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Before COVID hit, I traveled a lot. For the last six months, though, I – like everyone else in the world – have stayed put. From my home base in Boston, I’ve been communicating via phone calls and Zoom meetings, with travel on indefinite hold. Like everyone else, I was initially skeptical that my productivity would be unaffected when forced to be exclusively remote. Like everyone else, I was pleasantly surprised to settle into a new normal and could appreciate some of the efficiencies that resulted from not having to meet in person.

A few weeks ago, I went on my first work trip and spent a few days in San Francisco, and now I am in London. These trips have reminded me just how important in-person meetings can be and what we are missing during this all-remote era: specifically, we lose the authenticity of in-person interactions, the random walks and honest human signals that lead to a deeper mutual connection, better problem-solving, sparks of creativity, and energy to act.

During my trip to San Francisco, I spent quality time with several of our entrepreneurs. The face-to-face meetings had a humanity that our regular Zoom calls did not; the conversation flowed more naturally, as it was less structured. The random walks we took in these meetings uncovered opportunities to collaborate more deeply than if we had continued to communicate exclusively via video chat. One meeting with an existing portfolio company CEO helped both of us unexpectedly understand a problem we needed to solve urgently; another meeting with a prospective portfolio company helped me understand the founders’ story and context much more clearly and gave me much greater conviction about the founders themselves.

I’ve previously written about why I believe in-person meetings are more natural – it comes back to the honest signals we emit in these interactions. Our earliest ancestors always interacted in person. We have been biologically wired to exude certain signals that enrich and add context to the words we speak to one another, and these signals do not come across when we present ourselves as just little squares on a screen.

Even phone calls can feel more natural than Zoom calls, and this difference may also come back to evolutionary biology. Before our ancestors could harness any form of light after sunset, they essentially communicated via audio in the dark, as if on a pre-historic phone call.

We don’t really have an analogue to video conferences from our past, in our biology. Until the experience of remote working and calling starts to mimic more clearly what we’re used to biologically, I don’t think interacting exclusively via Zoom will ever be as effective as interacting in person. Face-to-face, we can pick up on social cues. We can connect dots between problems and people. We can predictively assess what might go wrong and figure out how to solve it. We can relax, we can be ourselves. On Zoom calls we can pick up non-verbal cues, but they don’t flow authentically and we expend mental bandwidth deciphering them.

Technology has made my life – like everyone else’s – much easier over the past few months, and I’m grateful that we have the tools we need to connect regularly with colleagues all over the world. At REMUS, we are in the business of building decade-long relationships. It’s really important for us to build relationships with entrepreneurs that are personal as well as professional, and I’m bullish on a return to in-person meetings once normalcy resumes. Those in-person touchpoints are essential for enriching relationships; they’re the regular bursts of humanity we need to make those remote conversations all the more effective.

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by Krishna K. Gupta and Stash Pomichter

We’re thrilled to welcome Josh to the REMUS team as a Venture Partner. He will be working  to help us understand and act upon the trends and opportunities relevant to the post-COVID Gen Z consumer. For those who don’t know Josh, he is a social media superstar who has built a legion of fans across TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and Twitter. He is a founding member of SWAY House, a cultural phenomenon of its own.

Like us, Josh is young and ambitious. His interests far exceed the 20M followers he has amassed on TikTok. His journey began as a normal kid outside Toronto who was interested in hanging out with friends and playing sports. He had an entrepreneurial streak from a very young age, first selling sports equipment, then later realizing the power of social media to build a fan base.

Josh is joining us because he wants to learn how to become a more sophisticated investor and entrepreneur, with the ultimate goal of becoming the first influencer billionaire. We want to help him get there.

We couldn’t be more different as people, but Josh’s journey reminds us somewhat of our own. As a young boy growing up outside Chicago (the American Toronto), founder Krishna Gupta also exhibited an entrepreneurial streak. He eventually started the firm from his MIT dorm room at age 20. To Krishna, it’s both exhilarating and petrifying to realize there is now a proper new generation that has emerged after him.

To that point, this partnership has arisen thanks to the initiative of REMUS’ resident Gen Z-er, Stash Pomichter. Stash himself founded a company when he was 15 and dropped out of MIT to join REMUS as a venture capitalist at age 19. Kids these days…

Although we are better-known for our investments in enterprise technology companies, we have done some interesting consumer deals in the past, including in health and wellness (seed rounds of ClassPass and Allurion), finance (Gyft), and retail (Bombfell). With Josh’s help, we intend to do more deals focused on the next-generation consumer in the coming  2-3 years.

As we see the world changing in front of us, we are interested to explore several themes with Josh, who will help any company in which we invest and will bring the power of his Gen Z consumer base with him. What does a next-generation, post-COVID consumer experience look like? How does the increased buying power and influence of Gen Z shape existing industries?

In the coming months and years, we’ll examine these questions and more, with the ultimate aim of helping to build the next great companies. We’re delighted to tap into Josh’s knowledge, passion, and youthful energy as we do.

We’re thrilled to welcome Josh Fagel to the REMUS family as our new Chief of Staff. Josh joins us from CMA Strategy Consulting, a boutique management consulting firm that specializes in telecom, media, and technology. A Stanford grad and Bay Area native, Josh recently moved to Boston, where he’s optimistic about becoming a Red Sox fan (he’s less optimistic, though, about learning to love New England winters).

Josh’s role at REMUS will be a central one. He’ll work closely with the partners to define strategic areas of focus, optimize internal processes, instill a data-driven approach to firm decision-making, and engage with both the portfolio and REMUS investors.

We recently chatted with Josh to learn more about his experience, interests, and vision for his role at REMUS.

Welcome to the team, Josh! Tell us about yourself.

Glad to be here! I was born and raised in the Bay Area and have been inundated by the tech ecosystem from a pretty young age. I went to Stanford University, where I studied economics and was still very interested in the tech scene. 

I knew I wanted to pursue business, so I went into consulting after my senior year in order to develop a quantitative toolkit that would allow me to analyze any company I might come across in the future. I was always focused on the most innovative and disruptive companies in a given industry.

How do you think that toolkit you’ve developed will help you in your work at REMUS?

Many of the companies REMUS interacts with are young and growing, with limited resources to support growth. They have sound ideas and products and are beginning the commercialization stage of their businesses, so they could use help on many fronts. REMUS itself is a growth stage startup of sorts, so there are many opportunities to make an impact.

I’m someone who’s had a lot of experience creating models and forecasting bookings and revenues. I’m comfortable supporting companies, even at the very earliest stages. I’m also very comfortable creating a system to operationalize and streamline those processes in order to better support the entire portfolio.

What attracted you to the opportunity at REMUS?

I’ve always been interested in startups and VCs. When I came to Boston, I did a pretty broad search of VCs in the space. I knew I wanted to be at more of an upstart VC fund, and I appreciated REMUS’ entrepreneurial mindset. I also really aligned with the “building, not betting” mentality. As someone who has entrepreneurial ambitions myself, I don’t want to just throw money at companies in a hands-off way; rather, I want to work with them to help them grow. That was something about REMUS that was exciting to me. 

As Chief of Staff, what do you envision your role will look like?

I’ve always liked to think of myself as a Chief of Staff, even in my past positions. I’m the type of person who voluntarily wears multiple different hats. At my past firm, while I did project work and managed analysts and communicated with clients, I was also in charge of recruiting for Stanford and UC Berkeley, and I planned all of the firm’s social events. I love to do a lot of different things at once. 

At REMUS, I’ll apply that passion and ability by working with portfolio companies while concurrently thinking about internal process optimization, working with the partners, and communicating with investors. I’m used to managing multiple workstreams at once, and it excites me.  

How do you hope your presence will positively impact prospective REMUS constituents?

If I’m doing my job well, it will enable Krishna and John to focus on what they do best: supporting portfolio companies, conducting rigorous and accurate diligence of potential portfolio companies, and communicating with LPs. 

That means it’s my job to be their right-hand man—to attend meetings in their place with no loss, to communicate takeaways, and to execute. 

How do you plan to interact with portfolio company founders?

I want to be a reliable, trustworthy, and quality point of contact for our companies. I want founders to come to trust me and my experience, so I can both add my own value and augment the value they’re already receiving from the rest of the team.  

You mentioned you were always interested in VC. Why? 

I’ve always thought of myself as a generalist. As a young, up-and-coming person in my mid-20s, I want to learn about all of the industries in which REMUS invests and support them.

In a VC role, you have the opportunity to interact with so many founders in so many industries. The ability to see what works and what doesn’t work – in terms of the products, the industries, the markets, etc. – is something that really excites me before I hone my craft and dive into one industry that I feel more passionate about. 

What do you do for fun? 

I’d say my big two things are music and sports. I’ve played the drums since I was in fourth grade. So I was in the Stanford Marching Band, I’ve been in jazz bands, rock bands, funk bands, a brass band. And I play soccer myself, and I follow sports pretty religiously.

I’m a very social person, and I love communicating with lots of different people. I’m connected to the Stanford tech scene, to the entrepreneurial and VC landscape in Israel, and to the entrepreneurs at HBS, where my girlfriend is a student. I have a big network of people whom I know, and I love to catch up with them frequently.

We’re thrilled to have Josh as part of the team. Learn more about the rest of the REMUS family here.

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We’re delighted to welcome Isabella Fantini to the REMUS family as our ag and food-tech specialist. For years, we’ve explored the nascent and growing opportunity for technology to transform the agriculture industry. We’ve long been interested in the ability of technology to infuse innovation into longstanding, old-fashioned industries, and agriculture is no exception. Now, a series of macro events—from the very real threat of climate change to a growing population to rapid advancements in ag-empowering technologies like computer vision and AI—have underscored our interest in the space.

With the addition of Isabella to our team, we’re reinforcing our commitment to finding and funding the best and the brightest in AgTech: the early-stage companies that will become some of the best-known players in a changing world.

We recently spoke with Isabella to learn more about her background, the genesis of her interest in AgTech, and her vision for her role at REMUS.

Welcome to the team, Isabella! Tell us about yourself. How did you become interested in AgTech?

I think it all started because I’ve loved food my entire life. Exploring food—from grocery shopping to cooking—has always been really important to me. In middle school, I attended the ROSS School, which has a holistic curriculum focused on cultural history. All our food was Regional, Organic, Seasonal, and Sustainable. There, I first learned about where my food came from, and it was then that I decided I wanted to become a vegetarian.

My parents told me I would need to read and research vegetarianism and give them a presentation before they would allow me to stop eating meat, so I basically taught myself how to be vegetarian and became passionate about understanding where my food came from.

I also love finance and math, and I studied economics in college. I then went into traditional finance, but I was missing the food element in my work. I knew I didn’t want to be a chef and didn’t want to work in restaurants (even though I had worked in restaurants all through college), but I wanted to make a bigger impact. That was when I was introduced to venture capital, and I knew investing in food startups would be the perfect job for me.

How did you get started investing in food startups?

I worked at Food-X, which was an SOSV-backed accelerator program for food companies. Working there taught me everything about startups and food and the venture capital space. We invested in any company that touched food—from restaurant tech to supply chain tech to food waste tech, a little bit of biotech, and AgTech.

To me, AgTech was the most impactful part of the chain. Then I found out that REMUS was looking for an AgTech specialist, and I thought, this is a perfect fit for me (my favorite pastime is reading AgTech books on the weekends!)

What attracted you to the firm?

Everyone is so smart and knowledgeable and cares about the problems they’re solving—not just from a VC angle, but from a personal level of fascination and interest in the companies. I liked that. I think AgTech is a big issue, and I think a lot of AgTech investments are being dominated by large companies that just want to improve their profits. I think the actual impact is going to come from smaller groups trying to find the startups that are truly innovating—and I saw that REMUS had already been doing that.

On a macro level, how do you think investing in companies that promote sustainability can also be beneficial for shareholders?

Climate change is almost too big to ignore now. When AgTech had its last big boom, all those big AgTech companies were focused on adding value to their shareholders by increasing yields. That meant they were dumping fertilizers and herbicides in order to make bigger and bigger crop yields. I think that era is over.

We can’t keep farming the way a lot of commercial farms have been operating, because it’s depleting our soil, it’s creating irrigation issues, it’s releasing methane gas, etc. I think the only way to keep increasing yield and to keep increasing our food supply chain is to enact a drastically different way of doing things.

Over the past 15-20 years, ESG has been an added bonus—a “nice to have” in a portfolio. Now it’s almost something you can’t not invest in. There are startups that are ahead of the curve and have already been developing new technologies, and they’re the ones that are going to be at the forefront of the next AgTech revolution.

What are some things you’re excited about in the space?

I’m fascinated by indoor ag, because it’s a viable solution to solve a lot of our resource constraints. It allows growers to manage everything—water intake, fertilizer, etc.—in a very specific way. I think it’s also a great solution for urban farms. People are still moving into cities, which are becoming very crowded, and people aren’t getting fresh produce. There are a number of solutions to the problems that occur as a byproduct of how we live in an urban environment.

And I’m also interested in farm management, giving information to farmers, and helping them collect all the data from the new machines they’ve deployed in their fields. The data that’s collected is an added layer and an added benefit to the farmers. I’m interested in how they’re using that data to make predictions, manage their fields, and manage their harvests.

How do you envision your role at REMUS?

I think my role as the first specialized analyst is going to be the go-to resource for anything related to AgTech. AgTech is a very wide industry. There are so many parts united by the underlying thread of food, sustainability, and environmental impact: it incorporates computer vision, AI, machine learning, hardware, robotics, machinery, etc. I’m excited to be the person who can see the landscape from a bird’s eye view and figure out where things are going, where issues are popping up, and what trends are emerging.

What do you do for fun?

I go to farmers’ markets! Any time I travel to a new city, I go to the farmers’ market. I think it’s one of the most authentic ways you can see a culture and see different people interacting. I remember going to La Boqueria in Barcelona and spending hours wandering around, picking up fruit, and eating fresh seafood from the various market stalls. I’ve done this in every place I’ve visited.

Otherwise, I read a lot—mostly food books, I will say. I love being outdoors and being in the sun. And I just moved to Boston, so I’m excited to explore my new city.

At REMUS, we build—we don’t bet. That starts from the earliest days of a founder’s journey, so today we are announcing the launch of the REMUS Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program. The founders of Matta and Ozone will join us immediately, out of MIT and Cambridge, respectively.

For over a decade, we’ve partnered with entrepreneurs from their companies’ inceptions and helped them establish future-proof foundations upon which to build. This foundation-building includes identifying a company’s first product and customers, sizing the market, negotiating the first pilots and expansions, hiring the first employees, and raising the first rounds.

We’ve been contrarian and aligned with rebellious visionaries to help reshape massive, longstanding industries. We were the first money in category-leading companies including Allurion, Beamable, ClassPass (recently acquired by MindBody), Cogito, EquipmentShare, Ginger (recently merged with Headspace), and Presto (recently announced plans to go public via SPAC). Several of those companies’ founders, including Presto’s Raj Suri and Ginger’s Anmol Madan, were effectively EIRs with us.

With our EIR program, we’re doubling-down on our investment in early-stage entrepreneurs, as we believe the next decade will provide fertile ground for company creation. As part of this program, we’re offering office space; an optional investment; and plentiful opportunities for entrepreneurs to engage with our team, learn how VCs make investments, and gain valuable guidance as they begin building their companies. Two of our earliest entrepreneurs – Anmol Madan (Ginger) and Jon Radoff (Beamable) – will help advise founders pursuing opportunities in healthcare and the metaverse, respectively.

What We’re Looking For

We are looking for EIRs in each of our offices in Boston, San Francisco, and London. We’d love to find entrepreneurs exploring companies that align with our key themes of interest—i.e., vertical technology and deep technology companies—but are open to working with any bright, technical, execution-driven founders looking to define some elements of the next decade.

While most EIRs will already have a pre-determined interest in a specific sector, we will also bring on EIRs who are excited about our particular areas of interest. Some of these areas include:

• AI-driven vertical healthcare platforms
• Voice and video in the enterprise
• Derivatives of the metaverse
• Services for the mobile millennial

Welcoming Our First EIR Teams

We’re delighted to welcome our first two EIRs, who will be joining us in our London and Boston offices, respectively:

• Douglas Brion, founder of Matta, will join us in our London office as an EIR in the advanced manufacturing industry. Doug, who is finishing his PhD in Engineering at the University of Cambridge in the UK, is excited about building software that would allow operators in the 3D printing industry to make better decisions.
  
  
• Max von Wolff, founder of Ozone, will join us in our Boston office as an EIR in consumer video. Max is dropping out of MIT to pursue this business and is passionate about the next generation of video editing.

Who’s Next?

We’re actively adding EIRs to our team.  If you’re passionate about the opportunity to partner with us to build the foundations of an enduring, transformational technology business over the next decade, click here to learn more about and apply to the program. We’re excited to build with you.

Image credit: Jackson Pollock, The She-Wolf

by Krishna Gupta & Cavin Mozarmi

We’ve been investing in applied AI voice companies since 2009, when we wrote the first check into Ginger (which has since merged with Headspace). As we approach 2024, we’re increasingly bullish on a particular applied AI opportunity: building conversational AI agents – particularly leveraging the voice channel – for specific verticalized use cases. In Ginger’s day, analysis of voice conversations was the key advance that could be leveraged; today, generative voice conversations are enabling an entirely different opportunity set. We want to invest in and partner with every such company.

We have proprietary expertise with this opportunity given my experience with Presto Automation (Nasdaq: PRST), one of the first and most immediately scalable applications of verticalized Voice AI. As Chairman and former CEO of Presto, I have seen the voice AI play develop with all its challenges and massive opportunity over the past 3 years–opportunity that comes from the convergence of technological progress and macro-economic realities. Presto’s verticalized Voice AI application for drive-thru restaurants has shed light on the kinds of conversational AI opportunities that may exist in nearly any vertical that relies on customer engagement for transactions and/or support. It has also shed light on what is possible and what, despite all the hype, is not yet possible.  

Below are some of our musings as we eagerly search for another 5 such applications to invest in, partner with, and help build over the next 2-3 years.

(1) AI can automate critical customer interactions in partnership with humans.

Customer interactions represent significant cost and drain on resources and yet are existentially valuable to get right. Most complex customer interactions cannot be fully automated anytime soon, but a set of applications are becoming possible thanks to advances in LLM technology. A combination of AI and human-in-the-loop (HITL) can remove repetitive customer interactions from the enterprise payroll in a way that was previously impossible (due to the rapid development of language models, richer datasets, decreasing latency in voice agents, and better processing technology).

The level of HITL that’s required correlates with the complexity of the use case: scheduling customer appointments would be a simple use case, as the inputs and outputs are standardized, which lends itself well to automation. Medium-complexity applications include such examples as home service companies fielding requests where it’s necessary to iterate between the agent and customer to gather more complete, issue-specific information, or banks resolving financial and tax inquiries from their customers. These more complex scenarios will be more human-intensive until LLMs are sufficiently trained.

The most difficult use cases to automate and thus the ones most likely to remain human-intensive for some time are the bespoke conversations happening between two businesses, such as between providers and payers in healthcare or suppliers and contractors in industrial settings.  Companies will still want to retain some human customer touchpoints, but they will be able to remove the more mechanical ones with the help of AI-powered applications. In the restaurant drive-thru application, the analogy is to remove the order-taker but keep the human who is handing consumers their final orders and have a brief conversation that enables the customer to leave with positive sentiment and greater connection with the brand.

(2) AI can drive both material labor savings and revenue expansion.

The ROI for customers using verticalized conversational AI agents begins at labor savings, especially in an environment where wages are rising. To determine the potential value of using a conversational AI agent to automate a function, it’s necessary to look at the communication channels a business uses for a given use-case as well as the average revenue per interaction. The higher the communication volume, the more total work there is to automate, and the more important that channel is to the business. Average revenue per interaction is also significant;, if it’s high, as it is in home services, then the cost of every missed call or text (because a human isn’t always available to answer) is even more painful.

But the ROI extends beyond that, as the revenue upsell opportunity these agents offer can be quite meaningful. The delta between the status quo—often, minimum wage employees with little to no incentive to upsell or cross-sell—and the potential outcome with an intelligent, trained conversational agent system can be massive. A Voice AI conversation can optimize this process, as it can deliver personalized recommendations in a more empathetic and real-time manner. That is certainly the case in the restaurant drive-thru application. Further, beyond revenue upsell, the data a conversational AI agent interacting with customers captures can often add previously untappable insights or opportunities for the enterprise.

(3) Industry expertise is a competitive advantage for AI integration.

Integrating a proprietary conversational agent within a customer’s operations enables direct access to some of the most important parts of the backend, and this serves as an important source of defensibility. Voice conversational agents in healthcare often need to integrate with EHRs and likely multiple disparate legacy systems. In financial services, they must integrate with banking cores to automate more in-depth workflows. With Presto as an example in the restaurant industry, these elements range from a POS system to a digitalized “menu” of offerings to a customer CRM or loyalty system, etc. Getting these integrations right and enabling a conversation and/or transaction to take place in a smooth manner is completely non-trivial. Add in the go-to-market specialization required to integrate something as transformational as conversational AI, and one realizes how challenging it can be for a generalized company to enter a particular vertical against a vertical-focused competitor.

(4) The best AI today is augmented by humans.

The dance between machine and humans, which we view as the holistic AI solution, is critical to accuracy and thus customer adoption. As I’ve learned, the state-of-the art tech is *not* good enough to have a latency-free, edge case-covering, accurate conversation right away while also syncing into all the backend hooks required for particular verticalized use cases. Like most leading AI applications, human-in-the-loop is initially required to fine-tune AI models, but it’s tricky to get it right. Over time, the conversational agent will become less reliant on humans—even as the customers continue to care almost entirely about the output. The companies that succeed here will win customers quickly, which then enables them to train their AI systems, which in turn allows them to scale their businesses in a way that improves margins. I’m keen to find companies that understand this balance and lean into it.

We’ve already made several verticalized voice AI investments, and we’re actively looking for more. As the AI transformation journey continues into 2024 and beyond, we look forward to building companies at the cutting edge of voice AI technology to generate real value across industries.