Rezolve.ai (Actionable Science), one of our portfolio SaaS firms, announced a $0.5M fundraise yesterday.
We backed Saurabh, Manish & Udaya, stalwarts in the enterprise technology space, over 2.5 years ago at Globevestor when global SaaS out of India wasn’t a big theme. This team had that solid mix of domain expertise, sales experience & tech chops for us to instantly get excited about the problem they were attacking.
As a pre-seed/seed stage startup investor, the most frequent gripe I hear from Indian founders is that they had a better product, competent team & better numbers, yet the investors funded their competitors. This makes them confused & dejected, and they lose faith in VCs & angels. A fair number of founders have remarked to me that “VCs are dumb”.
My honest answer to this is that the competition is simply selling a “better story”. But the founders are never satisfied with this response. And I believe the problem stems from a belief in pure meritocracy.
Recently, the founder of a very well-funded startup got angry on a call because he heard a colleague drink water. His comment – “If what I’m saying is less important to you than drinking water, we shouldn’t even have this call”. Stop for a moment & let this behaviour sink in. Unreal.
Over the past few years, we’ve really glorified the ‘maverick’-ness of successful founders in India. It is widely believed that it takes a unique vision & an aggressive, win-at-all-cost mindset for a founder to achieve big wins. However, this gospel has percolated extremely bad culture at a number of unicorns/soonicorns. We’ve all heard stories of some leading founders who are known to instantly explode on their team, run a foul mouth, always blame others for failures & have zero empathy.
To all those founders who haven’t received an interview call from YC today & are feeling rejected, don’t feel down & dejected. Thousands of founders have been in the same place as you, before they figured it out & made their venture into a big success. Some of the more successful founders in our portfolio have been there as well.
It reminds me of my own experience ~7 years ago, when we pitched the idea of Globevestor to YC. We sat in Paul’s living room, being interviewed by the trio of Paul, Jessica & Sam. You couldn’t get more YC than that! Our pitch was that the time for India was here & we were on a cusp of a big shift in early-stage ecosystem in India. But none of them even knew about Flipkart or Inmobi, the two unicorns we had then.
Failure is hard. But a lot of times founders make it harder for themselves by not being open about their & the startup’s struggles with their team till it’s too late. By nature founders are ever-optimists about overcoming their challenges, so wouldn’t like to spook the team needlessly. And they also would like to project an image of being in control. A feeling of being judged isn’t great. But an opaqueness about the startup’s fortunes slowly gets ingrained in the culture and the ‘team’ turns into ‘employees’.
Springboard, one of our portfolio startups, today announced their $31M Series B funding led by Telstra. With this, Springboard has raised over $50 million till date.
Started in 2013 by our long-time friends, Parul Gupta and Gautam Tambay, Springboard is building a new-age university with a focus on upskilling professionals. It matches each student 1:1 with a personalized mentor, alongside a core curriculum and project work. They’ve witnessed 330% student enrollment growth from June 2019 to June 2020. It’s a rocket ship!
Flintobox, another portfolio firm of ours, today announced the closure of its $7.2M (INR 50 Cr) pre-Series B round led by Lightbox.
We first backed Flintobox by leading their pre-seed round when they were fresh out of the GSF accelerator. As users of their products, we had high conviction that this team would create a large company in the early learning space. Since then, we’ve led or participated in three of their funding rounds, while they’ve grown their top line 100x!
We’ve announced today about our investment in Forbidden Foods, which owns the BRB brand of popped chips. We led the $1M round which was joined by Secocha Ventures, First Cheque and prominent angels.
The founders, Anuj and Abhishek, are long-time friends and form an incredible team. Anuj previously was a founding team member of Bira and led their operations & distribution. Abhishek is a long timer at Schlumberger, and brings immense operational expertise.
We recently invested in the pre-Series A round of Agnikul, an India-based small rockets company. The round was led by Pi Ventures and participated in by Speciale Invest, Artha Venture Fund and others, alongside us.
Agnikul is one of those moonshot, big vision startups. They’re building small rockets to launch nano-satellites to low earth orbits in space. Srinath and Moin, the founders, are innovating by making innovations in design to be able to make a single-piece 3D printed engine.
Our portfolio company, Zoomcar, announced today that it has raised a $30M round led by Sony.
Zoomcar has a special place in my heart as it was my first angel investment and the first deal we did on Globevestor. We invested first in their seed round when they were just present in Bangalore. And today they’re present in nearly 50 cities in India!