1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anup Jain, Managing Partner of Orios Venture Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What is your estimate of the heavily-funded unicorns in the Indian ecosystem? How many of those are going to become sustainable and successful companies?

Anup Jain: My wish is that each one of them does become sustainable. I haven’t performed that analysis but I think a large number, 80% and up, should be walking a straight line and will be able to do that. I don’t have any particular names in mind on the balance of 20%.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about go-to-market strategy. What are you seeing as some of the most effective go-to-market strategies out there? We are hearing a lot about these short videos like TikTok and reels. What are you seeing?

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anup Jain, Managing Partner of Orios Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on a couple of issues across your portfolio. What are you seeing by way of successful business models? What appeals to you the most? When you see a company and you’re pattern-matching against the business models that are working, what do you like the most?

Anup Jain: What we like the most is capital efficiency. When we see the way that the market has been approached with a solution that is creating the necessary virality and bringing down future customer acquisition costs, it is the healthiest sign of a business. It means that the initial set of consumers are satisfied. It means that they are passing on referrals to others free of cost to you. That is bringing down the cost of consumer acquisition which points to scalability.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anup Jain, Managing Partner of Orios Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your portfolio. What are some of the highlights that you’re proud of that are illustrative of how you operate? At what stage did they come to you? Why did you pick them over others?

Anup Jain: I’ll probably start with the principles. All our companies have to cross those barriers. We’re proud of having invested in each one of them. We look at the early stage for the quality of founders and the level of cohesion. When they pitch to us, we look for a well-crafted and well-communicated storyline. That is extremely important. In there is the rational and the emotional stuff.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anup Jain, Managing Partner of Orios Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What is the fund size of Orios?

Anup Jain: I would comment on the check size. The check sizes at the seed stages have gone up. In response to that, Orios invests anywhere between $1.5 million to $2.5 million in the seed stage. We look for some degree of data and traction before we make that investment. Pre-seed is an area that is very vibrant.

2021 was one of the high points for India as well. We feel that we should participate given the rate of digital adoption in the economy. Companies are being given the opportunity to scale much faster. They shouldn’t have to come back to investors over shorter periods of time to seek an extension of runways or to conduct experiments.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anup Jain, Managing Partner of Orios Venture Partners (Part 1)

Anup Jain, the Managing Partner at Orios Venture Partners, discusses the Indian startup ecosystem and its trends and nuances.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your background as well as about Orios.

Anup Jain: I’m an accidental VC. I didn’t grow up in this ecosystem, but I’m very passionate about entrepreneurship. When I started my corporate career with Procter & Gamble, it was a dream job. I’ve always been excited about doing innovations and disruptions. It brings about meaning to all stakeholders.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Janam Mehta, Partner of Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Have you invested in a PaaS company?

Janam Mehta: Purple.com is an e-commerce platform company. Healthflix is a very good example. They’re an EMR. They use data to help pharma with their research and give them insights. That’s a very good example of aggregating data from SaaS and making it a platform business.

Sramana Mitra: It’s not very easy to get platform companies to go to market as platform companies before Series A.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Janam Mehta, Partner of Campus Fund and Venture Investments at JSW Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Campus Fund and JSW Ventures.

Janam Mehta: JSW Ventures is a $40 million fund. We’re largely Series A focused. We do up to $2 million in the first check and around $4 million throughout the life of an investment. We are largely SaaS and platform focused covering enterprise health, consumer, finance, and agricultural industries. We are not a corporate venture capital. JSW is an anchor LP in the fund, but we’ve raised institutional capital. 20% to 30% comes from the general family of the JSW group. They are the largest steel manufacturers in India. They’re increasingly getting into different industries.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Evan Zimmerman, Chairman of Jovono (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do another example. You’re doing a very good job of illustrating what attracts you. Keep going. Let’s do a couple of examples.

Evan Zimmerman: Zeekit is another company we invested in. We led the Series A with some friends of ours. We co-led their Series A which was their last round of investment before they sold to Walmart for over $200 million. They had a SaaS business that was growing quickly and had a number of really prominent customers.