Shruti Gandhi wants to clear up a misconception that every founder doesn't need their early-stage investors to be a shoulder for them, they just need their investor to understand their business in a way that others don't. Most of the entrepreneurs in her portfolio are repeat entrepreneurs with a decade of experience in the field.
She said that the things they invest in need a lot of experience. You don't just pick that up as a college drop out, the kinds of things we invest in are not something that you dream up after one year of work experience. Gandhi just landed tens of millions to invest into the hard enterprise space.
The new $56.1 million fund from Array will invest in 30 companies. Since its debut fund, the check size has grown from $150,000 to 1.5 million. Gandhi says that the firm will aim for 15% ownership in each deal, up from 10%.
Most firms claim to have invested in enterprise tech, but they focus on mostly bottom-up software as a service companies at the first check stage. Few firms are technical enough to invest in the back-bone enterprise tech for the new era of companies. It is not to say that it does not back vertical products, but it looks for companies with differentiated back-bone fundamentals.
What does that mean? Everything you see today on the front-end needs a stronger backing technology that can handle big data, make users more secure and move to the cloud. Security, data and cloud infrastructure are some of the topics that the startups are focused on. Don't think of it as a cloud service, think of it as databricks, Okta, Twilio and Databricks.
The newer tech stack has resulted in Array pouring money into startups working on issues like automated threat detection and response.
The impact of Gandhi's focus is different because he focuses on women. More than one-third of the portfolio is led by women. Some of the biases that women in tech often receive are counterbalanced by the investor's portfolio.
She said that people assume that a woman is starting a consumer company when she is starting a company. The same holds true for me, running an enterprise fund.
The hard enterprise community appears to be well connected and Gandhi may not be able to grab deal flow from today's top accelerators. Over half of her portfolio founders have invested across all of her funds.
Data Robot's Dan Wright, Draft's Elias Torres, Polygon's Jaynti Kanani, MPowered Capital, and the University of Nashville are all limited partners in the company.
