1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nitin Pachisia of Unshackled Ventures (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 Nitin Pachisia was recorded in October 2017. 

Nitin Pachisia, Founding Partner at Unshackled Ventures, discusses pre-seed and seed investing.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Unshackled Ventures. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What sized investments do you make?

Nitin Pachisia: We’re a very young pre-seed fund. We started about three and a half years ago. For our initial investments, we invest exclusively at pre-seed stage, which is effectively pre-product in most cases. We focus on immigrant founded companies. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Raj Singh of Singh Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: What do you see in the deal flow? We are in the end of 2017. In the last three months, what trends have you spotted?

Raj Singh: To be very honest, the deal flow is slowing down towards the end of the year, but we still see a lot of the P2P model. I’ve sees looking at a lot of different use cases in the P2P model in the fourth quarter that I’ve not seen in the first few quarters of 2017. Like I said, the deal flow does seem to be slowing down as we get into the holidays.

Sramana Mitra: What kind of trends are you looking to invest into? The first question is what are you seeing in the inbound deal flow. What broad trends do you invest against at this point going forward? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Raj Singh of Singh Ventures (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 Raj Singh was recorded in September 2016. 

Raj Singh, Founder and Executive Director at Singh Ventures, offers a window into his firm’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What size investments do you make?

Raj Singh: I run an early-stage VC fund. We are about $50 million right now. We were founded about two years ago. We focus on mobile technologies. We get involved with anywhere from a concept stage to less than $10,000 a month of recurring revenue. What’s really unique about our fund is what we do in addition to the capital. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: I think it was in 1997. I was funding a company of my own that I had founded. We did all our product development for very little money in India. It was before the trend where you could be building companies in India. I met with 36 venture capitalists before I could find one to actually do this with me. That was NEA.

It was hell. People were telling me, “We don’t fund companies with product development in India.” A decade later if you were in Silicon Valley and not doing product development in India, you were a fool. These kinds of 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 3)

Nathan Lustig: Another company that fits that model is a company called GroupRaise, which went through Startup Chile. They’re originally from Houston. They now have an office with eight people in Houston, about 15 people in Santiago, and about 40 in the Philippines. What they do is they allow anybody to book an event at a restaurant. Anybody knows how to book one to eight people restaurant reservation. You can go to OpenTable or something similar.

What if you want to have a group of 20 or 100? They have 10,000 or so restaurants in the United States where you can book a big group event. The cool part is the restaurant actually competes over your business by donating 5% to 20% of the bill to the group >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma Partners (Part 2)

Nathan Lustig: I got a call from one of the founding members of the founding team of Startup Chile who said that there was a family office that was looking to diversify and get into tech. I met up with my now partner Francisco Saenz whose family had done well.

They were the co-founders of one of the biggest mall companies in Latin America. They did a bunch of traditional things like retail and banking. They were ready to get into this next wave of technology that was just getting started in Latin America. They also wanted to give back to the next generation of entrepreneurs.

In 2014, we founded Magma Partners, which was $2 million of our own money that we invested across 32 companies. The >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nathan Lustig of Magma 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 Nathan Lustig was recorded in October 2017. 

Nathan Lustig, Managing Partner of Magma Partners, a Latin-America-focused fund. He talks about their strategy, as well as the dynamics of the LatAm market.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Magma Partners. What is the focus of the firm? How big is the fund? What size investment do you make?

Nathan Lustig: We’re a US-Latin American venture capital fund. We got started in 2014. In our first fund, we had $2 million of >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Padmaja Ruparel of Indian Angel Network (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What is the size of the fund?

Padmaja Ruparel: $70 million. The IAN platform represents a way of raising money from $30,000 to almost $7 million. All they need to do is to keep performing and growing the company and money will be available. I think that this is the new gap that we have identified. This is the new gap where we have positioned the fund. The second that we have done is 60% of the fund is raised.

We started operations and investments in six companies all in a period of a quarter. Interestingly, the entire 60% has been raised in India. This is domestic money. It’s hard to raise money in India and therefore, they raise a lot of money overseas. We have >>>