As we start to head into the new year, we wanted to publish some of the areas that we've been spending time across the team in public!
If you're building (or thinking of building!) in any of these categories, please reach out to us at pitch@pathlight.vc or to any one of us directly - we would love to explore with you :).
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SMBs are the lifeblood of the world economy and they’re not going anywhere. There are millions of SMB services companies that require either (a) codified knowledge work (tax, bookkeeping, insurance) or (b) skilled trades labor (home/commercial services trades, home remodeling, physicians treating patients) to deliver their services. In these businesses, a significant portion of value in the P&L accrues to shrinking talent pools for knowledge work and/or to unskilled labor that is a cost center. Historically these businesses scaled linearly with headcount to drive topline revenues at the same (or shrinking) overall free cash flow margin profile.
There is a unique moment in time to reimagine SMB technology stacks to increase productivity of knowledge workers and/or reduce the cost of unskilled labor to with novel solutions to generic sales, marketing, support, jobs to be done as well as industry specific jobs to be done like tax paper preparation or on-site technical support (particularly given the innovations in voice and text models). Consider for instance the ability of automation to enhance the productivity of tax accountants. Alternatively, a home health business that automates the lead to schedule to dispatch process can drive previously impossible margin expansion (and potentially also revenue acceleration).
If you’re building something that will help bring the SMB economy to new levels of productivity, we’d love to meet.
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SMBs are increasingly outsourcing their IT and security functions to MSPs, primarily due to cost, lack of available in-house talent, and increasingly complex IT environments. At the same time, COVID has accelerated the shift from in-office to hybrid and remote work environments. As a result of this shift, some of the existing IT & security solutions leveraged by SMBs that were designed for in-office/centralized locations and employee bases are now less effective at protecting users who are logging in from any device and location. At the same time, malicious actors are becoming more sophisticated and are increasingly focusing their attacks on SMBs. While SMBs and their MSPs realize the need to leverage best-in-class enterprise security tools to fill the gaps left behind by ineffective or non-existent solutions, many of these tools are prohibitively expensive. All of this together has created a unique moment-in-time for a company to create a more comprehensive security platform for SMBs sold through MSPs to fill these gaps.
We’re particularly excited about AI powered ITSM Remediation:
We’ve historically helped to build leading identity companies like Stytch and Alloy in fraud, now we’re excited to support the next generation of SMB security.
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Digital observability markets are some of the largest software TAMs, but the real world is stuck in the analog and is potentially orders of magnitude more larger.
In a dynamic physical world that supports us all in their daily lives - we encounter daily pain points from issues in industrial plants and buildings, hospitals and health systems, guns and crime, and fragmented and aging physical infrastructure (roads, cars, seas, airlines, etc). These present not just safety and life saving issues that need immediate attention for citizens, but in a commercial environment, can cost manufacturers and providers up to 10% of their revenue.
We’re excited about single control planes that connect to an asset inventory, identify issues from the physical world, investigate and prioritize them, and then drive remediation. Collectively, this will save lives, reduce the mean time to remediation, and reduce revenue leakage and losses for cities to manufacturers to airlines to hospitals to homes. We believe there are large venture scale returns available, and net positive for the world opportunities in each of these areas.
We’ve already partnered with Obvio.ai, which is transforming traffic and road safety and enforcement on a real-time basis for municipalities across the US. We are enormously excited to meet founders seeking to transform physical world observability and can leverage advances in AI and even hardware.
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Healthcare spending as a % of total US GDP has dramatically risen over the last 50 years - from 5% of GDP in 1960 (27.2 billion) to 17.3% of GDP in 2022 ($4.5 trillion) - and is expected to grow to 19.7% of GDP in 2032.
Meanwhile, the amount of admin tasks for providers has also increased dramatically over the last few decades due to new regulations + compliance procedures as well as adoption of electronic health data - nearly 50% of a doctors workday is spent on non-patient admin work, even with the exponential increase of administrators.
We are excited about the cost savings + automation potential that AI has started to unlock across the US Healthcare industry. We believe that AI is a true platform shift that allows traditionally underserved providers to get access to best in class software / services that would otherwise have required a much more massive budget + headcount to operate.
Opportunities in healthcare payments
We continue to be excited about the intersection of fintech / payments and healthcare, and in particular are excited to meet founders building end to end RCM, claim management, denial + appeals, reporting + auditing, and payment posting + reconciliation that have a few of the tailwinds below:
Opportunities to improve the provider experience
We’re also excited to meet founders building software to further automate workflows around the provider experience…
Opportunities to replace services in payor workflows
Payors have historically been a tough nut to crack for venture backed software companies as they’re typically more accustomed to buying services and headcount. Many previous generations of software companies eventually turn into glorified dev + services shops with low margins. We believe LLMs will be a platform shift that allows companies to swap payor services + headcount budgets for AI platforms. We would love to meet you if you’re building in any areas for payors with AI including:
Opportunities to improve the patient experience + practice management
We believe that advances in LLMs that enable for unique advances for voice, document processing, and pseudo reasoning opens up new markets - what typically required a massive budget + outsourced team of human resources can now be replicated with an API call. This includes categories around:
Opportunities to decrease the cost of fertility services + increase access:
Finally, we're excited to meet founders building technology + software that can decrease the cost of fertility services by 10x to increase the number of consumers that can access those services by 100x. It could include software and AI enabled services that allow for data interoperability between various providers, better care coordination and scheduling, training and retention for OBGYNs / REIs, or much more.
If you are building in any of the categories above (as well as other opportunities in healthcare), please reach out! We’re proud previous investors in companies such as Osmind, Paytient, Candor Health, Juniper Health, and several more and our fund is backed primarily by non-profit endowments, hospital systems, and scientific research institutions (Carnegie Mellon, Cook Children’s Hospital, and more)
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Many SMB-dominated value chains have complicated funds flows, low trust in transactions between counterparties, and extended receivables timelines. Inefficiencies in cash flow tie up working capital and handicap any given industries’ growth and quite often there is large revenue. Technology has the potential to bring visibility to the cash flows in these B2B transactions, increase trust between participants, accelerate cash in the door and generate new levels of productivity.
Whether this is in construction (we’ve partnered with Adaptive based on this thesis), healthcare providers, insurance brokers, field services, logistics (shippers/carrier/brokers), cross-border trade, restaurants, or other industries, we’re excited about the potential to bring visibility to money movements.
If you’re excited about complicated payments flows in any vertical markets, we’d love to meet with you.
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Across many regulated customers whether they be banks, insurance companies, local governments, health systems - we have all experienced manual forms, data entry and re-entry, long wait times. Across each of these customers, the fundamental root set of workflows are similar with
In most cases, these customers are still in the world of on-prem or physical forms - however with labor shortages in these jobs and end customer needs rapidly evolving, the time for change is now. We believe there is a large opportunity to create an end to end vertical OS from the end customer to the regulated provider that completely sidesteps the tedious implementation cycles + cost typically associated with RPA products. We believe we’re still in the gpt 3.5 era of computer use + agentic APIs and we’re excited to see more magical products for workers.
If you’re focused on purpose-built automation for these customers in government / banks / capital markets / insurance / health systems and providers, we’d love to meet you.