Explaining the importance of Atmosic’s technology, Rajeev shares how the “implications of this in the IoT world are very large”

Rajeev Madhavan is a founder and General Partner of Clear Ventures, which invested in Atmosic. Earlier this year, he was interviewed by Steven Loeb of VatorNews about his experience as a venture capitalist, his thoughts on industry trends and some of his most exciting investments. During this interview Rajeev recalled his initial thoughts on Atmosic, and discussed his expectations for the company and our technology in the near future.

We’ve included this excerpt below; the full interview can be found here.

What are some of the investments you’ve made that you’re super excited about? Why did you want to invest in those companies?

RM: I’ll start with Atmosic, where I started the meeting telling the founders that I was probably not going to invest in them because they were very, very costly. I knew David and Masoud and I told them, “The chances of me funding this is very low, but if you guys really want, I’ll have the meeting.” They had this Bluetooth IoT device which does not need batteries. If you’re talking on headphones today, if you forget to charge that’s one of the biggest problems. This particular chip charged from the ambient RF energy in the air, which means people like me, who forget to charge these kinds of devices, are absolutely saved. Think about the number of IoT devices that need to be charged; if you’re an industrial company building an inventory of things that are based on IoT, it’s almost like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: you start from one end you go to the other end, again and again. Unfortunately, that’s the job of replacing your batteries. This was a company that changed that. 45 minutes into the meeting, I called my co-founder to join me. I told him, “I’m going in, I love David and Masoud, but I doubt it,” but about 45 minutes into it, I am converted.

They launched their product about a year ago, and they’re doing very well. They have about 30 customers. You’re going to see some of these parts appear in the next year. Remotes are the best example: you don’t have to charge a remote. That’s a big use case because you forget to plug in and charge your remote, or you have to change the battery; when you really need to use the remote, batteries are out, so those issues are gone fast.

That was now almost three and a half years ago, but that’s how the history of that investment went about. It was a very early investment, they were my customers previously, I knew them, we had a lot of common contacts. I sat down with them out of respect for them, more than anything else, to be very honest, and they know that. They bowled me over with the idea. They checked off a lot of “nos,” but they clicked on a “yes,” which is, “oh my god, the implications of this in the IoT world are very large.”