Tag: South Park Commons

Investing in Gameramp

The backstory behind the Operators Studio investment in Gameramp.

Stoked to share that Operators Studio has participated in the $5.4Mn pre-seed round of Gameramp, alongside BITKRAFT Ventures, South Park Commons, DeVC, and MIXI Global Investments.

Gameramp is building adaptive software for interactive apps, starting with gaming as a vertical. Its suite of APIs and AI Agents empowers gaming companies to deploy their monetization strategy with super-human speed and scale. End outcome – games scale faster and more capital efficiently.

I have known Vivek Ramachandran since his gaming VC days at Z47. He is one of the sharpest minds in the space, combining his venture chops with operating expertise built at EA and Big Viking Games.

While I knew Vivek well, meeting Sashank Vandrangi convinced me that this is one of the strongest founding teams in the space. Sashank’s mind moves at lightning speed and gives wings to his sharp product chops built at the likes of King and MPL.

Btw, this relationship started with a cold DM from Vivek a couple of years back, so yes, quality cold outreach continues to deliver value in this noisy world!

Gameramp fits the ‘India Supply to Global Demand’ theme at Operators Studio. India has an incredible pool of gaming developers & operating talent, and I believe this is the right time to build global gaming-tech companies that leverage this base.

This is also the 2nd gaming-tech portfolio for Operators Studio, after Terra (Gaming platform for global Gen Z).

Cheering for more gaming-tech companies being built from 🇮🇳 for the 🌎!

PS: Gameramp is hiring engineers, researchers, and builders who want to push the edge of what’s possible. If this excites you, reach out to Vivek or Sashank.

AI Musings #8 – Thoughts from South Park Commons Demo Day

Quick observations on the latest AI startup products.

Attended an amazing South Park Commons Summer Demo Faire yesterday!

Reporting back a few thoughts running through my head in real-time:

1. Essentially, the capabilities & design of every core SaaS use case are being reimagined by AI founders as we speak. In a future steady state, I see many of them living inside larger product suites as “features”, either via the incumbent fast-following and shipping them, or via small acquisitions/acqui-hires.

2. Consumer AI products remind me a lot of the 1st gen iPhone apps. Founders (developers) rapidly shipping entertaining, almost “toy-like” use cases. Like in mobile, will something massive eventually come out of these? So hard to tell…

3. An underlying capability of AI that a majority of products seem to be leveraging is “contextual artifact creation”. Eg. creating videos & decks in real time, replacing specific elements instantly in pre-existing media etc.

4. While the underlying “intelligence” capabilities of the products seem to be next-level, the UI/ UX as of now seems quite incremental relative to the mobile/cloud era. Lots more discovery & risk-taking needs to happen here.

5. Across enterprise & consumer/prosumer, it’s clear that these products can only manifest their power when they have access to extremely differentiated & diverse sources of data. In some contexts, it was unclear how a startup would get access to many such datasets in a fresh & relevant manner.

6. In legacy industries like govt/ public sector, AI-native products, even with game-changing capabilities, will still need to deal with age-old GTM challenges (long sales cycle, who will buy, what are the incentives for users to adopt etc).

7. Finally, it’s still pretty effin’ hard to pull off a glitch-free, low-latency AI demo.

Congrats to all the presenting SPC founders. Can’t wait for how these products shape up going forward!