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Utilizing this digital window to share my understanding of the funder and founder relationships and….
several other things that intrigue me!

Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship, Learning, Startups

I’ve written a lot about the fundraising process. Of late (however), I have begun advising founders to pull the plug on their fundraise. It is an emotionally sensitive topic for founders. It requires you to acknowledge the failure of a mission

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I’ve written a lot about the fundraising process. Of late (however), I have begun advising founders to pull the plug on their fundraise.

It is an emotionally sensitive topic for founders. It requires you to acknowledge the failure of a mission that you have put your heart & soul into, and an endeavor that would have undoubtedly solved 98% of your problems (yes, I am exaggerating for creative effect).

However, as the allocator of limited resources, you, as the founder, must know where to deploy the focus and attention of your time and that of your team. There is a romanticism in continuing to dig because you are maybe so close to finding that gold only if you continue the search. However, you should not create yourself a hole so deep that you would require the power of the Dark Knight to climb your way out of the mess – regardless of the result of your quest.

There are several reasons why your fundraising efforts aren’t delivering results. You may need to improve your social capital or find a narrative that resonates with investors or have better preparation for due diligence. However, the primary reason for a failed expedition to fundraise is (drum rolls): high valuation.

It is highly improbable that your startup will not find an investor at the right valuation. Let’s not forget that even at the height of the 2008 global financial crisis or the 2020 meltdown due to COVID – events that seemed like the end of the world – investors were willing to buy when everyone else was hell-bent on pummeling stocks down to ZERO!

Therefore, in my experience, the primary failure of a fundraising effort is a valuation mismatch that is too big for an investor to digest. You should (at most times) recover from the entanglement of extremely high valuations through astute selling and negotiation techniques. However, at times, the trauma of an outrageous valuation sticks onto you and prevails over everything else your startup is doing well.  

Therefore, if a valuation mismatch is a consistent feedback that you receive, then it is best to stop your fundraising for a short period. 6 months at a bare minimum but ideally 9 months so that investors you have pitched to – forget about you!

The strategy is to allow the investors that you have met to get a mental reset on your startup and (most importantly) the valuation you had quoted. I borrow this concept directly from Dan Ariely’s Irrationally Predictable, wherein he discusses his experiments on the stickiness of a first impression with consumers, and further experiments on the results of resetting that first impression. I will share more about my learnings from this book in my review over this weekend.  

Once you have regained the aura of “freshness” with an investor without the past baggage, you start digging again – with a new spade in a fresh ditch!

Book Review, Books for Founders, Entrepreneurship, Investments, Learning, Opinion, Venture Capital

A common observation made by fund managers, limited partners, and (interestingly) journalists on the 2 year-long startup boom is the speed of some of these deal closures – primarily by skimping (or skipping) due diligence on deals before investing. I

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A common observation made by fund managers, limited partners, and (interestingly) journalists on the 2 year-long startup boom is the speed of some of these deal closures – primarily by skimping (or skipping) due diligence on deals before investing. I regularly get advice from well-wishers within and outside our offices to reduce the due diligence standards to improve the number of deals we can complete.

I am a firm believer that due diligence is vital for the sanctity of the founder-investor relationship. When things go wrong (as they sometimes do), lowering due diligence standards could transform an unfortunate situation into a terrible or litigative one. Besides, founders can prepare their startup and themselves for due diligence before raising their round so that the process can get completed smoothly and in time.  

However, we must challenge our beliefs & habits periodically to decipher if the core premise on which we had built those beliefs, is valid or whether it needs an upgrade. This exercise may strengthen the conviction around those practices or require the creation of entirely new pathways to stay “ahead of the curve.”

One such exercise took place during the final week of 2021 as I gobbled up the pages of The Billion Dollar Whale. I do not remember why this book sat in my kindle library for almost a year, but I started reading it because of its intriguing title. Yes, I judged a book… by its cover!

The story of Jho Low is interesting; what truly grips attention is Bradley Hope & Tom Wright’s writing style. It alternates between empathizing, sympathizing, and ridiculing the obnoxious way that an odd and shy Malaysian of Chinese descent entered the power circles of the Middle East, global financial services, American politics, New York’s high society, and inner rings of Hollywood.

It is not an enigma that Jho Low had penetrated these various circles; what was surprising was the speed at which he broke into these secretive societies – all in a matter of years while throwing wild parties that were (almost) completely stage-managed!  

Just anyone who would do their due diligence on Jho Low would have realized that his story of Malaysian royalty was built on a pack of cards. He blatantly stole over $600m from the Malaysian sovereign wealth fund (1MBD), wiring the money to accounts that sounded like actual entities. The fund wanted to get in business but was entirely controlled by Jho. Besides, most of the investments done by 1MBD were built on flimsy financials and exaggerated earnings waiting to get discovered only if someone stuck a probe just 1 inch below the surface.

Unfortunately, no one did, and the con went on, and it got bigger over the course of a decade. It led to billions of dollars of hot money going through the global financial ecosystem. Jho’s grand plans demolished the cloak of financial security that we may believe all our banking systems operate under. This con continued for almost a decade, it got more prominent, and it started getting even bigger sovereign wealth funds embroiled into messy soup – no one is immune to a well-crafted story.

The book is a page-turning must-read book.  

I hope they make a movie out of it – hopefully financed by the 1MBD fund (which also funded Wolf of Wall Street indirectly) and recover the billions that the Malaysian people have lost and are on the hook to repay in the years to come.

In the end, I reinforced my belief that it was better to lose a deal than to rush through due diligence because not only is it our money at stake, but other players like our co-investors, employees, suppliers, partners, customers, etc. rely on our investment confidence to develop relationships with entities & people that they did not previously know.

The greed to speed through deal processes to reach the top of investors’ lists cannot justify the mayhem & loss of confidence in this entire ecosystem due to a deal gone done wrong!

#DamaniTalks, Analysis, Career, Entrepreneurship, Investments, Learning, Venture Capital

Behind every successful fundraise is a strong narrative.   That is the honest answer to a question that investors repeatedly ask when they get bewildered by sky-high valuation and moonshot venture ideas. However, the founder’s ability to weave a strong narrative about their venture elevates its valuation from being based on its fundamental value to being based

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Behind every successful fundraise is a strong narrative.  

That is the honest answer to a question that investors repeatedly ask when they get bewildered by sky-high valuation and moonshot venture ideas. However, the founder’s ability to weave a strong narrative about their venture elevates its valuation from being based on its fundamental value to being based on the future potential.  

I’ve always promoted fundraising as a sales activity versus a financial activity because the result that you get by segregating both the actions, is the one that gets sold, i.e., since there are shares on sale, the venture is itself the product on sale. Therefore, when the founder convinces an individual to impart with cash today, with the promise of a higher sum of money/return in the future, they have made a sale of shares to an investor.  

Why does this venture have the best opportunity to turn that potential into a reality? – that is the narrative. That is the story that must be told. 

Over the years, I have put together a list of dos and don’ts for founders to create and deliver a strong narrative. Here is a shortlist:  

  1. Please don’t sell them, make them buy: people do not like to get sold to, they like to purchase. The same applies to investors too. We want to buy into things instead of getting browbeat by a sales professional. An easy way to get someone to buy into your narrative is to use question-based selling, i.e., using questions to guide your investor to a win-win conclusion.  
  1. Don’t give them a deal; give them an irresistible offer they cannot refuse: when founders offer promises of 100x or OYO-type of returns, it just reeks of used-car salesmanship. Instead, focus on building a bigger narrative that pales compared to the business’s current value. Do not offer it as a deal; let the investor consider it as one they pouched – not the one they were offered!   
  1. Create a fictional yet relatable target customer persona that they can identify with: I had a founder that did a delectable job on this while pitching. He created the profile of a research analyst creating a report for a mining company. He even gave this person a relatable name (anyone heard of a particular Melon Musk?) 

He explained the job role of Mr. Melon and the trouble he faces in his daily job. The pain point faced by Mr. Melon was easily relatable. Therefore, when this fictional character was presented with the said solution, it felt like a personal relief, as though I was Mr. Melon experiencing the product.  

A relatable story that puts the investors in your target customer’s shoes – is 50% of the battle won!  

  1. Speak highly about your competition: to speak highly about those you compete with showcases your industry knowledge. Suppose you can identify the strengths and opportunities for those businesses (as opposed to the weaknesses & threats) and speak in genuine high regard. In that case, it tells the investor that you aren’t insecure about the gap between you and your competitor.  
  1. Be prepared for objections: this takes a bit of practice, but after your first 12-15 pitches, you will notice a commonality in the line of investor questioning. The more comfortable you get with answering the objections the better chance of you maintaining control of the narrative 
  1. Encourage discussions, avoid debates: conserve your energy. If your responses to the objections, turn the discussions into debates, find avenues to resolve the conflict, and move the narrative forward. I’ve lost copious amounts of non-refundable time on tangential arguments that I thought I had won while fundraising for Artha Venture Fund. I had not.  
  1. Look for quick noes instead of long yeses: you do not need everyone to believe in your narrative. A fundraise is not a popularity contest. With several hundred (if not thousands) investors waiting for an investment narrative, you should focus your efforts on those that will decide quickly and avoid chasing those that will agree reluctantly! 
  1. Back each assumption or opinion with data: you make several assumptions in your narrative. It is natural for you to have a confirmation bias in your beliefs and for the investor to doubt your opinions. Therefore, have your assumptions backed with datasets from where you derived your opinion.  

Anyone can doubt your opinion, but they should not have second thoughts because you have based your views on datasets that do not exist! 

Analysis, Brand, Career, Entrepreneurship, Learning

I believe that founders are super-humans.   Founders take an incredible financial, emotional, mental, and (unfortunately) health risk to create the change that they want to see in the world. They must display a great belief in the incredible while consistently staring at the inevitable. They must wear so many faces that they may not even remember

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I believe that founders are super-humans.  

Founders take an incredible financial, emotional, mental, and (unfortunately) health risk to create the change that they want to see in the world. They must display a great belief in the incredible while consistently staring at the inevitable. They must wear so many faces that they may not even remember what the original face looked like.  

Founders, big or small, have an incredible amount of power, disrupting the ecosystems within which they operate. Yet, they live in the constant reality that they could lose the power they hold today, by a bunch of college students sitting in a dorm room, building the next big disruption. The real-life of a founder – the one that lies between the Instagram posts and LinkedIn updates – can be brutal. Therefore, Pankaj Mishra’s timely piece on The deadly disease stalking India’s startup unicorn founders shines a light on a topic shrouded in darkness.   

One common factor of stress for founders is whether “what I am doing today will take me to the Big Hairy Audacious Goal that I had set out to achieve when I started this company”. Their insecurity of – the time they have left to achieve their goals is shorter than the time they need to execute their plans – makes them do some outlandish stunts.  

They rack up marketing costs, hire troves, build audacious infrastructure for a demand that does not exist without unsustainable customer incentives. All these tactics push burns to forest fire levels, creating enough smoke & confusion that no one would know when their house turned to ash.  

I wish I could say that these were one-off stories that we tell new founders to scare them into sustainable entrepreneurship. It is a phenomenon that is well documented, some of them turning into courtroom dramas played across startup ecosystems around the globe.  

One method that seems to reduce founder stress tremendously is to guide them into focusing that incredible founder energy into the zeal for a small set of goals. We work closely with the founding team to identify the metrics that matter, i.e., those metrics that are demanded by the people who matter, asking the questions that must be answered.  

Then I love setting a goal for the founding team to hit those metrics that would answer (with data) those very people who did not believe in the business idea’s viability. With each level of goal achievement, the metrics that matter would evolve.  

Narrowing the founding team’s focus on a palatable (but challenging) set of goals reduces stress and creates mini victories in the battles to the audacious victory. The narrower focus reduces unnecessary spending or expansions unless it aligns with the reply to the questions that must be answered. 

After all…  

“Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful, committed citizens can change the world; indeed, it’s the only thing that ever has.” – Margaret Mead 

Analysis, Entrepreneurship, Learning, News, Technology, Venture Capital

Every Monday, I review the funding activity of the previous week and pick three favorites. This week, I picked Tech plays as my favorites.

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Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. Then, I pick out a few companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things from that list. Here is my rationale behind this weekly exercise 

Last week 28 startups raised $705 million; the slowdown in China has only increased the confidence in India! The week saw another 2 unicorns getting added to India’s burgeoning unicorn list. SEBI’s approval of the Nykaa IPO will further increase the tailwinds for the ecosystem.  

Could we see another 15 unicorns added to the list before bidding goodbye to 2021… I think so! 

This week, 20 deals were in the early-stage rounds, making my weekly analysis cut. After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked three as my favorite funding news from last week! 

Name: NFTically 

Amount Raised: Under $1 million from Nitish Mittersain, Gaurav Munjal, Sujeet Kumar, Kunal Kapoor, Surojit Chatterjee, and others. 

What does NFTically do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Online marketplace for diversified NFTs. It enables users to buy or sell NFT, digital arts, or tokens and set up NFT stores, shops, websites, and storefronts. It supports NFTs such as digital art, collectibles, utility, trading cards, and more. 

Why do I like NFTically? 

I went on record last week on my fascination with the NFT space; therefore, it is evident that NFTically would make this list. The serious concern for me is the fast pace at which (almost) every social media or crypto platform is launching an NFT marketplace.  

That NFTically is doing this as an end-to-end white label service could make things very interesting!   

Name: SALT 

Amount Raised: $500,000 from Prashant Pansare, Amit Goel, Vishrut Bubna, Supermorpheus, and angels. 

What does SALT do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Payment gateway solutions for international payments. It provides tools for businesses to manage currency accounts, payments, collections, and expenses. It offers multiple business accounts, reports on company finances, virtual & physical corporate cards, and more.  

Why do I like SALT? 

“Build in India, sell to the world” is a favorite VC theme, but “Bill in India, collect from the world” is yet to catch up. A $400 billion export market is pining for innovation and ease – need I say more about the potential? 

Name: FloCareer 

Amount Raised: $5.7 million from Data Point Capital, Uncorrelated Ventures, and Orios Venture Partners. 

What does FloCareer do? 

Edited from Traxcn: Online recruitment platform with job board and assessment. Job seekers can give online assessment tests, get a personalized learning map, mentor experts, and apply for jobs. Employers can search for pre-assessed and pre-interviewed candidates and connect with them. Employers can also post jobs on the platform. 

Why do I like FloCareer? 

It won’t take a rocket scientist to tell you that recruiting is 1 of the top 5 most painful activities for a startup founder. There is a broken ecosystem between the sharing of a profile to the person joining an organization. Many HRtech solutions are trying to solve some parts of this journey, but perhaps just FloCareer, which is trying to solve the entire pain point!  

Whether (and what) the customers will pay for the value they receive, we will find out!  

Honorable Mention: Leap.club 

I have purposefully excluded the leap.club’s investment round of $810,000 led by Enzia Ventures, Kunal Shah, Whiteboard Capital, Titan Capital, Artha India Ventures, and its users.  

Brand, Entrepreneurship, Investments, Learning, My Funding Picks, News, Opinion, Technology, Venture Capital

Every Monday, I review the funding activity of the previous week and pick three favorites. This week, I picked Tech plays as my favorites.

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Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. Then, I pick out a few companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things from that list. Here is my rationale behind this weekly exercise. 

I am back with the weekly picks!  

This post I shall over the last two weeks worth of funding.  

Last two weeks 68 startups raised $2.3 billion; our ecosystem is on a sustained bull run now. Just when it seems like there could be a dip, a slew of startups raise mega rounds and showcase the strong undercurrent that is powering the market.  

After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked 4 as my favorite funding news from the last two weeks. 

Name: Phool.co 

Amount Raised: Undisclosed amount from Alia Bhatt 

What does Phool.co do? 

Edited from Yourstory: Phool.co is a sustainable solution to the monumental temple-waste problem in India. They aim to build natural alternatives to synthetic chemical-based products by using deep-tech and research. They are perhaps India’s first natural incense brand taking a digital-first approach and have a first-mover advantage as bio-leathers are barely available in India. 

Why do I like Phool.co? 

This concept is a personal favorite. Waste recycling is a mission close to the heart. Therefore, the idea of recycling the billions of flowers offered to deities (of all religions) to create incense sticks and bio-leathers is brilliant. I am super excited about this play, and I would love to learn about the genesis of this idea with one of the founders on a future episode of DamaniTalks. 

Name: PredictiVu 

Amount Raised: $1.5 million from Market Xcel Data Matrix, backed by Nomura Research Institute (Japan) and Infobridge Asia (Japan). 

What does PredictiVu do? 

Edited from Tracxn: AI-based platform offering software to get consumer insights. The platform leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning models to correlate marketing campaign performance with market share data, along with macro inputs such as digital trends, customer preferences, and targeted consumer insights. It allows members to correlate marketing activities to sales results, map competitor performance, identify granular customer preferences and competitor performance, predict success using historical data, maximize the RoI of marketing campaigns by sentiment analysis, etc.  

Why do I like PredictiVu? 

PredictViu thrives on the famous Sun Tzu premise that “If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.” Therefore if a founder knew how their sales & marketing results would perform against their peers or within their industry – they could identify & avoid their blind spots.  

The premise has promise, and if the data is even 75% as accurate they the PredictiViu founders claim it is – there is a winner here!   

Name: Astrome 

Amount Raised: $3.4 million from IAN Fund; Urania Ventures, Lakshmi Narayanan, Impact Collective, ArtPark, and angels 

What does Astrome do? 

Edited from Traxcn: Provider of satellite-based communication services. It develops products and technology to beam internet access from space using its constellation of high throughput satellites in the low earth orbit. It uses millimeter-wave wireless technology for mesh architecture to develop multiple point-to-point links of multi-Gbps capacity. 

Why do I like Astrome? 

Despite a 60.06 Mbps download speed, India held 68th rank in the global rankings for the fastest fixed-line internet speed in the world. With 5G around the corner but with the average internet consumer demanding better speeds, a solution from above made a lot of sense, didn’t it? 

Astrome wants to fill in the gaps that could cost a princely sum for the incumbent, internet connectivity provided (mobile or fixed line) through the direct beaming of the internet from high throughput satellites.  

At what price will these gaps get fulfilled? Now that is the billion-dollar question!  

Name: Manch Technologies 

Amount Raised: $ 1.1 million from Bharat Inclusion Seed Fund and Pentathlon Ventures. 

What does Manch Technologies do? 

Edited from Website: MANCH is a paper-less, presence-less, collaborative and secure platform conceptualized to help digitize business processes across various industries. The SaaS-based ZERO coding digital transformation platform enables capture and authentication of third-party information and verification of transaction workflows – with agility and accuracy. 

Why do I like Manch Technologies? 

The biggest boon of the pandemic has been the quick adoption and acceptance of technological solutions to sign legal documents and for KYC. Manch brings all these worlds into one platform and becomes part of legal & compliance workflows for organizations.  

Their offerings are a need of the hour (and for the future), but it is a space that is getting increasingly crowded!  

Analysis, Brand, Entrepreneurship, Learning, Lifestyle, Venture Capital

Yesterday, I had an odd conversation with a founding team.   They were addressing an important, critical, and an absolutely need-to-solve problem with a lifestyle intervention solution. Lifestyle intervention is an area where I have had a high degree of investment interest. However, the founders' pricing strategy was a significant source of concern for me.   They wanted to address the mass market and, therefore, priced their solution at

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Yesterday, I had an odd conversation with a founding team.  

They were addressing an important, critical, and an absolutely need-to-solve problem with a lifestyle intervention solution. Lifestyle intervention is an area where I have had a high degree of investment interest. However, the founders’ pricing strategy was a significant source of concern for me.  

They wanted to address the mass market and, therefore, priced their solution at 1% of the failsafe solution if their program did not work. Due to the massively reduced price, they had to compromise on several things, viz Quality & experience of the coach  

  • Customer handled per coach  
  • Product packaging  
  • Customer retention  

The venture seemed to be in a death spiral as the shallow price point reduced the customer’s faith unless the results were instantaneous. Unfortunately for them, instant results were not possible.  

  • 1 out of 3 customers dropped off within 30 days,  
  • 3 out of 5 in 60 days and  
  • 4 out of 5 in 90 days (the eventual program is 90-180 days).  

Eventually, their solution worked for 1 out of 6 customers that finished the program.  

However, I believed (and conveyed) that the massive drop-off rate made the data extremely fuzzy.   

I inquired if they would increase their price from 1% to 10% of the failsafe solution.  

The higher price point would give them the budget to improve the coaching & product quality, address the massive drop-off rate, and (hopefully) the low success rate. They said they could increase the price, but it would mean that they would lose the mass of their targeted customer base. My team pointed out that they were (as it is) losing the mass of paying customers since they were only able to retain less than 20% at the 90-day mark.  

I explained that India is a value-conscious market but not necessarily price-sensitive, especially regarding health matters. Besides, their meager ball price wasn’t translating into customer referrals or huge profits. They weren’t breaking even, and sales were stagnating, i.e., they were slowly but surely dying.  

Lifestyle interventions require customers to have faith in the personalized plan, the coach’s experience, and the product’s quality. However, when bundled at a low price, far below what is reasonable, the customer inherently knows that they are compromising on something, if not all, their beliefs. In this case, the lack of an experienced coach that would provide personal care with strong follow-up on the customer during the intervention was sandbagging the results. Therefore, it wasn’t a mystery that most customers lost faith halfway through.  

The truth is that customers rarely blame themselves. Therefore, (to them) the failure of the program lies in the coach (who gets paid peanuts but “personally” manages 70-80 clients), the product (where differentiation and margins are wafer-thin), or in the program (which is well-intentioned but neither personalized nor adequately implemented).  

Therefore, when deciding the pricing points, founders in this space must understand why their customers are coming to them and whether pricing or results will be the primary motivating factor in making their decision. 

What their customers would tell them will surely surprise them. A customer signing up for a lifestyle intervention solution will pay more for the latter because (for them) the pain is deep enough to make a change. Therefore, the entire health & wellness vertical is a rare space where a lower price point hurts the quality perception and vice versa. 

Besides, a low-ball entry-level price point will attract the wrong customer cohort. The kind will lose faith because they already know that the results promised at a price are too good to be true. When they get what they expected, i.e., slow results, they quit! It completes their self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Let’s not forget that if the lowest price would capture the mass, then Tata Nano would be India’s number 1 selling car!  

Brand, Entrepreneurship, Investments, Learning, My Funding Picks, News, Opinion, Technology, Venture Capital

Every Monday, I review the funding activity of the previous week and pick three favorites. This week, I picked Tech plays as my favorites.

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Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. Then, I pick out a few companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things from that list. Here is my rationale behind this weekly exercise. 

Last week 28 startups raised $547 million. The ecosystem is flying high now that it set a solid base of 100 deals per month. With things looking rosy on the COVID reopening front, I expect that we should be doing 35-40 deals a month by the end of the year – especially after the resounding response to the Zomato IPO. 

This week, an overwhelming number of deals were in the early-stage rounds, making my weekly analysis cut. After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked three as my favorite funding news from last week! 

Name: Hyreo 

Amount Raised: Undisclosed amount from Callapina Capital with participation from Anas Rahman Junaid, Konglo Ventures, Raveendranath Kamath, Nat Natraj and angels 

What does Hyreo do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Hyreo is a cloud-based recruitment suite for employers. Features offered by the solution include an integrated ATS, automated recruitment marketplace, and chatbot-enabled candidate support experience. Other features offered by the solution include NLP-driven resume parsing, social data integration, and candidate sourcing performance analysis. Kelly, Omnix, Shopalyst, SunTec, Unisoft, UST Global, Xpetize, Zerone Consulting, Adecco, AHC Consulting, AppLexus, and Emvigo constitute their clientele. 

Why do I like Hyreo? 

My familial routes and close association with several entrepreneurs – funded and bootstrapped provides a unique perspective when looking at Hyreo-style startups. It provides an answer to the woes of 80% of the founders that I converse with regularly.  

Therefore such B2B startups get me excited. Not only are we customers for them, I personally know an army of founders that would find value in them.  

Name: Dozee 

Amount Raised: Rs 44 crore from Prime Venture Partners, YourNest Venture Capital and 3one4 Capital. 

What does Dozee do? 

Edited from Tracxn: AI-based patient monitoring system for healthcare providers. The company has developed software that enables hospital administrators to track and monitor early warning symptoms. It has features for vitals monitoring, telecommunication, reminders, health trend analysis, software integration, and more. 

Why do I like Dozee? 

I believe that startups offering the most simple-looking solution have a ton of complexity at the backend – Dozee for me falls into that category. It is a simple solution of using AI to enhance the capacity of nurses and doctors seems so simple. I can assure that it isn’t as simple as it seems – but the genius is in simplicity after all!  

Name: Captain Fresh 

Amount Raised: $3 million from Matrix Partners India, Ankur Capital, Incubate Fund, Jitendra Gupta, Amrish Rau and Asish Mohapatra. 

What does Captain Fresh do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Online B2B platform offering seafood products. The company offers the platform for the wholesale trade of seafood with integrated shipping, payment protection, and quality assurance services. It uses deep tech technology for offering the fastest harvest-to-retail solution. The application provided by the company is available on the Android platform. 

Why do I like Captain Fresh? 

HORECA is going to make a strong comeback in the next 3 quarters. If there is one thing that the locked down population has learned – it is that the root cause of their medical disposition is in the food. Therefore the customer, especially the middle-class customer demands better quality from their hospitality provider putting the onus on them to source better. Captain Fresh is an answer to this problem statement!  

Entrepreneurship, Investments, My Funding Picks, News, Opinion, Technology, Venture Capital

Every Monday, I review the funding activity of the previous week and pick three favorites. This week, I picked Tech plays as my favorites.

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Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. Then, I pick out a few companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things from that list. Here is my rationale behind this weekly exercise. 

Last week 29 startups raised $209 million; the base of 25+ deals a week is firmly set now, and the Zomato & PayTM IPOs led-liquidity could open the flood gates for funding in early-stage companies. Stay tuned; the best is yet to come! 

This week, an overwhelming number of deals were in the early-stage rounds (compared to 22 last week), making my weekly analysis cut. After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked three as my favorite funding news from last week! 

Name: Ati Motors 

Amount Raised: $3.5M from Blume Ventures, Exfinity Venture Partners, MFV Partners and a syndicate on LetsVenture. 

What does Ati Motors do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Ati Motors is developing an autonomous electric cargo vehicle. The company produces “Sherpa Tug” autonomous, electric tug with features like 1-ton payload capacity, electro-mechanical braking, lithium Ion battery, OTA software updates, etc. 

Why do I like Ati Motors? 

Warehousing is fast becoming the mainstay of the internet commerce industry, and anything that increases efficiency, productivity, and accuracy can provide colossal cost & margin implications. Ati is doing precisely that with their autonomous robot (I love the name Sherpa!)  

Name: Arcana 

Amount Raised: $375K from Balaji Srinivasan, Sandeep Nailwal, JD Kanani, Kendrick Nguyen, and angels. 

What does Arcana do? 

Edited from Yourstory: Founded in 2019, Arcana Network aims to be the developer-friendly decentralized storage option amongst other storage platforms such as IPFS, Filecoin, Storj, Sia, etc.. It gives developers the capability to build more secure and privacy-preserving applications from the ground up. Through Arcana’s SDK, developers and businesses can protect the private, confidential, and sensitive information of their customers, employees, and business easily. The firm’s privacy stack offers decentralized services for identity and access management, end-to-end encryption, non-custodial key management, and data storage. 

Why do I like Arcana? 

User data privacy is an issue that confounds even the most well-funded and seemingly secure tech startups. The obvious incentive for hackers has been the silos of datasets to grab if they can break through any of the gaps created by layers of security. 

They say that blockchain is the future of the internet.  

So can one protect user data using blockchain? Arcana has that answer!  

Name: Bikry 

Amount Raised: $1.3 million from YCombinator, founders of Twitch.TV, Razorpay, Angelist, Cabra VC, and angels. 

What does Bikry do? 

Edited from Tracxn: App-based storefront solutions for social commerce business. The app enables users to open online stores, create product catalogs on the phone, and share it with customers through Whatsapp Business, Whatsapp, Facebook, Instagram, etc., review store performance, order management, scheduling & tracking deliveries in real-time. The mobile application is available for Andriod users. 

Why do I like Bikry? 

Where the customers are, the sellers will go. Therefore if the customers are online, the sellers offline or otherwise have to go there too.  

However, it is not easy to make a simple-looking website that possesses the functionality your customers seek. Therefore Bikry’s solution has millions of business owners across India right now – and in the future!  

Entrepreneurship, Investments, My Funding Picks, News, Opinion, Technology, Venture Capital

Every Monday, I review the funding activity of the previous week and pick three favorites. This week, I picked Tech plays as my favorites.

Share:
Written by:
By
Date:
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Every Monday, I sit with my team to review the funding activity of the previous week. Then, I pick out a few companies that I would have loved to invest in or find founders doing similar things from that list. Here is my rationale behind this weekly exercise. 

Last week 27 startups raised $847 million; the impressive number streak continues with 113 startups raising in the previous 28 days! These numbers could quickly pale in comparison if global investors continue to pump money into India and the streak of M&As continues!  

This week, 22 deals were in the early-stage rounds (compared to 23 last week), making my weekly analysis cut. After sifting through the news (aggregated from Tracxn, Inc42, and YourStory), I picked three as my favorite funding news from last week! 

Name: Neverinstall 

Amount Raised: $375K from Speciale Invest 

What does Neverinstall do? 

Edited from Yourstory: Neverinstall is building a cloud platform to bring any graphical user interface (GUI) application regardless of OS and device type to the browser. 

Why do I like Neverinstall? 

Neverinstall is virtualizing commonly used applications (like Chrome, Firefox) or tools used by dev teams by providing users access to these applications hosted on the cloud. The platform makes it easy for end-users to free up their system’s resources by accessing powerful computers in data centers across the globe.  

It should be an excellent tool for programmers or people that require access to high-capacity processors. Besides, with an investor like Speciale, you can expect NeverInstall’s technology to be of the highest class!  

Name: CoRover 

Amount Raised: Undisclosed amount from Canbank Venture Capital Fund 

What does CoRover do? 

Edited from Tracxn: CoRover provides a conversational AI platform to automate business operations. It uses machine learning and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to help businesses give quick, automatic, and authentic responses to the users’ queries & actions in any language, channel & format. It also provides an end-to-end managed chatbot as a service (CaaS) solution to train, integrate and upgrade chatbot models. 

Why do I like CoRover? 

CoRover continues the tradition of embedding conversation AI deep into our daily lives. This space is getting crowded with multiple players providing solutions that are difficult to differentiate from one another.  

However, I love CoRover’s focus on solutions, especially around banking, which is a huge customer pain point. Monetization is going to a challenge with so many free solutions around, but if CoRover can crack that – there good times ahead! 

Name: Leegality 

Amount Raised: Undisclosed amount from IIFL Securities Capital Enhancer Fund and Mumbai Angels 

What does Leegality do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Cloud-based enterprise legal document management software provider. It is a mobile and web application for users to create and sign legal documents. Users can choose from available templates or request a custom template, e-sign, and share with the other parties to review and e-sign. 

Why do I like Leegality? 

As an enterprise user of this platform, I am super bullish on Leegality’s prospects as a business. They have competition from Docusign & Adobe Sign,  but what I love about Leegality is the simplicity of the user journey from signing to receiving the final documents.  

I am interested in investing in them or similar solutions. So hit me up in case you are in the space! 

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