A few days ago some students at E-Cell IMT Ghaziabad reached out to do this podcast as part of their ongoing series with startup investors. It’s always great speaking with students about entrepreneurship & investing — so here’s a the link to the brief podcast session with the E-Cell team, where we talk about investing criteria, founding teams, student-led startups, valuations & culture.
Q1 2021 has been absolute fire ? at Globevestor! 8 startups invested/under process already, with 3 solid portfolio follow-on rounds and 3 exciting pre-demo day investments in YC W21 across saas, spacetech, brands, edtech, AI – Indian origin founders are killing it globally!
Just a short note to celebrate small things.
Earlier this week, The New Yorker wrote a scathing piece on the VC industry with the above title (link in comments), looking at VCs through the WeWork debacle. If you were a cynic, you could write it off as cherry-picked writing in the “tech Vs media” battle that’s plaguing the Valley.
But it does highlight some issues with VC pretty well. Yet it isn’t saying anything new. The problems in VC are quite apparent — concentration of big capital with fewer funds, a power shift towards maverick founders, VCs becoming less confrontational to be seen as founder friendly, lack of principled & authoritative boards, a growth-only gospel, and an undying hope that continuous scale will trump everything else.
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.
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!
Thanks everyone for the positive feedback on the Hinglish video on investor perspectives from earlier this week. Part 2 of the video is also out now.
In this we talk about startup events, angel investing, mentoring, exits, women entrepreneurship & other stuff. Hopefully, there are some takeaways for founders & angels.
It was recently highlighted to me that seemingly all startup conferences/events in India happened in English. And that the content produced about startup ecosystem was also overwhelmingly in English & sometimes jargon-laden, which a few founders couldn’t comfortably grasp.
Honestly, I never thought that English as a medium would also become a barrier for founders, but it seems that as startups move to capture ‘Bharat’ and founders/angels come up all across India, we need more vernacular content on startup ecosystem. So as a first for me, here’s a small interview in Hinglish on some perspectives as an investor (Part 1 of 2). Hopefully, this is of help to some people out there.
There may not be consensus on this, but my experience is that women founders carry a relatively higher burden (esp. emotionally) & have a tougher journey compared to men. Every investor (incl. me) feels that we aren’t biased against them, yet it seems there are lesser women founders compared to the ratio in broader workforce. At most startup events, you see a smaller percentage of women than in a large firm’s cafeteria. Structurally, there’s little additional support available to them given their unique challenges.
That’s why I really liked Aishwarya & Vikas’ mission at Rebalance. It’s a new accelerator aiming to improve diversity in tech in India, esp. supporting women founders by providing them network & mentoring. Their first cohort just graduated. And it’s a job well done with women founders tackling problems across the spectrum.