My name is Rodvik. I'm a co-founder at GoVentures. It's a corporate venture capital fund.

And thanks to the previous speakers, I think I learned a lot. I don't know about you guys, but I learned how to use some AI agents, how to build some, and how the brain of a neural network works, at least visually. That's how I see it.

I'm not a techie. This will be a little bit more theoretical, as they told me to describe it.

And we're going to talk today about international startup ecosystems and how different parts of the world is using AI. And it's a subject that's really near and close to me, one because of GoVentures, but also because of my personal journey, which I'll get to in a bit.

So the takeaway that I want you guys to have here today, we might have a varied audience. But whether you're an entrepreneur, investor, or running a function in a business, keep a watch for international opportunities. And when we think about international opportunities, we think of these major key locations around the world. But maybe there's also opportunity in emerging markets to look at as well.

We'll talk about some structure on how to understand this problem, but also I'll take you through the story of GoVentures, because that does a really good job of how we made our strategy work when looking 90% internationally. And to start that story, it begins in Malta, which is an island south of Italy in the Mediterranean. And that's where GoVentures is from.

So the island itself is pretty small. There's about 500,000 people. The GDP is about half of the price of Twitter that Elon Musk paid.

And it's a small place, but because of its strategic location, it's an EU member state as well. And there's some key industries. You might know that Binance has headquarters there.

There's some online casinos that have some regulation there that they can run as well. And it's pretty much island life. So what about startups? It's a place that's attractive to younger talent.

The government is starting to incentivize. But there's not too many companies there yet in the Mediterranean. So you'd ask, why do you run a fund there? And first thought that everyone has is normally because of tax benefits. It's not because of tax benefits. It's because we're a corporate fund.

We come from a company. It's kind of like a Rogers, but based in the Mediterranean. It's a 300 million euro group, and we have telecoms, data center, cloud assets, cybersecurity, any sort of IT service for a company.

And the idea was... In 2018, we said, look, we've been growing this company kind of locally. What if we were to capture innovation? Because generally, in southern Europe, innovation comes a little bit slower than the rest of the world. First, something has to work in the US, then in the UK, France, and Germany before it kind of trickles down. So we said, let's invest in some companies and bring innovation to us a little bit faster.

So that's a little bit about the company. I can't tell you about a nice island without showing you some pictures. I love taking drone photos, so I took these myself. I used to live very close to that swimming pool, which is in the sea, I know.

But I always thought about why. But let's get back to now what we were talking about. So if you look at the investment split that we made, and put it in some sort of framework.

I like to use frameworks for things. This is Microsoft's matrix. You compare markets to products and existing ones to new ones.

So normally for most businesses you find, even venture capital funds, you find that they focus on a specific product that they know about and in a market they know about. And we did the complete opposite. We said, let's just go internationally. Let's try to build outside of what we have. We went ahead and invested worldwide. And part of the reason is because we needed to look internationally.

1But one interesting thing from this outreach and investment program is that we found that our best performers were not even in the United States or North America. In fact, they came from Singapore and India. And they are the unicorn and $800 million company in our portfolio right now.

So that's a bit strange, right? You would expect it to be a different way. You know, I also have a personal interest about talking about this.

Personally, I was born and brought up in Dubai to Indian parents. I lived in the US for some time and a few places in Europe before moving to Toronto. So I really am interested in seeing how the world operates in terms of it.

So as I mentioned, I'm a co-founder at GoVentures. I'll get a little bit to our performance of the fund and what makes it special in a bit. But before that, I used to build some tech platforms in Europe. Feel free to add me on LinkedIn.

But now on one side, what I do is I run Go Ventures, as well as a couple of other investment programs. But I even work with other organizations like accelerators, like one in Africa. It's called Open Startup.

And we accelerate companies for free. We don't take any cash or equity from them. And we've done about 400 companies in the past nine years.

so this set the platform for us to look all over the world to kind of figure out hey where do we want to invest and where do we find opportunity right leading to a portfolio that we have that's actually what quite spread internationally this is a small selection of the companies that we have and in just five years what we managed to do with this international strategy is uh rank in the top quartile of US performing funds. So that's about a 3 to 5x return. It's actually 4.5. And the point of this story is basically to say that, look, if you look internationally, you may be able to capture something that unlocks your growth.

So how do you look at capturing a value from startup ecosystems as well as then AI ecosystems? So there's some building blocks. Are you going out there to capture talent? Then you need to ask some certain questions like, Is the educational infrastructure there? Is the workforce inspired by previous exits? For example, if you look in the Scandinavian regions, you have a lot of employees who used to work at Skype, which actually just shut down, I think, RIP. But it made a lot of new entrepreneurs and people who are willing to take risks. So those kind of stories are things that you should look for when looking at talent.

Are you going there for money? Is it a growth market? Or is it a place where you'll raise capital from? Are there government policies and things to benefit you? And is there the underlying infrastructure, not just for yourself, but for your technology?

So let's look at some startup ecosystems around the world and understand what adds value from them and what challenges we might face, starting with the most obvious, Silicon Valley. So you have everything in Silicon Valley, you think, right? You have the access to capital, you have the sense of innovation, you have top talent, but it's bloody expensive, right? You can't get anything done there. So let's take the other side, somewhere like China.

There are things like hardware innovation or something to look at. Sure, there's government support in some cases, but there's also IP protection issues. If you take somewhere in the middle like Europe and particularly Germany, there's a lot of diverse talent coming in from all over the world. There's government support as well, but the VC market is a little bit smaller. They just have less VC dollars to spend. And then somewhere like India, you've got development resource, large talent pool, maybe not AI-specific talent over there if you're going to outsource.

So like I was saying at the beginning, people generally look at the largest ecosystems and pick from that. But maybe there's something in emerging ecosystems as well. Take Latin America, for example. Startups are coming up in fintech, in agriculture, in supply chain. And it's actually becoming a very, very hot place for VC interest right now.

I know that we're looking at a bunch of companies in Latin America. You know, even in emerging markets, you start to find more localized and hyperlocal problems that can be solved. And they're more related to the fundamental societal issues that are faced in those areas. But I think the best way to kind of understand what kind of startup thrives in an environment is to look at the success stories.

South America, you have things like Rappi, which is delivery and mobility, Clara, which is a fintech, Kavak, which is a car sales platform. Across Africa, most of the big companies end up being financial services companies, which are wave and flutter wave. But there's also some like an HR tech company such as Andela.

Then in Southeast Asia, you have Grab, which is again delivery mobility, Lazada, which is e-commerce, and then Traveloka, which is travel. So let's flip this and think about it from an AI perspective. What are the maturity factors that you kind of have to look for when you're picking a destination for AI?

One is fundamentally the strong educational institutions. But having the talent and the scientists aren't enough. You need to have the cash to be invested in R&D. So is that happening?

And once they build research projects and products, is there enterprise adoption of these AI solutions? And of course, all of this sits on data infrastructure and cloud computing that needs to be available. There's also the inverse way to look at it. What are the barriers as well? So let's look at the AI market now and the state of AI around the world.

I should load the second. So in the US, you know, we're leaders in AI. US and Canada, I think, we're leaders in AI adoption, particularly enterprise AI. And looking at things like autonomous systems, last month I was in San Francisco and they had these Waymo cabs everywhere. Now they're launching in Texas as well. I have no doubt they'll eventually end up over here too, right?

Again, let's jump to the other side. Let's go to China. Here you have things like facial recognition. I remember demos of facial recognition in China from 10 years ago. Way long. Really, really long ago, right? And, you know, there's new things coming out too.

There's one addition that I put over here, which is LLM optimization, you know, because I wrote this presentation before DeepSeat came out. So these things are changing, you know, so I expect in another six months the value of each of these ecosystems will change, right? Again, let's look in the middle, let's look at Europe. There's adoption, but it's a little bit less than the US in terms of enterprise. And Europe tends to put a little bit of red tape and regulation on everything, right? And the applications are more manufacturing, industrial automation, things like that. So I see it as a very industry 4.0 kind of region.

And then again, if you take a place like Africa, fundamental problems, fintech, agriculture, healthcare. So I'll leave you with some takeaways and recommendations. So I put a kind of framework like a scorecard for startup ecosystems. What should you consider? Access to capital, talent availability, regulatory, and market size.

A little bit different for AI. You see if there's R&D investment. You see if there's a talent pool. Are there startups already there? Building something is going to be a market. And is there business integration of this AI as well?

Recommendations for Entrepreneurs

In terms of recommendations for entrepreneurs, I think there's vast opportunity for AI adoption in emerging markets, actually. When building solutions, try to build local solutions. You know, we're always trying to build for the entire world. I'd say suggest start smaller and look at problems in communities that you're closer that you can tap into and then scale that wider. Leveraging support from the government is also very important, both from a financial perspective as well as regulatory.

Recommendations for Investors

On the investor side, I have a thesis on AI in emerging markets. I think there's going to be high growth startups in emerging markets for sure. And these will have lower competition and higher demand. Also, infrastructure is a key area which is not going to go away anytime soon. And diversifying the portfolio not just by region, but by vertical as well.

Conclusion

So I'll stop there. Thank you. I'll open up for questions. Thanks.