Teknovations Investor Outlook 5

Teknovation’s annual Investor Outlook series continues to ask interesting questions from investors based in East Tennessee, including Eric Dobson, our founding and managing partner at Community Equity Partners.

Question 5 in this series asks:

What other technologies beyond artificial intelligence are of interest to you?

Read all the answers at Teknovations.Biz through the button below! Here’s our answer from Eric Dobson:

We still favor strongly Intellectual Property-backed companies. That means we are still searching for the DeepTech, HardTech, CleanTech, MedTech, advanced materials, and advanced manufacturing companies that comprise 80 percent of our portfolio. These are the areas where we can have the greatest impact. We work with technical founders to understand the role they must execute as the executive and  how to launch technical sales. We then pull them through our angel group process where we validate their ability to grow and create a lot of value for our angel investors. Then, we pull these derisked companies into our venture fund. The mode is scaling nicely, and we can continue to exert influence on these companies as they grow. The other 20 percent of our portfolio remains Software-as-a-Service, FinTech, etc., which generally boils down to marketing (brand building) companies. We can help, but this is not our greatest strength. We are now beginning to pay more attention to AgTech. We believe AgTech will be a key focus over the next decade and fits our model well.