Radhesh Kanumury to Launch New Cross Border B2B Venture Fund 'Suvan Ventures' of $10-15 Mn in Size

Radhesh Kanumury

Industry veteran Radhesh Kanumury announced that he will be starting Suvan Ventures, a new venture fund focused on early stage B2B Indian cross-border SaaS companies (those which sell into global markets like US and Europe but have development/ customer success/ marketing teams in India). The fund size is expected to be $10-15mn, making 20-25 investments.

Suvan Ventures will identify and invest in companies early in their lifecycle and help them scale by providing mentoring, as well as invaluable connections to investors, partners, subject matter experts, system integrators and potential customers.

Global SaaS companies from India have an immense potential, as highlighted by a recent report by Bain & co . The report forecasted combined annual revenues of $30 billion by 2025 for Indian cross border SaaS companies.

There are already enough proof points in this space.

The potential of this sector is in-fact supported by companies like Browerstack, Druva, Freshworks, Zenoti, Chargebee, Mindtickle, Postman, Uniphore that have attained a ‘Unicorn Status’ in the recent past. Further, the successful IPO of Freshworks at Nasdaq, reaffirms the stability and momentum of the indigenous B2B cross-border SaaS sector.

Radhesh has been founding member and Managing Partner of Arka Venture Labs (built from scratch with 3 Anchor investors namely Blume, BGV and Emergent Ventures), a venture fund that successfully pioneered this category till December last year.

Arka Venture Labs, started in August 2018, has made 27 investments before the beginning of the year, out of which there are 4 exits already. 9 of the investments have received up rounds of financing from Marquee investors like B Capital, Lightspeed, Nexus, Matrix ventures, Sequoia Surge, Uncorrelated Ventures, Facebook, etc. Radhesh will continue to lead some of the investments from Arka Venture Labs post January this year. Arka will continue to back pre seed and seed stage entrepreneurs building India US cross border startups.

Speaking on founding Suvan Ventures, Radhesh Kanumury said -

I've had immense learning from Arka Venture Labs that I would like to incorporate in Suvan Ventures. Specialized funds like Suvan Ventures can play an important role in the journey of Indian B2B cross border companies. We already have anchor commitments from family offices and marquee angel investors.

Radhesh has got strong testimonials from the portfolio founders of Arka Venture Labs.

Radhesh is amongst the most seasoned B2B investors in India with rich operational experience in the enterprise technology space. Before Arka Venture Labs, he had an 18 year stint with IBM with roles across technology, sales, and business development. During his final 3.5 years there he led IBM India's startup initiative working exclusively with B2B startups, providing mentoring and connections to the right set of people in the ecosystems, enabling them to successfully and rapidly scale.

“I have had the pleasure to work with Radhesh both as an investor and a mentor helping us with product, GTM strategy and much more. He is one of the rare VCs that is deeply empathetic to the founder journey, takes the extra mile to understand the market & business and truly gets hands on and helps when required. I am convinced that Radhesh’s conviction for exploring new tech and deep empathy for founders can be a great asset to any early-stage company,” said Nirman Dave, Co founder of Obviously.ai.

Aditya Bhamidipaty, Founder of Firsthive, added, “Radhesh is an incredible partner to the founder. I have found him very engaged, empathetic and invested in our success emotionally beyond just the money. Most importantly he is always available and just a call away. He is a wonderful sounding board, always ready to work the network and thinking about the company almost like an extension of our team.”

Arka Venture Labs Invests in Nirmata to Accelerate Mainstream Adoption of Cloud-native Technologies

Kubernetes management company secures funding from Arka Venture Labs to accelerate regional cloud-native adoption

Nirmata, the Day 2 Kubernetes company, is excited to announce venture investment from Arka Venture Labs, a fund that provides capital and mentorship to global B2B companies. This new investment will allow Nirmata to accelerate regional APAC expansion, across engineering, support, sales and market, securing its position as a leading pure-play Kubernetes management platform.

As enterprise- adoption of cloud-native technologies accelerates, they encounter significant challenges in Day 2 operations due to steep learning curves, infrastructure complexity and rapidly changing business requirements. A significant amount of time and effort is spent on ongoing operations of Kubernetes clusters and applications. This problem is compounded by rapid increase in hybrid and multi-cloud adoption, especially in recent times.  

Nirmata enables enterprises to eliminate this undifferentiated heavy lifting, allowing precious development and operations resources to focus on delivering mission critical applications that delight customers. Recently, Nirmata in partnership with Amazon announced a new product offering, the Nirmata EKS Manager, which eliminates several Day 2 challenges faced by Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Service users. Nirmata EKS Manager is available in the AWS marketplace.

“My co-founders and I started Nirmata to democratize cloud-native technologies.”, says Jim Bugwadia who is a founder and the CEO of Nirmata. “As developers across the globe adopt Kubernetes, Nirmata is well positioning to solve the cloud-native application management complexities across multiple Kubernetes clusters and cloud providers, without lock-in and unnecessary abstractions.”

Arka Venture Labs invests in B2B tech companies between India and the US corridor. In addition to providing capital, the group works closely with the companies by providing expert mentorship, networking opportunities, infrastructure support and connections to valley ecosystems.

We liked the strong credentials of the founders and their ability to provide a complete solution to solve the Day 2 Kubernetes problem of some of the Fortune 500 companies with their patented platform. says Radhesh Kanumury, Managing Partner, Arka Venture Labs.

Nirmata was started by Jim Bugwadia, Ritesh Patel and Damien Toledo, a team with more than 50 years of experience building enterprise products that simplify IT operations. The Nirmata team has been helping enterprises deliver and support cloud-native applications for more than six years. 

About the Company

Nirmata is a unified management plane for Kubernetes clusters and workloads built for enterprise DevOps teams. Nirmata enables self-service cluster provisioning, provides visibility, health, metrics, and alerts, ensures compliance via workload policies, and streamlines application deployments across clusters. 

About the Venture
Arka Venture Labs is the first of its kind India-US cross-border accelerator fund that has been launched with three VC firms coming in as Anchor LPs. They are Blume Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), and Emergent Ventures. They are open to B2B startups with a strong growth in the US, backed by strong core technology and economic differentiators.  It started 2 years back and has invested in 9 companies so far

AI Service Platform Dotin Receives its next round of Seed Funding from Arka Venture Labs and Qu Ventures

Arka Venture Labs, a VC firm that provides capital and mentorship to B2B companies along with Qu Ventures joins dotin Inc. as the latest investor in the start-up’s current funding round. dotin Inc., a Business to Business, Artificial Intelligence, Software as Service platform leverages critical insights on employees’ and potential hires’ personalities to promote employer-employee alignment in the workplace. 

Despite economic uncertainty, dot.in is having a successful round of funding. And it is for good reason. “We liked the team dotin team, and the Patents they have created in this space after extensive research gives them a strong moat," shares Radhesh Kanumury, Managing Partner, Arka Venture Labs.

Arka Venture Labs’ investment extends beyond capital. The group works to help companies access Silicon Valley by providing expert mentorship, networking opportunities, and infrastructure support. That means accelerated growth in the US. “While we’ve had considerable success in the US already, our partnership with Arka Venture Labs and Qu Ventures helps dotin in scaling. And given the fallout of COVID-19, our AI platform is needed more than ever. We can make a real difference, helping employers access talent and their employee pool to best support their workforce during such a critical period,” Ganesh Iyer, CEO and Founder of dotin explains. "The timing of this partnership is fortunate. We look forward more such partnerships in this round."

The dotin platform utilizes psychology, structured/unstructured social or enterprise data, and machine learning to identify interpersonal decision-points and modify behavior for the benefit of employer and employee. This yields powerful business outcomes and improves the quality of employees’ work life. 

Right now, bettering the day-to-day for talent is necessary. Many companies have gone virtual to protect their employees during the pandemic. But for some, work-from-home can be a challenge. dotin Inc. AI platform can help. For industries looking to safely onboard new talent, insights into personality and work habits can ensure employers bring on workers who will perform well under these extenuating conditions. Or, employers can use these insights to offer the right support and training to their existing workforce to help during these trying times. 

With the additional funding, dotin plans to further their product development, widening the scope of their offerings. This round of funding is still open for interested investors. 

About dotin Inc. 

Based in Silicon Valley, dotin Inc.'s proprietary AI service software taps into structured and unstructured data to deliver rich, impactful and bias-free business insights. 

About Arka Venture Labs

Arka Venture Labs is a cross-border accelerator fund launched with three venture capitalist firms – Blume Ventures, Benhamou Glove Ventures, and Emergent Ventures.

Arka offers B2B start-ups with the capital and investment they need to invest in overseas markets. Specifically, the group helps companies access the Silicon Valley ecosystem with its vital mentoring and infrastructure support.

About Qu Ventures

Qu Ventures is a family-owned investment firm that provides early-stage tech companies with resources backed by the public companies the family owns, including Alpha Group (the largest entertainment company in China) and Aulton New Energy.

Among its many investments, Qu Ventures has partnered with Starship Technologies, Leaseable, Pronto, and Byton (a new generation of smart vehicles and a direct competitor to Tesla). Qu Ventures works with an organization's management team to do more than just write a check; the group helps entrepreneurs focus on innovation, disruption, and impact. 

Obviously AI - A Data Science Platform for Non-Tech Users Raises Funding led by Arka Venture Labs

Obviously.ai, which helps business users in doing predictive analytics in less than a minute, has closed its funding round led by Arka Venture Labs, a first of its kind India-US cross-border accelerator fund that has been launched with three VC firms coming in as Anchor LPs.

Apart from Arka Venture Labs, Obviously AI has several investors that include Berkeley Skydeck, Nvidia, Sequoia Capital (Scout fund), and more.

Obviously AI was founded on the belief that business users should be able to get predictive insights from their data, without waiting on an engineer. Their mission is to make data science effortless by enabling anyone to run complex data predictions and analytics, simply by asking questions in natural language with no code, no special training and all in less than minute. 

The tech startup has closed its  funding round with Arka Venture Labs leading it. 

How Obviously.AI Works

Obviously AI uses state-of-the-art natural language processing to break apart a question, interpret it and find the right data. Then to make predictions, it runs hundreds of machine learning algorithms in parallel and finds the right algorithm for your dataset. Finally, it identifies top attributes that impact the outcome you are trying to predict and delivers highly-accurate reports in under a minute. 

Here are the sorts of straight-forward, yet vitally important predictive and analytical questions Obviously AI can address:

• "Which users are most likely to buy again?"


• "Age and location of user paying more than $500?"


• "Which customers are likely to cancel their subscription?"


• "Will Tim Smith upgrade his plan?"

The platform is ideal for a range of small and medium businesses or small departments of larger companies. 

For example, in retail the software can optimize assortments, predict inventory burn or forecast staffing. For healthcare companies it can assist administrators to predict and prevent hospital readmissions, predict which patients are less likely to adhere to prescribed drug regimen and create the right intervention plan to increase medication adherence as well as help predict appointment no-shows. 

Other appropriate use cases include insurance, marketing, banking, gaming and SaaS. The platform is available in free, Pro and Pro Plus versions. 

We realized that business users often cared about getting decision making insights about their customers, products and its usage. But often had to wait for weeks on a data engineer to get a single question answered.” said Nirman Dave, Co-founder and CEO, Obviously AI. “We have been on a mission to make data science effortless just by asking questions. It’s amazing what marketers, salespeople and other non-technical business users can learn when they use our platform.” quoted Tapojit Debnath, Co founder and CTO.

About Arka Ventures

Arka Venture Labs is the first of its kind India-US cross-border accelerator fund that has been launched with three VC firms coming in as Anchor LPs. They are Blume Ventures, Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), and Emergent Ventures. Theyprovide founders with a combination of seed capital, mentoring, access to Silicon Valley ecosystem and infrastructure support. They are open to B2B startups with a strong potential in the US, backed by strong core technology and economic differentiators.

Blume Ventures To Launch ₹40 Crore Fund & Accelerator Exclusively for B2B Startups in India

Mumbai-based early-stage tech-focused venture fund, Blume Ventures (Blume), is all set to launch venture capital fund exclusively for B2B (business-to-business) startups in India. For this, Blume has partnered with two US-based venture firms - Silicon Valley-based Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) and Emergent Ventures, who will contribute to the fund.

Blume along with its US partners will also be launching accelerator platform -- Arka Venture Labs, in India to to help facilitate global transition and faster growth of B2B startups in India.

Arka Venture Labs, which would play dual role of "a fund" as well as a "Startup Accelerator platform", will provide seed and pre-seed capital of up to $200,000 for startups in the B2B space along with mentorship, infrastructure and access to the Silicon Valley ecosystem that will be critical in scaling up B2B startups in globally developed markets.

Initially, Arka Venture Labs and the fund have a corpus of about Rs 40 crore ($6 million) and has already achieved its first close. The platform has received interest from both Indian and US-based corporates, family offices and global high-net worth individuals and then the fund's corpus may go up in amount.

As Arka Venture Labs is joint venture of an Indian and two US-based venture firms, the platform will offer capital, cross-border ecosystem linkages and access to a global customer base to those tech-focused B2B startups that work in areas of retail, supply chain, robotics as also deep technology including artificial intelligence, big data and analytics amongst others under its platform.

To be eligible for Arka platform & fund, the startups are expected to have a minimum viable product with a strong potential to scale in the US and Europe with the platform looking to enable completion of the proof of concept (POC) within 6-9 months and have at least 1-2 paying clients on board. Going forward, the three funds will enable follow-on rounds for startups under this platform.

“We help Indian enterprise startups overcome the ‘trust gap’ that exists between them and customers, investors and acquirers alike when making a global transition. We plan to make Arka Venture Labs an open and collaborative platform to bring in all the help we need to bridge this trust gap for our companies,” said Yashwanth Hemaraj, investor at BGV and one of the founding partners at Arka Venture Labs.

"Once startups in B2B space look at developed markets like US and Europe for a client base, their scale of growth and profitability get an incredible boost due to such markets’ propensity for high profit margins and lesser sales cycles. Hence, we decided to create a platform early in startups’ life cycle to enable this growth path,” said Radhesh Kanumury, managing partner of Arka Venture Labs, also advisor to Blume.

Notably, about 40% of Blume Ventures’ portfolio in India consists of B2B startups including Grey Orange Robotics, Exotel, Belong and Instamojo, among others.

In April, Blume led $1.3 million investment in BeatO, a Delhi-based tech-enabled diabetes management startup. Prior to this, it has led $1 million pre-series A round of funding of Pitstop, an after-sales car service provider, in September 2017.

Source - Economic Times

[Top Image - VCCircle.com]

Blume Ventures To Launch ₹40 Crore Fund & Accelerator Exclusively for B2B Startups in India

Mumbai-based early-stage tech-focused venture fund, Blume Ventures (Blume), is all set to launch venture capital fund exclusively for B2B (business-to-business) startups in India. For this, Blume has partnered with two US-based venture firms - Silicon Valley-based Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV) and Emergent Ventures, who will contribute to the fund.

Blume along with its US partners will also be launching accelerator platform -- Arka Venture Labs, in India to to help facilitate global transition and faster growth of B2B startups in India.

Arka Venture Labs, which would play dual role of "a fund" as well as a "Startup Accelerator platform", will provide seed and pre-seed capital of up to $200,000 for startups in the B2B space along with mentorship, infrastructure and access to the Silicon Valley ecosystem that will be critical in scaling up B2B startups in globally developed markets.

Initially, Arka Venture Labs and the fund have a corpus of about Rs 40 crore ($6 million) and has already achieved its first close. The platform has received interest from both Indian and US-based corporates, family offices and global high-net worth individuals and then the fund's corpus may go up in amount.

As Arka Venture Labs is joint venture of an Indian and two US-based venture firms, the platform will offer capital, cross-border ecosystem linkages and access to a global customer base to those tech-focused B2B startups that work in areas of retail, supply chain, robotics as also deep technology including artificial intelligence, big data and analytics amongst others under its platform.

To be eligible for Arka platform & fund, the startups are expected to have a minimum viable product with a strong potential to scale in the US and Europe with the platform looking to enable completion of the proof of concept (POC) within 6-9 months and have at least 1-2 paying clients on board. Going forward, the three funds will enable follow-on rounds for startups under this platform.

“We help Indian enterprise startups overcome the ‘trust gap’ that exists between them and customers, investors and acquirers alike when making a global transition. We plan to make Arka Venture Labs an open and collaborative platform to bring in all the help we need to bridge this trust gap for our companies,” said Yashwanth Hemaraj, investor at BGV and one of the founding partners at Arka Venture Labs.

"Once startups in B2B space look at developed markets like US and Europe for a client base, their scale of growth and profitability get an incredible boost due to such markets’ propensity for high profit margins and lesser sales cycles. Hence, we decided to create a platform early in startups’ life cycle to enable this growth path,” said Radhesh Kanumury, managing partner of Arka Venture Labs, also advisor to Blume.

Notably, about 40% of Blume Ventures’ portfolio in India consists of B2B startups including Grey Orange Robotics, Exotel, Belong and Instamojo, among others.

In April, Blume led $1.3 million investment in BeatO, a Delhi-based tech-enabled diabetes management startup. Prior to this, it has led $1 million pre-series A round of funding of Pitstop, an after-sales car service provider, in September 2017.

Source - Economic Times

[Top Image - VCCircle.com]