Blue Lake VC’s Post

Thank you all for joining yesterday and particularly to Lyubov Guk, Eleanor Kaye and Roei Samuel for making this event possible. Startup Syndicates play a huge role often being a major source of investments between the F&F and the VC rounds. I am proud of the work Blue Lake Syndicate is doing as was glad to share our hard earned experiences!

This is my second favourite type of LinkedIn post! I am very pleased to announce Blue Lake VC investment into Imaginario AI and joining the founders Jose M. Puga and Abdelhak Loukkal. Imaginario helps to do an in-video search spotting the exact moment you are after just by describing it. A guy wearing a hat, a girl smoking, Totoro with an umbrella - anything. If you are a company and still spending a tonne of time doing manual searches of your video archives you should speak with Jose. For us this is yet another validation of our thesis that immigrant founders offer an outsized opportunity for the investors, particularly at early stages. I think it also may be useful to share some of our thinking process behind this investment, some founders may find it helpful. 🚴♂️ Team - The single most important factor. At early stage we don't always expect a startup to have a full stack of a high level team, but. A level founder(s) is a must. Multiple team members with highly complementary skills is a significant bonus. Sales + Technical are some of the more prized once in our book and this certainly was the case here. 🎁 Product - Our approach is that product only matters insofar as it solves a Problem. Not just any problem but a very specific one. The one that needs solving. Where the alternative solutions are distinctly inferior. In the case of Imaginario after doing the client interviews the alternative to their solution was for someone to sit and actually watch vides back manually to spot a specific moment they are after. No-one wants to do that. 🚶♂️ Go to market - None of the above matters if the startup has no path to market. The usual problem that we see is where, founders often underestimate what it takes for a large corporation to make a purchasing decision. We really like a narrow, almost niche go to market play at early stages with an ambitious upside going forward. Last but not least I want to thank Blue Lake Syndicate members who have backed this investment, we are lucky to have so many wonderful investors in the community!