1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to talk about any other company?

Sateesh Andra: I’ll switch to an India team company. Abhishek managed the company. He had an exit in the first three years. It was a cyber security company that’s selling in Europe, US, and India.

But there’s this India-themed FinTech company called Kissht. They enable purchase financing for buying a mobile phone or a laptop. They can buy now and pay later.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: As you probably know, my background is in computer architecture. I was in the parallel computing part of MIT’s projects back in the mid-90s.

Funding for chip companies has gone down tremendously. Almost no one in the Indian venture ecosystem is willing or equipped to do chips. I’m actually thrilled to hear that you are willing and equipped to do early-stage investments. Congratulations on that.

Tell me a little bit about this company. How does the follow-on funding happen? Were any of your colleagues in India willing to fund the chip company, or did you raise the follow-on funding in Silicon Valley?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start talking about Endiya Partners. How big is the fund? What is your preference in terms of where you want to invest in? What kind of stage?

Sateesh Andra: Our fund is around 175 crores. We’ve made 12 investments.

Sramana Mitra: That’s about $35 million.

Sateesh Andra: Yes. In the early days, there were accelerators, incubators, and angel investors. There weren’t any seed-stage VC fund. Angels used to do the early stages.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Sateesh Andra was recorded in April 2019.

Endiya Partners’ founding team – Managing Director Sateesh Andra, Managing Director Dr. Ramesh Byrapaneni, Director Abhishek Srivastava – talk about their Seed and Pre-Series A VC fund focused on India.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by each of you taking turns to introduce yourselves, your background, and how you see the India venture opportunity. Let’s start with you Sateesh.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund (Part 5)

Bill Bice: If you have a business and you want help in growing, there are literally thousands of options out there. It’s another way of saying that nobody has gotten great at doing it. That’s the problem that we’re tackling.

We’ve built a marketing automation system that automates whole industries instead of being designed to be implemented in one company at a time. The data advantage that we get from that is really significant. Internally, we’re a SaaS company, but externally, we deliver Marketing-as-a-Service.

445th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Deepen Parikh, Courtside Ventures

Deepen Parikh is Partner at Courtside Ventures, a firm focused on investing in sports related ventures. He provides a fascinating window into a little discussed sector.

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444th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast With Hernan Fernandez, Angel Ventures Mexico

Hernan Fernandez is Managing Partner at Angel Ventures Mexico, a firm that invests in Mexico, Chile, Peru and Colombia. This is an excellent discussion on trends in Latin America.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bill Bice of Verge Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do some examples from your investment portfolio. What have you invested in? What are the highlights of your portfolio?

As you describe them, what state did you encounter these companies in? What attracted you to them?

Bill Bice: Let’s start with Intellicyt that I just mentioned. It was a pre-revenue, pre-LLC company. My partner found the technology at University of New Mexico and helped match that with an entrepreneur who had experience in this market.