1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your current portfolio. You said you’ve made 10 investments. Tell us a bit about what you’ve invested in. In particular, let’s focus on a company or two that are scaling well. Has anything crossed the $5 million annual revenue mark?

Brij Bhasin: Let me give you a few examples of companies that have started scaling in a significant way. We’ve invested in a company called LetsTransport. It’s a last mile logistics marketplace for small trucks. In India, the cities are quite congested. You have these smaller sized trucks that are used for local deliveries.

We have a curated managed marketplace for corporates and companies of various nature to essentially avail the logistics services from these truck drivers. We work with FMCG companies, retail companies, and e-commerce companies. LetsTransport has built a significant scale in the business. We’ve grossed more than $6 million ARR [annual revenue run rate] and continue to scale the business further.

Sramana Mitra: You said ARR. It’s a marketplace, but you do subscription?

Brij Bhasin: No, I was talking about revenue run rate. We are doing above $500,000 on a monthly basis from a revenue run rate standpoint.

Sramana Mitra: The ARR terminology is a bit confusing in that case, because typically it’s annual recurring revenue in the subscription business. So you’re using it as a revenue run rate.

Brij Bhasin: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s the gross transaction level. The business model is about 20% of the gross.

Brij Bhasin: We have a different revenue model on the margin basis, depending on the client. There’s a smaller part of the GMV.

Sramana Mitra: That one’s scaling well.

Brij Bhasin: We have a company called DocsApps, which is a telemedicine startup. They essentially provide online doctor consultation through mobile app. You can connect with doctors. They are currently at a stage where they’re doing about 1,500 or so consultations per day. Just to give you context, the largest hospital chain in India does about 10,000 consults a day. It’s still quite fragmented. The goal is to catch up to being one of the largest aggregators of doctor consultation and telemedicine services.

Sramana Mitra: How does that work? Is that a federated model where you have doctors from different places who are moonlighting into your service or do you have a dedicated team of doctors in a call center who are manning your calls?

Brij Bhasin: All the doctors are consultants. We work with them on a sort of managed marketplace model again where we have curated these doctors and brought them on board. They gave us specific time commitments during the week. They’re available during those timeslots to take the call.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of scale is this at in terms of revenue?

Brij Bhasin: I wouldn’t be able to share the revenue numbers of this company but to give you a sense, they recently raised about $7 million in their Series A fund raise.

Sramana Mitra: The reason I’m asking is, we do cover companies that have crossed the $5 million revenue threshold. If any of your companies have done that, you’re welcome to refer them to us and we’ll be happy to do very in-depth stories about them.

In the last 12 to 18 months, what trends do you see in your deal flow? What are the highlights of the Indian startup trend flow?

Brij Bhasin: In the 2015 and 2016 timeframe, there was a lot of activity and investment in the India market. The broader consensus was around investing in consumer-centric businesses. These were consumer services and products. Over the last year, there has been somewhat of a focus shift more towards B2B startups. These are either B2B marketplaces or B2B SaaS. Definitely from 2017 onwards, there has been more of an investment interest in these areas.

Sramana Mitra: What is that telling us? Is it happening because the B2C companies are not scaling or are investors not interested in funding them? Are they more interested in funding the global SaaS model? What is the takeaway from this shift?

Brij Bhasin: There are a couple of ways to look at it. This is a personal opinion from one investor. One aspect of it is that there has been significant funding that has gone into consumer businesses. The idea is to let those companies play out in the market and see what is working and what is not. Then, revisit consumer businesses from the next wave standpoint.

For example, the next interest level is into companies that are building for more of the smaller towns and not necessarily for the urban consumer. B2B investments have their own thesis and investment cycle. We are seeing more and more specialists. Senior engineers are coming out and starting globally competitive products and having the experience and technological depth to be competitive globally.

They also play into the movement, from a technology standpoint, of how AI and ML is coming into every different industry vertical and every different product. Those trends combine like a broader wave.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners
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