Shruti Gandhi, Array Ventures on taking SaaS companies from Zero to $10 Million ARR

The Neon Show

Shruti is one of the few Indian-origin VCs in US who invest in Enterprise focused Startups globally.After spending 9 years of her career at IBM as an Engineer, she joined Samsung Next as a Principal, where she spent the next 2 years investing in early-stage startups. This was probably what worked out as a perfect mix of (a) Her understanding of Enterprise focussed SaaS businesses & (b) Venture funding ecosystem, which helped her start Array Ventures.Some of her notable investments are CasaOne, Blumira & Modal among others. In this podcast, Shruti shares her experience of supporting founders building early-stage SaaS businesses focussed on solving problems for Large Enterprises.Notes - 00:57 - Her journey from Mumbai to the US and transitioning from an Engineer-cum-Founder to a VC02:35 - How and why did she choose to start a fund to cater to startups selling to Enterprises?05:20 - Changing growth & opportunities for SaaS startups focussed on Enterprises in India & the US08:19 - Her thesis of investing in Blumira based on how their automated threat detection can benefit companies09:53 - Is the recent IPO of 6 Enterprise companies including Palantir, Snowflake, Sumo Logic, Bentley Systems, creating real value or is it a bubble?11:20 - Her learnings from Array VC exits: Passage AI, Hivy, & Simility13:10 - What would be an ideal exit for her - Large Acquisition (in 5-6 years) or IPO (in 10 years)?14:13 - What value does Array VC bring to its portfolio companies?16:10 - How’s the growth trajectory for her portfolio SaaS companies from 0 to $10M and then from $10M to $100M ARR?19:02 - What are things which worked for her portfolio companies for exponential ARR growth?

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