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Exfinity backed Mad Street Den for its pragmatic enterprise AI vision

Shailesh Ghorpade · Shailesh Ghorpade on Exfinity's journey to partner with the best SaaS startups of India · Dec 28, 2020 · at 9:36

Shailesh Ghorpade, Managing Partner at Exfinity Venture Partners, explains why his firm made an early seed investment in AI startup Mad Street Den before enterprise AI had broad market validation.

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“One is that we actually both Ashwini and Anand have been really stellar founders. I think what we liked about them is the fact that how they were looking at the application of AI, you know, so AI per se, a lot of funds do it. And every second company that you meet is, as you know, Says that we are doing some AI, but I think the way they were envisaging AI and the kind of use cases that they were talking about really was something that we bought into. And we thought that they understood the big picture. You know, Anand himself is a true blue, you could call AI professional and the way he approached the whole product, building it ground up. The vision, of course, the product wasn't there at that time, but the kind of vision he had for the product and the way Ashwini looked at the market and said that, look, you know, these are the problem spaces that exist and we would like to solve. So that excited us actually. And then we decided to sort of back them.”

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