Roundtable Recap: January 30 – Spotlight on Startups in Africa

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Osayi Igharo, Managing Partner at Ripple VC, who discussed startups and venture capital in Africa.

Burloe
First up, today, was Parinita Hendre from Mumbai, India, pitching Burloe, an e-commerce company focused on shoes and accessories.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 4)

Jishnu Battacharjee: There are two core principles for Unacademy. One is that the educator can build the content easily. The second is, the content is bite-sized. The idea was, you can talk about a topic but it cannot be more than five minutes. That whole theme took off.

Fast forward to now, they are serving 10 million people across the country. Suppose I release content and students start using it. Based on the student reception, I get a rating. Unacademy then organizes live classes for the interested students who want to go deeper. Those are paid.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Is Abhinav the CEO?

Jishnu Battacharjee: That’s correct. He has two other co-founders. In 2017, we started thinking of what we should do regarding monetization. 2018 was our first year of monetization. At this point, it was tripling every year with cash added into the bank.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When I think about Nexus, one company comes to mind immediately, which is one of the biggest and oldest success stories in India. It’s Druva. The company is maturing very well. I wouldn’t call that exactly as a self-serve go-to market. That’s an enterprise product.

Jishnu Battacharjee: Exactly. Not all companies follow that. We invested in Druva in 2011. At that time, Druva was a small company with a few hundred thousand bookings.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture 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 Jishnu Battacharjee was recorded in November 2019.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee is Managing Director at Nexus Venture Partners, a fundamentals-focused firm that aligns with the 1Mby1M philosophy. Jishnu takes us through several examples of how the firm is thinking about investing in startups. Excellent conversation.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do one example from your rocketship portfolio that illustrates more of what you’re doing today.

Anand Rajaraman: I’ll give you an example from India. We are an investor in Moglix. It’s a company based in Delhi. They are in the B2B e-commerce space.

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Did Facebook come to you or did you go to them?

Anand Rajaraman: A bit of both. At that point, they already had Peter Thiel’s money. He was the only investor at that time. They had just launched at Harvard and Stanford.

Within those universities, we could see the growth. At that time, Zuckerberg wanted some advice that Venky and I were in a unique place to give him. He connected with us through a mutual acquaintance at that time. 

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What is the preferred check size for your fund?

Anand Rajaraman: We write about $2 million to $3 million checks, which means that we could co-lead in the US. In foreign geographies, we might even be the lead. In a B round, we follow.