About Me

 

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

Entrepreneurship

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.

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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! 

Book Review, Books for Founders, Entrepreneurship, Learning

Bhavesh Kothari invited me to join the United Book Lover’s Club (UBLC) with several esteemed members of the literary fraternity. The group consists of leaders (who are readers) and authorpreneurs.   The group has A Book A Day wherein a member provides their favorite book and why they loved that book so much. As

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Bhavesh Kothari invited me to join the United Book Lover’s Club (UBLC) with several esteemed members of the literary fraternity. The group consists of leaders (who are readers) and authorpreneurs.  

The group has A Book A Day wherein a member provides their favorite book and why they loved that book so much. As someone that has read for the better part of two decades, it was surprising how easy it was to point out my favorite book. Therefore a huge thanks to the UBLC leadership for giving me the chance to share this all-important book! 

Certain books talk directly to your soul. They silence your mind, make your intellect take a back seat, and indeed reveal what you or I were born to do. No, this is not a book about religion or a philosophical take on life.  

It is a book on how specific experiences infect our fertile minds to make agreements with ourselves. These agreements cage us in a dream, keeping us away from reality by making us believe we are limited beings without the ability to make a change to ourselves or the world around us.  

When we find ourselves trapped in the personality based on the agreements we have made consciously or subconsciously. Then we face the challenges and limitations of the character we find ourselves trapped into. We pay the heavy price of holding onto those agreements but ironically also secure in knowing the punishment we have accustomed ourselves to – it is a vicious circle.  

We may try to break out of this circle we are trapped in, but it requires tremendous effort, and when we fail, we are back to where he had started.  

That is where Don Miguel Ruiz comes in with this classic guide to personal freedom, The Four Agreements. Don suggests that the simplest way to get out of the circle is by breaking the old agreements you’ve made with yourself and create 4 new ones to replace them with: 

  1. Be impeccable with your word 
  1. Don’t take anything personally 
  1. Don’t make assumptions 
  1. Always do your best 

I read this book for the first time in 2005; it was required reading at my door-to-door sales company to move to a team leader position. I vividly remember that afternoon as my 22-year-old self had an out of body experience to realize how I was trapped due to events or experiences entirely out of my control.  

I had taken the poison spewed (through words or actions) by another entrapped soul and allowed it to create a dream which encaged me into a lifetime of punishment. I remember putting this book down with tears streaming down my eyes as I broke agreements and replaced them with these new ones.  

I immediately bought another 10 copies and shipped them home for my family to read, and I ensured that each of my team members read it – from when I was a team leader to when I created Artha. I bought this book repeatedly, re-reading it every year or two to refresh the agreements and check whether I was entrapped in another dream once again. I’ve given this book away to total strangers on flights and to innumerable friends, even with my notes scribbled into the margins.   

Even after 16 years of following these agreements, I find myself scratching the surface to understand the power they ultimately unlock. It is not a one-time read type of book; it is a read, implement and read once again type of book.  

All you can do, like Don says through the final agreement: just do your best!  

#DamaniTalks, Brand, Entrepreneurship, Learning, Venture Capital

There is clear evidence that many of the most recognized technology companies in the world (and in India) started with simple & crude first version products:   Amazon began as a bookstore  Zappos as shoesite.com  Uber began as ubercabs.com Airbnb as airbedandbreakfast.com  Oyo as oravel.com  EaseMyTrip as a B2B

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There is clear evidence that many of the most recognized technology companies in the world (and in India) started with simple & crude first version products:  

The list is endless.  

Simple MVPs get created with the simple intention of obtaining validated learning which is a vital element of the lean startup approach made famous by Eric Ries.  

Instead of reading about the stories of simple MVPs becoming businesses valued at billions (if not trillions) of dollars, we have Dharmil Sheth of PharmEasy sharing the story of a simple image capturing app becoming a business valued at over $4 billion.  

Not many know this, but Pharmeasy went viral with over 40,000 users using its MVP app with ZERO marketing costs.  

Just how did PharmEasy do that?   

Tune in at 9 pm tonight to find out!  

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

Every Monday, I review the funding activity of the previous week and pick 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 36 startups raised $761 million! 

The number of deals taking place continued climbing, and our 30 minutes weekly call to discuss funding activity is struggling to get completed in an hour. It is heartening to note that a lot of the new action is (finally) taking place in the early-stage ecosystem where we operate.  

Now many voices are joining the chorus that FY22 will end strong with over $20 billion in investments in the startup ecosystem! It is one of the best times to be in VC!  

This week, 23 deals were in the early-stage rounds (compared to 25 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: The Sleep Company 

Amount Raised: Rs 13.4 crore from Fireside Ventures, LogX Ventures and Varun Alagh. 

What does The Sleep Company do? 

Edited from Tracxn: The Sleep Company is a manufacture of mattresses. It uses intelligent technology to adapts to body shape, and its patent-pending smart grid helps reduce back pain and more. Its features include airflow technology, elasticity, and more. 

Why do I like The Sleep Company? 

The online mattresses space is red hot, with Wakefit, Sleepcat, and Flo taking the top 3 spots. The addition of one more player in an already crowded space should be a no-no as a selection, no? Think again.  

Wakefit is going after the mass market with an affordably priced mattress. On the other hand, the Sleep Company is going after the affluent customer with a mattress 2-3x the price of a Wakefit mattress.  

Both companies may compete in the same space, but they are going after two utterly different customer segments. Whether the Sleep Company will want to (or get forced to) enter the Wakefit territory to pursue scale? 

That is a billion-dollar question! 

Name: Supertails 

Amount Raised: $2.6 Million from Saama Capital, DSG Consumer Partners, Deepika Padukone, Titan Capital, Sauce VC, and Whiteboard Capital. 

What does Supertails do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Platform offering multi-category pet supplies. Its offerings include dry food & wet foods, treats & chews, biscuits & cookies, grooming supplies, training, cleaning & waste disposal products, collars & leashes, bowls & feeders, toys, clothes & accessories, bedding & travel supplies, and more. 

Why do I like Supertails? 

India’s pet population is growing fast, especially in the post-pandemic world. People confined to their homes for extended periods are looking for avenues to destress and distract themselves. This phenomenon and the marked increase in the wealth owned by the urban affluent have created perfect opportunities for startups like Supertails to cash in on.  

Name: Nua 

Amount Raised: 7.1 million from Lightbox Ventures, Deepika Padukone, Vindi Singh Banga, Kamini Banga, and Kae Capital. 

What does Nua do? 

Edited from Tracxn: Online subscription-based platform offering female hygiene products. The company provides organic sanitary pads. The company claims the product is rash-free and leakage-proof. It allows customers to create customized packs and select quantity, delivery dates & frequency. It also provides a cover to dispose of the used sanitary pads. 

Why do I like Nua? 

D2C startups have gobbled up several FMCG strongholds on the back of the pandemic-led offline distribution disruption. Besides, the new internet consumer, instead of the run-of-the-mill brands, thrust on them for several years through offline distribution channels.  

Therefore, after disrupting cosmetics, snacking, sexual health, and a host of others, female hygiene is next on the list of startup founders. I loved the layout and messaging of Nua’s website that gives a premium feel without the loud colors of traditional female hygiene brands.   

#DamaniTalks, Entrepreneurship, Learning

In this week's episode of #DamaniTalks I spoke to Kailash Katkar, Founder of Quick Heal a man who built a ₹1800 crore IT security company without a college degree!  Kailash created a global empire spread across 60+ countries starting from a small one-room bootstrapped

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In this week’s episode of #DamaniTalks I spoke to Kailash Katkar, Founder of Quick Heal a man who built a ₹1800 crore IT security company without a college degree! 

Kailash created a global empire spread across 60+ countries starting from a small one-room bootstrapped computer repair services company – He has been an inspiration to many! 

Key takeaways from the episode: 

  • Why did Kailash drop out of school? Why did he decide not to pursue higher education? What sort of challenges did this bring about in his entrepreneurial journey?  
  • How did Kailash’s interest in repairing calculators come about? How did Kailash land his first job in a Radio and calculator repair store? What were the key takeaways from his experience here? What was the trigger that told him to leave and set up his own venture? 
  • What did his first venture- CAT Computer Services, provide? Where did his interest in computers come from? What was the feeling like of generating a turnover of Rs.1 lakh after a year during that time?  
  • Why did Kailash transition his company to Quick Heal? How did he convince his brother to join the company? Why was Kailash installing antivirus software on his client’s computers free of cost initially? Apart from the antivirus software, what else did Quick Heal start providing?  
  • Why did Kailash decide to pivot from hardware to software business? What are some of the most significant learning about running a B2B software business? What prompted Kailash to hire better managers for Quick Heal? According to him, what is the importance of getting the right managers in place?  
  • Why was Kailash not able to take a bank loan during that time? Why did Kailash decide to take VC funding? What was it like raising money from Sequoia Capital in 2010? How did they add value to Quick Heal? What was the feeling like to be the first Indian cybersecurity company to be listed on BSE and NSE? Where does Kailash see Quick Heal in the next 5 years now? What is his advice to budding entrepreneurs? 

Watch this episode

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