Bobby Singh

From our PearX S25 cohort, meet Pravāh, the AI-native operating system for the electric grid When Mohak Mangal, Dhruv Suri, and Aman Gupta looked at the strain on the U.S. electric grid, they saw a system pushed to its limits. Exploding demand and unpredictable supply have made blackouts increasingly common. This costs the economy more than $150B a year, a number that could 10x in the next five years. Mohak Mangal and team founded Pravāh to help fix it. Their platform helps utilities and grid operators make real-time decisions on load, generation, and congestion, reducing blackout risks, optimizing power procurement, and bringing much-needed stability to the backbone of modern life. We’re proud to support the Pravāh team as they take on one of the toughest and most important infrastructure challenges of our time.

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What a joy to speak with this brilliant cohort of innovators in the The Global Energy Alliance for People and Planet (GEAPP) ENTICE (Energy Transitions Innovation Challenge) 2.0 program and taking on their sharp questions at the investor bootcamp. 80% of global GHG emission reduction goals for 2050 can be met through energy system decarbonization, efficiency and electrification. This represents a US $100 trillion opportunity according to the IEA.     A stronger, more stable grid is at the heart of building a #resilient #energy future. This year’s program challenges innovators to tackle:  1) Behind-the-meter digital twins: #AI tools to analyse consumption and create appliance-level insights  2) Industrial flexibility at scale: AI solutions using smart meter data to identify flexible assets and operational inefficiencies    Kudos to the entrepreneurs and the GEAPP team for curating and executing such a thoughtful program.     Looking forward to seeing how these #innovations scale #impact.  Synapses Dalberg Media Vaishali (Vish) Mishra Anukul Tripathi (He/Him) Jayant Sinha Saurabh Kumar

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Had a wonderful time speaking with Shruti Mishra from CNBC-TV18, sharing the journey we've been on at SaveIN and where we’re headed next. From starting with the vision to make healthcare more accessible to now building one of India’s largest outpatient wellness networks, it’s been a humbling and energizing ride. With welUp, we’re addressing a fundamental gap — the fact that most healthcare systems kick in after you fall sick. But real wellness is proactive, everyday, and personalized. That’s the future we’re building. 🎥 Catch the full conversation with CNBC here. #SaveIN #welUp #CNBCFeature #HealthcareInnovation #FounderJourney #YCombinator #Startups #OutpatientCare #IndiaHealthTech #FoundersVoice

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**Bolna's Impressive Fundraising Highlights Self-Serve Success in India** Bolna's recent $6.3 million funding round led by General Catalyst underscores a significant trend in the Indian tech ecosystem. With 75% of its revenue generated from self-serve customers, Bolna is leveraging the growing demand for voice orchestration solutions. At ElevenX Capital, we see this as a strong indicator of how businesses are increasingly prioritizing scalable, user-driven tools. How can venture capitalists better assess the potential of self-serve revenue models in the future? #investing #innovation #venturecapital #entrepreneurship

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Today marks a milestone for Salesforce Ventures, and a defining moment for enterprise security. Alphabet’s acquisition of Wiz has officially closed. Wiz has been a cornerstone of our portfolio since May 2021, when Nowi Kallen, Kartik Gupta, and team first invested in their Series B at a $1.5B valuation. We saw the potential early and invested deeply, backing the team through their Series C, D, and E rounds. From a $1.5B Series B to a $32B acquisition, one of the largest in enterprise tech history, the Wiz team’s execution has been nothing short of extraordinary. This outcome reflects our mission at Salesforce Ventures: identifying the companies that define the next era of technology and staying behind them for the long haul. But the real credit belongs to the entire Wiz team on the ground. Beyond the technology, it was the relentless grit and day one mentality of Assaf Rappaport and the team that turned a vision into a $32B reality. Huge congratulations to the entire Wiz team on this historic achievement.

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Just wrapped a candid roundtable at VentureDoc with Anupam Rastogi, Managing Partner at Emergent Ventures, an early-stage Enterprise AI seed/pre-seed firm with over 50 portfolio companies, many of which are now category leaders. No hype—just real talk on building in this space. Here are the key takeaways that resonated, especially as a solo founder scaling VenueKonnex, our AI marketplace for corporate events, venues, services, and planners: - Partnering > investing: Deep involvement in positioning, ideal customer profile, go-to-market hires, sales/customer success leadership, and fundraising preparation. Horizontal patterns from numerous journeys can accelerate growth. - Founder must-haves: A hunger for $500M–$1B+ annual recurring revenue, rapid multi-function learning, and weekly adaptability. Lead with your “why” and ambition—don’t conceal it behind technology. - Massive opportunity: With $50 trillion in corporate spending and software currently at about 1%, achieving over 10% AI adoption in a decade is realistic. Focus on backing infrastructure, horizontal applications, verticals, and AI combined with deep tech—targeting B2B buyers. - Global teams targeting the US? This is common. Prove your edge through insight, network, and intellectual property. At VenueKonnex, we are leaning into AI operations to scale listings and outreach in a founder-driven manner. - Moats today include full outcomes, metadata-driven compounding, enterprise complexity (security, governance, fallbacks), and pure execution speed. - VC choice involves options: It’s a long-term commitment. Check incentives, such as fund size, cold references, and hands-on fit. - Services-to-AI shift: Replacing agency spending with significantly better and cheaper outcomes can yield hybrids with margins exceeding 90%. Grateful for the sharp Q&A that sharpened the grind. What’s one hard lesson from fundraising or scaling lately? Anupam Rastogi Venture Dock VenueKonnex

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This article, co-authored by Vardaan Ahluwalia and me lays out India's significant new Research Development and Innovation Fund initiative in the context of other successful interventions: when governments and the private sector work together, they can make a transformative difference to deep technology entrepreneurship. Equally, initiatives to help manage financial risk should be followed by structural reforms in areas ranging from intellectual property regulation, ease of clearances for start-ups, tax rationalization in capital gains and options that helps start-ups attract talent, and a visa regime that attracts leading global researchers. https://lnkd.in/gk92YSZa

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Love to see this! Another step for Kenya & East Africa towards greener energy, and better economics for boda-boda drivers!

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Dayna Grayson is a leading VC who has “sat in every chair” at a young age. She founded Construct Capital with Rachel Holt, an early leader at Uber. Together, they are tackling the digitization of industry. Dayna will discuss macro trends, what it takes to be a founder, and the potential for AI. She is one of the few who have successfully blended a career of operations and investing.  Check out our discussion at: https://lnkd.in/eYBUGjbW #leadershipdevelopment

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Rozana founded by Ankur D., Adwait V. and Mukesh Christopher has raised fresh funding, pushing its valuation close to $200 million as it expands its platform serving rural and small-town consumers. While urban e-commerce markets are becoming saturated, rural commerce remains vastly underpenetrated. This segment represents: • Hundreds of millions of consumers • Rapid smartphone adoption • Increasing digital payments usage • Growing demand for organized supply chains But rural commerce requires fundamentally different business models. Companies must rethink logistics, pricing, distribution, and community engagement strategies. Investors are increasingly backing startups that can build last-mile distribution and trust networks in smaller towns and villages. At Alacrity EXTN LLP, we help companies exploring emerging markets: • Conduct deep market research in underserved segments • Design expansion strategies for tier-2, tier-3 and rural markets • Evaluate strategic investment or partnership opportunities The next generation of Indian unicorns may well be built beyond metro cities. #RuralCommerce #Ecommerce #DigitalIndia #StartupFunding #EmergingMarkets #ConsumerTech #RetailInnovation #MarketExpansion #BusinessStrategy #VentureCapital #IndiaStartups #AlacrityEXTN

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Proud to support Esusu as it enters its next phase of growth with a new $50M Series C fundraise! Wemimo Abbey, Samir Goel and team continue to lead the industry in credit building and economic mobility for millions of renters nationwide. Esusu (Founder Institute San Francisco portfolio company) is setting a new standard for combining economic and societal impact. By helping renters get credit (literally) for paying their rent on time, they are increasing financial access and empowering more people to become homeowners - in fact, they have already empowered over $30BN in new mortgages from renters across their system. I'm especially excited about how they plan to leverage their massive dataset to create even more impact. By making rental payment data a more prominent feature in mortgage underwriting, Esusu will be able to increase the number of people that can buy homes and build generational wealth. This is a truly inspiring company 🙌 Read more here: https://lnkd.in/guUKsGtY

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I am excited to announce that Shine Capital has led AudioShake’s $14M Series A. Our investment represents the culmination of two years of searching for a company that will define the next generation of audio. Since 2023, we have been asking ourselves the question, "What technology will be used pervasively across the totality of the audio landscape?" Then we met Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, founders of AudioShake. AudioShake makes a suite of AI-powered tools for processing audio that include stem-splitting, voice isolation, speaker separation, and more. These primitives are critical infrastructure for almost any task involving audio, as evidenced by the breadth of use cases that the company serves. The Walt Disney Company and Downtown Music use AudioShake to make tracks available for sync licensing. Film studios and post-production houses use AudioShake to clean up sound from microphones to prevent re-recordings and manual audio engineering. Sports leagues and broadcasters use AudioShake to separate stadium noise from commentary to enable clean captioning and crisper audio. And Big Tech and frontier labs use AudioShake to prepare their audio data for multimodal AI training. We believe that audio will be the most important medium in the age of AI, defined by explosive growth across three categories that are even better with AudioShake: 1) Audio-as-AI-Interface: For the first time, people can perform complex compute operations using their voice. Conversing with AI will propel voice assistant usage well beyond its current ~50% adoption. 2) Explosion of Content: The rate at which user-generated content is made continues to accelerate, which will be further amplified by the possibility of AI-generated content. Audio is a superset of video — nearly every video uses sound to convey meaning, message, or emotion. 3) Voice Agents for Business: More than $100B of phone labor is performed annually in the United States. While some of it sits in call centers, most of it is fractional work. Businesses across finance, healthcare, and beyond have rapidly adopted phone agents. We are fortunate to partner with Jessica Powell and Luke Miner, passionate entrepreneurs and audiophiles dedicated to making audio as easy to work with as images or text. Audio contains vast amounts of information and creative possibility, and AudioShake will help unlock it. Thank you to our friends at Indicator Ventures for connecting us to Jessica. We are thrilled to support the AudioShake team with them, alongside Origin Ventures, Thomson Reuters, Precursor Ventures and Background Capital.

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Gaurav Ranjan from PrimeVP and Naman Lahoty from Stellaris Venture Partners, two of my oldest friends in VC joins us this week on The Neon Show. This conversation is on what it really takes to be a VC today. We discuss: 1. What unique edge do founder-turned VCs have? 2. Why do startup projections rarely come true? 3. Are VCs naturally good founders? 4. Why are VC feedback loops extremely long? 5. The VC timeline from First pitch to Deal close. 6. What have VCs unlearned about pattern-matching? 7. Why Founder empathy is the most underrated edge in VC? And more learnings from evaluating 3000+ startups and 7+years of being VCs. The episode drops tomorrow at 8pm on The Neon Show. https://lnkd.in/gnAFEj3f

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AI networking is at an inflection point. Frontier labs are building 200k+ GPU clusters, but without adequate networking, multi-billion-dollar GPU investments deliver suboptimal returns. The network has become the performance ceiling. Upscale AI’s unparalleled team is building open standards-based networking that doesn't trade off performance. We are excited to be backing Barun Kar and Upscale AI in their $100M seed round. Read more about our decision in the comments.

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Yesterday’s encounter that reminded me why protocols matter more than platforms. Had an inspiring conversation with Rajeesh Menon, whose work spans the entire digital infrastructure ecosystem that’s quietly revolutionizing how we think about systemic change. From EkStep Foundation to Beckn Open Collective, Rajeesh embodies something crucial: building systems that serve rather than surveil, that empower rather than extract. What excites me most is exploring how our community-driven approach (SAOcommons) to human capital indexing (WellbeingProtocol) could plug into this broader ecosystem of digital public / common goods. The goal? Value redistribution that’s signal-based and equitable rather than platform-captured. But this conversation also surfaced some critical questions I’m wrestling with: 1) “Emission” vs “Collection” of data 2) Deep Thinkers' Collective. 3) Anti-hive-mind design - How does TheInternetOfValue preserve individual agency while enabling collective intelligence? 4) “Weaponising” context ? If you’re working on systems that put livelihoods with dignity at the center, Rajeesh Menon is building something remarkable. Worth following his journey. Thanks for the active listening and questions, Rajeesh!

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Thrilled to announce that Together Fund is investing in Sentra, alongside a16z speedrun! You track results in Jira. Decisions in Notion. Conversations in Slack. But the reasoning, the debates, trade-offs, and context behind why you chose A over B, disappears into what we call "Dark Matter." A decision made in March looks insane by July because no one remembers the constraints that made it smart. I lived this firsthand at Twitter scaling from 800 to 8,000 employees, and at Google while launching AI Overviews to billions at planet scale. The problem isn't process. Process is compensation for something deeper: organizational amnesia. An organization’s "Systems of Record" doesn’t solve this, they encode it. They store what happened, never why. That's why we are investing in Sentra. Sentra is the always-on collective memory that eliminates organizational amnesia by maintaining accurate context for all members and agents, functioning as an operational nervous system. It connects to every channel where work happens, meetings, Slack, email, code commits, docs, calendars, and treats them not as artifacts to search, but as living signals to synthesize. The fleeting and the permanent, unified into a memory that understands. The founding team is built for this: - Jae Gwan Park (CEO): Product-first founder, memory systems research at UofT and MIT - Ashwin Gopinath (CSO): Former MIT professor, created "Reflexion" (NeurIPS 2023), agents that learn from mistakes, 2x founder - Andrey Starenky (CTO): Early Vapi engineer, ex-IBM, built to process enterprise-scale data firehose Together is an operator-led fund. We invest in problems we've lived. This is one of them. Many congrats Jae, Ashwin and Andrey, we are so excited to partner with you! Read the full thesis: https://lnkd.in/gixj9cE4 Book a demo: https://www.sentra.app/ #OrganizationalMemory #AI #Sentra #TogetherFund #a16z #ContextGraphs

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Attention Seed Stage Founders: Looking to Raise and Scale? Don’t just pick a VC that just writes checks. Choose one that is hands-on and operationally obsessed. This blog from Primary Venture Partners illustrates exactly how they have shaped the Lyric journey. They rolled up their sleeves to drive real growth, delivering over 90 qualified leads and helping build a team of 16 key hires. That is not just mentoring. That is stepping in as an operational growth engine. Trust me, when it is time to scale, your partners make all the difference. Kudos to Cassie Young for assembling the Dream Team for ambitious founders. CTA: Do not just raise. Set your startup for Acceleration with the right ally.

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This summer I became an Investor + Senior Advisor to Sima Labs AI, an extraordinary team led by co-founders Rushaan Mahajan and Sophie Raniwala. I’ve met hundreds of founders over the years, almost never do angel investments - and I can tell you Rushaan and Sophie are exceptional. While most of us debated how quickly AI would impact our lives, they were already solving a real problem: as video explodes across every platform, the challenge isn't just creating more and better content: it's delivering it smarter, faster, and with higher quality. Their first breakthrough, SimaBit, is an AI-powered preprocessing engine that learns what matters most to the human eye in every frame. It sits in front of existing codecs (H.264, HEVC, AV1), cutting bandwidth significantly while actually improving visual quality. Because it runs through SDKs, it integrates seamlessly with existing pipelines. SimaUpscale brings the same intelligence to upscaling. IP owners sitting on goldmines of classic TV (think Golden Girls) can unlock a massive opportunity: breathe new life into beloved shows and reintroduce them to entirely new audiences through social media clipping. Upscaling is just the beginning. This week they released a whitepaper predicting RTVCO: Real-Time Video Creative Optimization: where brands will use generative AI to create and test thousands of video variations on the fly. Creative accounts for a lot of variation in advertising effectiveness; other forms of digital ads have been able to test and iterate at scale - but so far, video hasn’t. Sima Labs (Video Tech) could become the invisible infrastructure powering this future. If you’re interested to hear more, reach out and I will connect you.

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