in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, Khosla Venturesassists entrepreneurs involved in significant, high-impact innovations, and unusual technology approaches. Leads World in AI, But Here Comes China, Former Qualcomm CEO Signs On As Advisor to 5G Chipmaker EdgeQ, Nvidia Unveils Certified Server Program Offering Pre-Built Servers for AI Applications, Red Hat’s Disruption of CentOS Unleashes Storm of Dissent, AI to Transform Healthcare of the Future in the Shadow of COVID-19, AI-Based Recycler AMP Robotics Gains $55M in New Funding from Investors, Azure Digital Twins Now Available to Empower Enterprises with Virtual Product Modeling, ASF ROUNDTABLE – “Fighting Covid with Advanced Technologies: HPC Roadmap for a Mission Critical Event“. thinking about the technology has huge implications downstream, but takes very little money. Khosla Ventures is headquartered in Menlo Park, Calif. Sandhya is a Partner on the Investment Team at Khosla Ventures and is passionate about helping founders transform industries through the use of AI/ML and other new, emerging technologies. Khosla Ventures Mar 2020 - Present 11 months Investments include: Kernel, Fountain Biotherapeutics, Pardes Bio, Rubedo, Menten.AI, Advanced Chemotherapy Technologies, Invoy, Ochre Bio, Known Medicine Investor Insights. I don't think you need a lot of management experience. There's also a whole slew of startups where the market and products have emerged slower. Instead, focus on what will be the fundamental innovations five years from now, where you'll still have an advantage. And that might have large implications for which hardware architectures work. This category only includes cookies that ensures basic functionalities and security features of the website. We've seen some radical innovation out of startups there. Sorry, your blog cannot share posts by email.