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

Sramana Mitra: What stage did you invest in Arkin?

Sandeep Singhal: We came in at the very start. We seeded the company. We expect to see more of this going forward. It’s just very efficient if the go-to market strategy is being developed in the US with team members that are based here and the MVP is built out in India. We’ve seen that in the past with Druva and PubMatic. We believe that we’ll see more of that approach.

Sramana Mitra: Especially in the enterprise context. Companies that are selling to global SMEs are actually marketing and selling from India as well and getting further along before they choose to move to the US in

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

Sramana Mitra: One thing you haven’t mentioned about this company is the business model and the monetization. What validation did you have that these 500,000 downloads were actually converting into paying customers?

Sandeep Singhal: Good point. They had a $10 charge for deploying their client for curl. It was a command line interface that you could commit into Postman. They were charging for that. More importantly, we spoke to some of the users who were at enterprises.

One of them happened to be our portfolio company and we asked the VP Engineering of our portfolio company how much they >>>

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

Sramana Mitra: Same thing about MVPs. Are you looking for early customers that are international customers that they have built an MVP around?

Sandeep Singhal: Yes. There are two ways to do this. You can work with the Indian arms of global customers. You can work with them in the Indian market but have a clear understanding of how Indian operations are aligned with global operations. The Indian operations are very India-centric. It’s hard to take what you’ve built for the Indian client to the global market.

If you are looking to go down the path of working with an Indian multinational with the idea of using them as a stepping stone to >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sandeep Singhal 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 Sandeep Singhal was recorded in July 2016. 

Sandeep Singhal, Managing Director, Nexus Venture Partners, is a key player in the India-US startup corridor. The discussion spans trends in SaaS, Open Source, and the Indian venture capital market in general. If you are working in the technology startup sector with an interest in India, this is a worthwhile discussion.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with some kind of basic level setting. The Indian SaaS startup scene has gone 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Suri of India Internet Fund (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What about unicorn mania? I know India went completely crazy with unicorn mania for a while. Are you seeing a slowdown in unicorn mania? As a seed investor, how do you prevent yourselves from getting buried under later-stage liquidation preferences? What practices are you deploying to prevent such unappetizing outcomes?

Anirudh Suri: Unicorn mania has calmed down a little bit. It was not focused on fundamentals. Thankfully, it has slowed down. Our focus has always been on fundamentals. It’s very tough sometimes to stay focused on fundamentals.

Sramana Mitra: When the market goes crazy, fundamentals go out the window. That’s when it becomes

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Suri of India Internet Fund (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: I have a question that I want to double-click on. One of the big differences in the Indian market that doesn’t exist in the US market is this abundant supply of cheap labor. Are you seeing business models and business ideas that creatively take advantage of that phenomenon to offer value to customers? Do you have any examples?

Anirudh Suri: If you look at even the companies that have become unicorns or are larger companies in the Indian context, many of them have taken advantage of the cheap labor that India offers. When you look at Amazon or Flipkart today, they have cash on delivery. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Suri of India Internet Fund (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: It sounds like the original business model probably had a low TAM. Turning it into a financial institution opens up a much bigger TAM, right?

Anirudh Suri: The initial focus in the Indian market is on affordable housing institutions and micro-financing institutions. Very quickly, they realized that just providing them credit scores was not going to be very profitable in the long run.

Sramana Mitra: You want to talk about any other company in your portfolio?

Anirudh Suri: Another company that is very interesting is a company called Tookitaki. They have pivoted over time. They >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anirudh Suri of India Internet Fund (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 Anirudh Suri was recorded in December 2017. 

Anirudh Suri, Founding Partner at India Internet Fund, talks about the funding trends in the Indian startup market.

Sramana Mitra: Help us introduce you to our audience. Tell us about your fund and investment focus. How big is the fund? What size investments do you make?

Anirudh Suri: We are an early stage seed to Series A fund. We invest primarily in technology-based ventures. >>>