Investment themes
We invest in future forward ideas across the stack with enterprise as the customer.
First Rays makes initial investment in Seed - Pre-Series A stage startups.
Cloud Infrastructure
Cloud Infrastructure is not only a technical Inflection Points but also a business model innovation. Traditional models of networking, cybersecurity are under stress from cloud and hybrid compte environments. This shift requires an enhanced security posture as cloud providers do not take responsibility for customer data.
Data Infrastructure
Data Infrastructure Annual data creation is on track to reach what is known as one yottabyte before the end of this decade. One yottabyte is equivalent to 1tn terabytes of data (with each terabyte equivalent to about 85m pages of data). As companies capture, store and analyse data, data infrastructure software will emerge as the largest software category. In turn, the increased data use will require increased governance and stewardship services, including support to ensure compliance with security and privacy laws. While awareness of the importance of data usage has been rising, it is still under-recognised compared with the likely impact. Increasingly, investors must evaluate companies through a prism of their data assets and how they use them. They need to prepare for the Yotta age. A new generation of digitally native businesses has now begun to use the FANG playbook. Data will also disrupt the tech industry itself, including software.
Future of Work
Enterprises have to constantly adapt in a world filled with disruptions! Remote work, distributed teams and many such challenges are presenting opportunities for greater digital adoption and new solutions to address enterprise needs. We would like to hear from founders building solutions for the Enterprise Future of Work.
Cybersecurity
There is no version of the future where cybersecurity is not a massive and essential business. It’s basic infrastructure now, like an airport or power grid. The reality is that acceleration of digital transformation and distributed workforces have left wide open gaps in security defenses. Cybercrime has reached new heights and cyber warfare is only intensifying. As the landscape evolves, we expect more and more companies to emerge to address these challenges.
Dev Tools
A cross-cutting concern across all these themes is dev-software, i.e. products that are sold to, purchased or influenced by, and consumed by software developers, is a $40B+ market today, accounts for 7% of the global software spend and is growing at 19% CAGR. As every company becomes a software company, the amount of software created is expanding at a frenetic pace, aided by cloud computing, APIfication and agile development cycles. This push towards making software a core competency has also fueled the growth of the global software developer population, which is expected to reach 45M by 2030. Whether it is “shift-left” for security, or building tools for data engineers rather than data analysts, this is a macro trend we are actively investing in.
