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Our Story
First Rays ventures specializes in seed stage investments in Enterprise Infrastructure Stack and B2B SaaS. Our investment focus emanates from two dimensions that we have observed over the years of making investments in enterprise software startups.
First, we believe that at seed stage there are few funds who bring specialized focus on meeting specific needs of Founders in the scale up to Series A. At First Rays, we stay true to our expertise in enterprise b2b and bring significant value beyond capital.
Second, we believe that significant disruption that is happening in the enterprise stack. Our investment theses are around mega-trends that are changing the landscape for Enterprise IT. We are seeing that these trends will disrupt the way software is being delivered and consumed in the Enterprise landscape. Our active investment portfolio reflects these emerging trends.
Our Expertise
Targeted support for portfolio. Help get to the next round, faster.
Product Engineering
We understand what is takes to build an enterprise grade product! We help with insights in this space as well as bring crucial early customer feedback.
Go To Market
We understand enterprise sales cycles and what it takes to win early PoCs and customers! We draw from our experience of selling to a rich network of CIOs, architects, CTOs, CPOs and CISOs.
Talent
We know how to get to the early hires! We work extensively with founders and help bring on their first business or technical hires.
Growth Playbook
Execute a capital efficient GMT plan focused on the right metrics
Our Team
Alok Nandan
Alok is a Founding General Partner at First Rays Venture Partners. Previously, he was a Partner at Emergent Ventures where he was involved in investments in software infrastructure companies like Acceldata.io and Blitzz.io as well as SaaS companies like Observe.ai and Talview. He was also an angel investor in Minjar (acquired by Nutanix). He started his career as a product guy in Microsoft Azure and was part of two startups that exited (YuMe, IPO:NYSE) and Tempo.AI (acq by Salesforce). Alok has BS (IIT), MS and PhD in CS from UCLA.
Amit Sridharan
Amit is a Founding General Partner at First Rays Venture Partners. Previously, he was the Director at Mahindra Ventures where he invested and drove partnerships in cloud-native enterprise software. He has also had stints at Pear VC and Spruce Capital Partners. His investments include Avaamo (Board Observer), Cloudleaf, Paid Labs (acquired by Auction Mobility) and Pear Technology (acquired by Avinew). He has researched & published case studies on VC at Stanford and was ranked as a Top 100 global investor by GCV. Amit has BS (IIT), MBA (IIM) and MS-Management from Stanford GSB.
Jenny Sohn
Jenny is the Chief Financial Officer at First Rays Venture Partners. She is a seasoned CFO, well-versed in B2B/C SaaS in private companies, who understands the unique challenges of private companies’ finance and legal, operations. Served as Audit Chair with various board members to provide stewardship for operations, transactions and equity/debt raises. Jenny served a number of private companies as an operator, finance leader and an advisor to executive teams over the years. Jenny has BA and MBA (Finance) from UC Berkeley.