We do one thing — seed stage investing.We love to help build from ground zero and get our hands dirty. As a team we have invested and advised over 30 companies across India, Israel and the Valley.
We partner with tenacious entrepreneurs who make products and services for enterprises and consumers.
We have offices in Bangalore and Chennai.
We take risks on disruptive ideas being built by visionary entrepreneur.
We look for three things :
Founders
Product
Vision
When we are evaluating a partnership, we spend significant time getting to know the Founders and experiencing the product which often speaks more than an investment memo. We have seen that users catch on to products that are a perfect blend of smart people + disruptive tech + art.
We make long-term commitments to our partner i.e. founders. We are reliable and transparent and focus on creating relationships built on trust.
We have learnt from our entrepreneurs that the most difficult part of building ground-up is the lonely experience of doing everything first – so we have built a knowledge sharing support layer to help our entrepreneurs across product management, digital marketing, sales and finance & admin support.
We love technology and we are early adopters. We are often our companies’ most active, vocal users.
Vishesh Rajaram
(Managing Partner)
Vishesh has over 10 years of investing experience across enterprise technologies and consumer services. He has been actively involved across the life-cycle of venture capital investing from deal sourcing, building networks, investing, monitoring and creating value and exit engineering.
Arjun Rao
( Partner)
Arjun has more than 15 years of experience in the technology and Internet start-up ecosystem in India. As an entrepreneur for 8+ years he has led tech and product teams, strategy and fund raising at all phases of a start-up lifecycle. Arjun has worked in product development, product management, digital marketing at growth stage companies
In most of our previous investments, start-ups have come to us when they are 2-3 people and an idea. We are typically the first investor for these start-ups. So, even if you don’t think you’re ready, we’d still like to get to know you. Maybe we can even help in the meantime.
We are usually the first investor in the start-up but have also worked with companies that have raised small rounds (<$200K) from accelerators and friends and families. However, if you have already raised in millions, then we are unlikely to be a fit.
We do one thing – seed stage.
While our investments historically tend to cluster around enterprise, consumer, hardware, fintech and digital-health that’s not where our appetite ends. If you’re building something new, we still want to hear from you.
As a venture capital firm there are some basic process that we go thru.
1. Initial review: We study material shared by founders to determine fit with our investment criteria.
2. First meeting : We take this opportunity to hear the founder out.
3. Follow-up: Majority of our passes happen after the initial meeting. This is when we do a deep dive into the business and also throw perspective on how we work with our start-ups. The follow-up meeting would involve at least one Partner
4. Partner meeting: We make decisions as a team and all partners have to meet the Founders. If our discussions go well, we invite you to our partners meet for you to present the idea to the entire team with a goal to give you an answer within a day from our meeting.
Our initial investment in a start-up ranges from $250k to $1M, but we’ve gone higher and lower in some cases. We are serious about supporting our companies with follow-on investing and reserve 60% of our corpus for follow-on investments.
Rounds we were part of range from $100K to $1M which should last the start-up upto 24 months.
Why Most VC’s Don’t Sign NDAs.
(Courtesy: Brad Fled)
Sample companies invested in or advised in the partner's personal capacities
