Seed Capital: Inventus Capital Partners

1M/1M ambassador Irina Patterson talks with Parag Dhol of Inventus Capital Partners.

Irina Patterson: Please tell us briefly about your personal background and about your fund.

Parag Dhol: Inventus Capital Partners is a U.S.–India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs and industry operating veterans who have backed over 100 entrepreneurs with operations in India and/or Silicon Valley. Inventus backs entrepreneurs first and foremost. The companies financed by Inventus include redBus (acquired by MIH/Naspers and our biggest success), Vizury, Credit Sesame, Savaari, PoshMark, Power2sme, Policybazaar and eDreams, among others. Inventus started investing out of Fund-II earlier this year. >>>

1Mby1M Deal Radar 2013: Sapience Analytics, Pune, India

Sapience Analytics is the creator of an enterprise-class solution designed to increase productivity and create “automated work visibility” across the enterprise hierarchy – with no added managerial responsibility. Within two years of its release, Sapience has crossed $1 million in annual revenue and has scaled to more than 50 installations and 50,000 users. Sapience has recently been selected by NASSCOM as India’s Top 10 Emerge Product company for 2013. It has also been recognized as one of India’s fastest growing enterprise software products by IDG Channel World (50 Hot Companies, 2013); NASSCOM (Lead 10, 2013); and Red Herring (Asia Top 100 technology start-up, 2011).

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1Mby1M Deal Radar 2013: Approyo, Palo Alto, California

Approyo is a premier SAP HANA–focused company that supports companies with their shift to the HANA platform. The company develops ready to deploy and secure predictive analytics solutions for customers in sectors like retail, oil & gas, manufacturing, and healthcare. Within two years of its launch, Approyo has created tie-ups with 23 resellers in 14 countries and has crossed $1 million in revenue. >>>

How to Navigate India’s Seed Capital Gap

India has a minuscule seed capital ecosystem. Entrepreneurs thus have to be really creative to survive.

My new piece How To Navigate The Seed Capital Gap in India offers a synthesis of how entrepreneurs are getting around. Two companion pieces offer perspective on why the ecosystem is developing so slowly: Seed Investors in India: Why So Few? and Venture Capital in India: Age of Reckoning. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: Invention Labs, Chennai, India

Invention Labs develops augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) solutions like Avaz that help children with speech disabilities develop communication and language skills. Avaz represents ideas visually, as picture symbols that can then be sequenced together to create sentences that are spoken out. Unlike its competitors, Avaz is not English-specific and not only helps in communication but also in building language skills. >>>

1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: GeoLoqal, New York

GeoLoqal is a mobile platform-as-a-service specifically designed for building location-specific applications with complex geo-targeting functionality. Its main value proposition is that by using its “Snap In”  geolocation related functionality, developers, OEMs/ISVs and enterprises can build powerful location based solutions without investing in development/testing and reduce the time to market.

GeoLoqal was founded in 2012 by Ronnie Guha and Amiya Mansingh who had worked together for four years at a consulting firm. Ronnie, an IIT Chemical engineering graduate, has spent more than half of his 15-year career selling professional services and solutions at companies like IBM, Informatica, Oracle/BEA, and VMware. The idea for GeoLoqal came while Ronnie was testing out his parking finder app, SpotNPark. He realized that there was no platform that could provide a robust, scalable way of simulating and testing user motion or geolocation dependent apps across the world.

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1Mby1M Incubation Radar 2013: OpsViz, Palo Alto, California

OpsViz provides infrastructure source of truth as a service for technology companies. With its flexible back-end and connectors to commonly used open-source tools, OpsViz ‘snaps in’ the architecture of its customers to ‘collect and clean’ the infrastructure data and analyze it. What sets OpsViz apart is that its founder Gülin Yilmaz managed to validate the business and pricing models and has a confident customer base to draw upon.

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1Mby1M Deal Radar 2013: Freshdesk, Chennai, India

Freshdesk is a SaaS company that provides customer support software across multiple communication channels. The software combines a back-end helpdesk system used in ticketing and knowledge management with an online social customer portal on the front end. Within two years of its launch as a cost-effective alternative, in 2013 Freshdesk has crossed $1 million in revenue and has over 10,000 customers in over 180 countries.

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