The Venture Intelligence Blog

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...

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.

From the post by Alok Mittal - who incidentally wears both hats - at VentureWoods: The venture capital industry in India is relatively small. And besides sporadic instances of “spray and pray”, it has mostly remained tight and focused its resources on one or two bets in a given area. That means that not more than 3-4 companies in any given space get to Series A. Angel investors need to understand this dynamic, and hence not just look at whether a company could build a good business, but also whether it has credible chances of raising the next round of capital to get there. A small VC industry also poses the issue of volatility - couple of VCs talking about an area being over-invested in enough to create a sudden negative sentiment. ...Is the Indian angel investor ready to lead? Are we ready to step up to the plate and make bets that we know VCs don’t like/understand today? Are we simply going to follow what we expect VCs to do 12 month down the line, or are we going to show them...

Economic Times has an interesting article on the emerging trends in the Indian Angel Investing space. “Without a doubt individual investing is a growing trend but individuals are few and scarce whereas with a network all that an entrepreneur has to do is apply online and gain access to a pool of nearly a hundred,” says Sasha Mirchandani, founder Mumbai Angels who was an individual investor before he set up the angel group. ...“Start-up entrepreneurs usually give up 30-40 % of equity to an angel network and by the time first round of venture capital funding comes round they could be left with just 20% of the ownership and lose motivation ,” says LR Narayanan, whose investment banking firm MasterKey Holdings works with early-stage technology firms. But beyond the money the real draw of individual angels is the personal mentoring they provide. “For this model to work angels must nurture just two or three start-ups at a time,” says Krishnappa, who is floating a model where individuals put...