As every entrepreneur will know, securing that first round of seed capital is often the most crucial step in getting any business off the ground. And for their part, seed investors play a crucial role as tech influencers or tastemakers, often backing a trend years before it becomes mainstream. But what do these European tech tastemakers of today think is coming tomorrow? Artificial intelligence is the number one sector that seed investors in Europe are obsessing over, with a whopping 70% saying they're most excited about what's going on in the space. Mosaic Ventures, which has backed companies like period-tracking app Clue and crypto wallet Blockchain, this morning published the figures as part of an extensive study into the sentiment of 60 top European seed funders.

Joanna Glasner is a reporter for Crunchbase. Stories about seed funding often contain sappy metaphors about planting seedlings and nurturing them to maturity. In reality, it's a brutally Darwinian business: most companies fail, successful ones get diluted and exits commonly take a decade or more. That said, seed also has the highest potential returns of any investment stage. Unlike most VCs, seed and angel investors can do a lot of deals with a few million dollars.

Manish Singhal has two video technology patents to his name and helped build products at companies such as Motorola and Sling Media before becoming an entrepreneur and investor. No wonder, then, that the venture capital fund Singhal co-launched last year--pi Ventures--focuses on tech startups, particularly those working on artificial intelligence and machine learning. The VC fund aims to raise $30 million; it has already attracted investors such as International Finance Corporation, Accel Partners, Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal and prominent angel investor TV Mohandas Pai. The fund has backed four startups and will invest in a total of 18-20 startups. In an interaction with VCCircle, Singhal speaks about AI startups in India and the fund's strategy.

Nexd today announced seed funding as well as beta availability of its artificial intelligence (AI) and analytics platform, designed to help B2B organizations measure, understand and take action to increase close rates, more effectively forecast sales pipelines and improve overall sales efficiency. The company is addressing one of today's biggest sales management challenges, an action gap, whereby teams frequently miss opportunities to engage and win prospects due to fragmented information spread across thousands of disparate enterprise and SaaS applications and tools. Nexd taps the power of big data, machine learning and predictive analytics to analyze every touch point related to the sales process--including millions of data points from apps and tools outside a company's CRM system--ultimately determining patterns of success as well as where breakdowns occur. The result is deeper intelligence, increased predictability and improved execution across the sales organization. "When we embarked down this path we saw an incredible opportunity to use analytics and artificial intelligence to make people more effective at work," said James Davison, Co-Founder at Nexd. "While we're initially focused on sales, due to its huge impact on the business, we envision the core platform with its guidance and recommendations capabilities will ultimately provide value to many other areas across an organization."