Extracts from an Economic Times article titled "How India's two largest angel investor groups are fine tuning their funding strategies":
The scale these networks are staring at as well as the manner India's startup ecosystem has developed in the past two to three years are forcing an overhaul that both IAN and Mumbai Angels like to fashion up as another stage of evolution.
"During the early days, there were only two large networks. You were not only getting money but access to the finest brains in the country. But post 2013, a number of micro venture capital funds have come up. Several entrepreneurs now prefer getting money from a single investor when they need a cheque of Rs 1-3 crore rather than have 20 angels pool in their money, which has its own challenges," said Anil Joshi, managing partner at Unicorn India Ventures, an early-stage fund.
..."It's an evolution because when we started out nobody understood startups as an asset class. Today, it's different. The next gap we are seeing in the market is that for startups that are doing well with angel money, it becomes very difficult to raise capital of $1-5 million," said Padmaja Ruparel, president at IAN, which recently raised Rs 175 crore for its fund that's targeting a corpus of Rs 350 crore. "The fund has come in to fill the gap, to make sure that startups that are performing well have two pots of money to draw from."
