AngelList Launches India-dedicated Fund 'The Collective' to Invest ₹1 Cr Each in 60-80 Startups

AngelList, a US-based platform that helps connect companies with investors, has announced the launch of its own venture fund in India called 'The Collective' and the India-dedicated fund has got the backing of some stellar names including Flipkart co-founder Binny Bansal.

Notably, India will be the first market outside of the US to get such a fund.

The fund will deploy $150,000 (about ₹1.03 crore ) each across 60-80 companies annually and will give access to quick capital to its Syndicate leads. Since the launch of AngelList India Syndicates a year ago, the platform has had 15 syndicate leads and invested over $5 million across 50 Indian startups like BharatPe HalaPlay, Yulu Bikes, Open Bank.

The Collective brings additional capital and advice from experienced investors like Salil Deshpande (Bain Capital Ventures), Avnish, Tarun, Vikram (Matrix Partners India), Binny Bansal (Flipkart), Navroz Udwadia (Falcon Edge Capital), Rahul Mehta (DST Global) and prominent funds like Kalaari Capital, FJ Labs, Beenext and others.

Syndicate leads can access up to $150,000 in additional capital per deal from The Collective. The instant access to capital enables leads to focus on what they do best — using their judgement and access for allocations in the best Indian startups.

In January of last year, AngelList introduced Syndicates to the Indian market. Syndicates lets investors team up with like minded people and pool funds for investments in startups.

AI-focussed VC Fund pi Ventures Gets $6 Mn from UK Govt.'s CDC Group

The UK Government's development finance institution CDC Group plc has invested USD 6 Mn in pi Ventures, India’s first Applied Artificial Intelligence and IoT focused early stage venture fund. The amount will be used to invest in startups with deep tech capabilities that have the potential to disrupt sectors and facilitate a lasting change in businesses and lives.

CDC Group plc aims to increase capital flows to underdeveloped markets so countries can finance their way out of poverty. Their focus is to find talented teams and cohesively grow great businesses in Africa and South Asia. CDC’s unique structure combines the best of private sector skills with a public-spirited mission. Their focus sectors to invest include financial services, infrastructure, health, manufacturing, food and agriculture, construction and real estate, and education, typically that which will lead to the economic growth of a country.

Alagappan Murugappan, Managing Director, Head of Intermediated Equity, South Asia, CDC Group plc, said, “We are pleased to be supporting pi Ventures for its AI-focused fund. This allows our capital to support early-stage companies that are innovating through technology to provide affordable goods and services at scale in areas such as healthcare among others.”

pi Ventures announced their second close in January this year at $25mn and the fund is expected to announce their final close shortly. Key contributors to the fund include Chairman of Hero Enterprise Sunil Kant Munjal, Electronic Development Fund (managed by Canbank Ventures), SIDBI, prominent family offices from USA, Canada, Singapore & India and leading entrepreneurs like Mohandas Pai, Binny Bansal, Deep Kalra, Sanjeev Bikchandani and Bhupen Shah among others. The fund is co-sponsored by In Color Capital of Canada.

Manish Singhal, Founding Partner, pi Ventures added, “CDC’s confidence fuels our vision to find, fund and support the best teams who are using Artificial Intelligence to solve real world problems. We are very happy to have their support and backing”.

pi Ventures has announced 6 investments so far - invested in SigTuple (revolutionising global healthcare space through data driven intelligence), NIRAMAI (non-invasive, non-touch, non-radiation approach to detect breast cancer), ten3T (medical grade wearable device), Zenatix (data-driven energy efficiency company acquired by Hero Electronix), CustomerSuccessBox (customer success platform which helps B2B SaaS companies reduce, churn and grow their recurring revenue by applying AI and ML) and Locus.sh (logistics optimisation platform).

The 70-year old CDC Group has been investing in India for over 30 years and has already made 595 investments across sectors.

CDC Group plc is the UK’s development finance institution. Wholly owned by the UK Government, it invests in Africa and South Asia with the aim of supporting economic development to create jobs. CDC has net assets of £5.1bn.

In May of last year, International Finance Corporation (IFC), a part of the World Bank Group, had invested $3 million in pi Ventures’ maiden fund.

pi Ventures is India’s first Applied Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning & IoT focused early stage venture fund, founded by Manish Singhal (Ex Co-founder & CEO, LetsVenture and prominent angel investor) and Umakant Soni (Ex Director India, Science Inc & Co-founder AI BOT company). Backed by some of the leading entrepreneurs globally, pi Ventures brings hands-on product and entrepreneurial experience to the Indian venture investing ecosystem. pi Ventures focuses on healthcare, logistics, retail, fintech and enterprise sectors.

[Top Image - YourStory.com]

Naya Ventures to Invest In 7 Start-ups in India

Naya Ventures, a Dallas, US based and USD 50 million early-stage venture capital firm, is set to invest in seven startup companies in India in the next one to two years. Till now Naya Ventures has invested in 12 companies so far.

Founded by Dayakar Puskoor, who owned P&L for the Hosting and Mobility Solutions business at Microsoft, it is looking to invest in the firms in incubation, development and management of new mobility, cloud and big data solutions.

Dayakar believes Indian entrepreneurs have to get the right product-market fit to go global. They need support of sales and marketing partners to access global market.

"There is also a gap in the investment eco-system to gain additional growth capital and exit opportunities for early stage start-up. Besides, the Indian M&A activity in technology arena has been slow, non-lucrative and has barely started," said Dayakar, who was here to attend August Fest 2014, the biggest startups festival in India which began Saturday.

Naya Ventures focuses on providing access to additional growth capital and strategic exit partners.

He feels the high growth sectors such as big data, cloud computing and mobile applications have potential to create billions of dollars in wealth and several hundreds of thousand jobs.

Dayakar earlier led USD 350 million hosting business encompassing all product development, product management, marketing and business development for Microsoft.

Prior to joining Microsoft, as founder and CEO of JP Mobile, Dayakar pioneered the industry's first mobile software solutions company. He secured USD 55 million in financing and successfully completed its acquisition by Good Technology, later acquired by Motorola.

Except India, VC Funding at the Start-up stage Drops across Countries

According to the latest EY Global Venture Capital Insights and Trends report, in 2013 Venture capital funding at the start-up stage fell across countries, except India, although India got lowest of only 1 million funding but it has risen from 2012 figures and India is only country ahead of US, Europe and China in terms of rise in investment from previous year.

In 2013 India is fourth in the global VC rankings, saw an increase in dollars invested of 13%.

In 2013, there were 325 VC funds raised, across all investing stages, for a total of US$28b. In contrast, 2012 saw 344 funds raised, totalling US$33.5b. The US accounted for 64% of the funds closed, with 207 funds in 2013 compared to 185 in 2012.

VC activity in India was largely in line with 2012 levels in terms of deal value and volume. While the number of
deals fell marginally by 2% compared to 2012, the amount invested increased by 13%.

India saw revenue-generation stage investment decline to 63% of total investment in 2013, down from 82% in 2012. Investment made at the profitable stage during 2013 however represented a third of total investment which is more than double the proportion in 2012. This indicates both that investors continue to be cautious about the early stage, and more interested in making late-stage investments in companies as they scale.

Over the last 2 years, the percentage of angel and incubator participation in India - at 16% in 2013, up from 3% in 2011

Angel investors and crowdfunding platforms however shown significant amount of involvement at start-up stages left by VCs this year. VCs instead are investing in later stages and high-growth ventures.

India saw investments at the profitable stage rise to double of what is in year 2012 which is 33 per cent of the total deal value in 2013.

InterviewMaster gets Undisclosed Funding from VentureNursery Angel

InterviewMaster a Bangalore-based startup has nabbed undisclosed amount of funding from Mumbai based VentureNursery Angel which is India's first Angel-backed Start-up Accelerator. [Via - TOI]

InterviewMaster.in has also been selected by VentureNursery’s second batch of start-ups accelerator program and has been graduated in April's last week, the startups is a product of Emprenure Labs which is based out of Bangalore and have offices in Cochin and Australia as well.

Basically, InterviewMaster is an innovative web application based on the concept of 'Automated Video Interview Solution' which allows you to create, administer, evaluate interviews online using pool of pre-recorded video questions and structured evaluation tool that screens job candidates.

InterviewMaster claims it can save firms up to 80% in time and cost, if HR departments are comfortable sacrificing intimacy for efficiency and no cases of fraud like telephonic Interviews.

Interview Master is founded by a group of entrepreneurs from IIT Bombay and NMIMS and former management/recruitment consultant from reputed companies.

How to attend Automated Video Interview using Interview Master