The question that the Bansal wannabes in the entrepreneur community and the Jack Ma aspirants in India must ask themselves is, “Do we want to only make tonnes of money, or do we want to change the world?” We are finding it possible through bright entrepreneurial talent to serve both agendas
A quiet wave of positivism is spreading across the entrepreneurial community in India. In the wake of the ‘Start-up India, Stand Up India’ call that the Government gave a few years ago, a number of startups sprouted all over the country with the usual mistakes of half-baked ideas, inadequate capital and poor teams incapable of executing lofty ideas and dreams. Inevitably, many of those early entrepreneurial firms folded up and there was a period of gloom when venture capital seemed to be shying away from many of the new models of education, skills, agriculture and healthcare that could be the making of a new India!
Fortunately, there have been a few judicious and patient investors who have put limited capital but tremendous wisdom and mentoring time to work and unearthed quite a few diamonds in the rough. Three to call out would be Powerhouse Ventures, Windrose Capital and 1Crowd, all young ventures started and run by experienced fulltime professionals and boasting of a high success rate of seed-funded ventures scaling the ladder to next rounds of funding and success. The journey of 1Crowd is particularly noteworthy, commencing with a crowdsourcing, angel-funding platform, setting up an incubator to help noteworthy ideas blossom into companies and recently concluding their first multi-crore fund raise to take companies to the next level.
A few judicious investors have put limited capital but tremendous wisdom, and unearthed quite a few diamonds
Dr Uma Ganesh with Dr Parul Ganju, founder of AhammuneOur own experiments and experiences as investors has been quite gratifying. It started over three years ago with a startup called Beyond Core in Silicon Valley set up by an entrepreneurial Bengali lad from Kolkata who traversed through Stanford, Oracle Corporation and Harvard Business School before setting up the company with his Russian wife and Stanford classmate. After raising seed money from us and a few others, they raised an intermediate round of funds and finally sold the company to one of the top San Francisco product firms, giving all of us early investors a 10X return on capital. Our second investment was in the parent company of 1Crowd, Zeva Capsol where we are seeing value appreciate every month and the third in a drug discovery company called Ahammune, run by an outstanding young Kashmiri woman, Parul Ganju and set up at the Venter Center in Pune. The company has already raised its next round of capital, has progressed well on all its milestones and is well set to raise adequate funds to get its first set of products tested, certified and launched in all markets.
These early successes have inspired us to set up the investment arm of our company 5F World, which has now deployed over a million dollars in early stage companies focused on a combination of digital technologies, skills as a segment and India as the core market. The first venture which touched all three of our sweet spots has been Skills Alpha, a digital skills platform that enables corporate employees to investigate career possibilities with the help of data and artificial intelligence bots, search for skills and pedagogies that are aligned to their own learning preference and join communities of peer support, mentoring and coaching that enables them to reach their skills and career goals in the shortest possible time. Today this platform is not only deployed and growing in tech, consumer durables and foods companies, it is also being tweaked to serve the needs of final-year college students, schoolteachers and even underprivileged livelihood seekers in skills centres. A related venture has been the setting up of the Center for Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Analytics as a joint venture with an American corporation that is building talent in the much sought-after fields of AI machine learning, predictive and prescriptive analytics with young graduates and Master’s students, and most recently, a design thinking venture that will create industrial and service design expertise in the corporate as well as student community.
On the social enterprise side, the three ventures we are most excited about are Studio Coppre which is supporting the work of artisans with world-class product designs, Farmguru which is aiding the process of farm inputs identification and procurement for farmers countrywide and Live History India Digital which is bringing the history and culture of lesser-known parts of India to a community of connoisseurs and young travellers and building new linkages of Indians to India.
Through all these companies and our flagship company Global Talent Track, we are impacting the lives of over 2 lakh people every year and providing a worthwhile mission to many young entrepreneurs. The question that the Bansal wannabes in the entrepreneur community and the Jack Ma aspirants in India must ask themselves is, “Do we want to only make tonnes of money, or do we want to change the world?” We are finding it possible through bright entrepreneurial talent to serve both agendas and nothing can give more satisfaction in the startup world than to find and support these gems through advice, venture philanthropy and adequate doses of capital. One final company we set up, Kalzoom Advisors, which is again a joint venture with a US investment bank is helping young companies in the US and India to scale successfully and it is these models of scaling that companies in India will have to discover to make a true impact in the years to come!
Dr Ganesh Natarajan
