- Are you a technical founder or founding team building a STEM-led technology to tackle climate change?
- Are you building a solution something that has an immediate need or addresses a significant gap in the market today but not considered “cool” or “hot” by the venture community?
- Are you focused on product-market fit and meaningful value proposition to the customers you serve and healthy unit economics that you can scale?
- Are you taking a customer-driven contrarian view to building your venture i.e. are you driven by solving a problem for a customer base that you want to tackle over chasing valuations?
We would love to speak with you!
Here is what you can expect from us:
- We are open to invest by ourselves. We are open to lead rounds if your capital requirement is higher than what we can invest. We also don’t care about who else is investing
- We are not looking for what is “hot”, we are looking for the founders with high conviction coming from deep technical competency and willingness to being contrarian
- We will want to speak to some (potential) customers who you are building the solution for and understand how close or far you are from product market fit
- We want our founders to stay lean and focus on reducing technology and market risk by maniacally focusing on product development and customer validation till they reach product-market fit
- We want to learn what drives you and your vision for the company you want to build and will only invest when our thesis aligns with that vision, ask us and we will freely share our thesis in the sector or technology that you operate in
Yes, as a sector focused early-stage investor, we often set terms and crowd other investors in, especially angel investors as well as institutional investors who do not have the mandate to lead rounds. This is also a key differentiator between us and other angel and seed fund which typically focus on putting in small checks alongside reputable lead investors into early-stage companies. Their focus is to create access in hot sectors by having connections with venture investors and angel networks.
The Seed Fund cell will invest from the seed stage up to Series-A (including early Series-A rounds while the start-ups are still pre-revenue). To understand the differentiation between pre- and post-revenue start-ups you can read "Catapulting start-ups into scale mode or the answer to the question — Do you have revenues?" by Sangam founder, Karthik Chandrasekar. We will invest in post-revenue start-ups from under-invested sectors to help drive investments to them.
Yes, while our focus and preference is to invest in Indian companies since we understand this market the best, We have the optionality to invest into technological innovation globally or into companies operating in india but domiciled elsewhere
