The Venture Intelligence Blog

In the first interview of our " How I Raised Funding ?" Series, Priyanka Aggarwal, Wishberry shares Q: In your seed round, you raised funding from the who’s who of Angel investors like Rajan Anandan, Sharad Sharma, Deep Kalra, Sunil Kalra, etc through the Letsventure platform. How did you kick off your fundraising process on Letsventure? How did you end up convincing so many stalwarts to invest in the company? Priyanka: While raising money on an angel platform it’s extremely helpful to have a lead/anchor investor. Having said that, most of our lead investors were syndicated offline and we only listed on the platform to raise the remaining 20%. Having Rajan Anandan and Sharad Sharma as our lead investors convinced other angels to back Wishberry. So how did you meet and convince Rajan Anandan and Sharad Sharma? Click here to continue reading. Venture Intelligence is India's longest serving provider of data and analysis on Private Company Financi...

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 clas...

VC investments in April – at $125 million across 31 investments - marked a 22 month low in value terms. While the value of investments was down 20% compared to the same period last year, volume (or number of investments) was down by 6%. Compared to the previous month, value of investments was down by as much as 80% and volume fell by 18.4%. (Venture Capital is defined by Venture Intelligence as Seed Capital to “Series D”/Fourth round of investment of up to $20 million in companies that are less than 10 years old. The monthly analysis includes investments of over $20-M as well in tech startups that are less than 10 years old.) April reported just 3 deals above $10M plus bracket compared to 11 deals in the previous month Series A witnesses uptick amidst gloomy April Venture Capital funds invested across 17 Series A deals up from 14 deals in the previous month. All other rounds were either flat or down. Angel activity remains at low ebb.  Angel i...

Excerpts from an ET article . Why do Sachin & Binny Bansal invest in startups? 1 . Principle of Paying it Forward 2. To back game changing companies which regular VCs might not fund Examples include their investments in space tech company  Team Indus  and 3-D organ printing company  Pandorum Technologies . 3. Keep themselves updated on the startup ecosystem. Portfolio company  InShorts (earlier News In Shorts) taught them the intricacies of how app metrics were different from web traffic metrics.  Checklist to attract funding from Sachin & Binny  A. Your business doesn't conflict with Flipkart Binny Bansal exited from 3 portfolio companies - including Roposo and Zopper - when they pivoted their business models towards e-commerce  B. Are you raising between $20k-500k? That's their sweet spot / range. C. Can you teach them a thing or two? Refer point 2 above. D. Sectors they like...

With enthusiasm for angel investments in India at an all time high, Venture Intelligence is happy to announce a new feature to its Angel Investments database: the ability to search listings of companies seeking angel / seed capital in your city. Integrating company and investor profiles from the world’s best known angel deals platform - AngelList - the Venture Intelligence Angel Investments database allows its users to further search and filter listings by company name, city and amount of funding sought. To look up companies seeking angel capital in your city right away, just login to the Venture Intelligence PE/VC Deal Database . Don’t have a login? Contact Us for a demo.

Sandhya Hegde of Khosla Impact  has listed out the seed capital sources she likes in India and why. Extracts: I have categorized them in 3 different groups — angel networks, fundraising platforms and seed funds. Over time, group 2 will eat group 1 (à la Angel List).   ... I am really excited about the potential of angellist-like platforms in India where startups are more geographically dispersed and it’s often harder to get meetings quickly for founders. Platforms are efficient, help standardize terms and give more power to entrepreneurs. We need some of that. I already see IAN members rapidly signing up on these sites☺   ... Everyone’s doing seed investments at this point so nothing, apparently, is too early for institutional capital. Accel, SAIF, Kalari, IDG, Accel, Helion, Sequoia, Matrix, Nexus.. I begin to think even Tiger Global might make a seed investment in the right team given the exuberant environment in India. If you have their attention, you are winnin...

Cross Posted from the Entrevista Blog In this audio interview ("podcast"), Palem Srikanth shares his amazing entrepreneurial journey - from a Stanford educated logistics executive with Hewlett Packard to returning to India and starting a Dosa restaurant chain to the tough lessons from making cross-border acquisitions to the recent sale of the logistics software business (to US Private Equity firm Francisco Partners-backed Kewill) for about Rs.275 crores.   The Podcast can be downloaded from here . (Use Right Click > Save As to save the file to your desktop) Highlights : Importance of Financial Strength in the Enterprise Software space How persistence and investing in technology (to ensure Four Soft's products  were cutting edge)  provided the maximum return - much more than the expensive acquisitions the company made  Managing the confidentiality of the transaction involving a listed company - so that there is no misuse of insider informa...