1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Utsav Somani of AngelList India (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 Utsav Somani was recorded in May 2018.

Utsav Somani, Angel Investor at AngelList India, talks about the newly launched AngelList India.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about the investing focus of AngelList in India. How are you operating? How is it structured? How is it different from the mother ship? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: I’m going to ask you a few questions about the Indian market. What is your analysis of the Indian e-commerce market?

Kanwaljit Singh: There is a large consumer market in India. E-commerce is satisfying several of those requirements for branded products that Indian consumers are not able to consume due to access and sheer logistics complexity. For a large consumer brand, to be able to reach the remote corners of the country is extremely expensive. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: I’d like to understand to what degree of certainty do you foresee the family offices that are working with you to be able to cover that capital need of going from $5 million to $15 million?

Kanwaljit Singh: The interesting thing is that the private equity investors in India is a very large group. They are very bullish on the consumer brand space. It’s a very interesting funnel for consumer investing in India. The mouth of the funnel is really the angels and individual investors. >>>

418th Roundtable Recording on October 11, 2018: With Shuly Galili, UpWest Labs

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: In this case study, how many customers were they able to reach in an internet-only mode?

Kanwaljit Singh: I think it’s in the thousands. You can build very interesting businesses, especially in the Indian context if you can reach a core community of consumers. We believe that the lifetime value of the consumer is far more important than just reaching a certain number of consumers. A hundred thousand consumers who are buying our products on a regular basis has the potential. We’ve seen interesting milestones since there aren’t so many brands in India that have grown to $15 million to $20 million size.

Sramana Mitra: How much capital do you need in this model? What is your assessment of how much capital is >>>

Roundtable Recap: October 11 – Global Startup Acceleration Networks are Growing

During this week’s roundtable, we had as a guest Shuly Galili, Founding Partner, UpWest Labs, who talked to us about pre-seed and seed investments in the Israel – Silicon Valley corridor.

Sensfix
As for pitching, we had Balaji Renukumar from Palo Alto, California, pitching Sensfix, an IOT-based venture addressing the repair and maintenance of street lights and other infrastructure assets. Very cool company, and a great example of how various eco-systems are collaborating to produce new startups. This one has been accelerated in India and in Amsterdam, before showing up in Palo Alto.

We also discussed our new partnership with EIT Health to accelerate over 100 European Startups. More on this coming soon.

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Kanwaljit Singh of Fireside Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a few case studies of your portfolio. We can do three or four of these. Take us through the evolution of these companies. When did they come to you? What did they have? What brought your confidence and what happened as they evolved?

Kanwaljit Singh: Let me a take an example of a company called Mama Earth, which targets the baby and the mom. The company is about two years old. It was founded by a couple when they realized that there was not a good choice of products they could use on their child across various personal care requirements. They decided to start this company for not just themselves but for millions of parents who are looking for safer products for their child. >>>

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

Sramana Mitra: The other piece of this equation is let’s say you can invest quarter of a million to $2 million per company on funding. What does the rest of the ecosystem look like around you to build brand companies? What are they looking for in terms of proof points to want to come and play with you in deals like these?

Kanwaljit Singh: That’s a great question. That was one of the motivators for us when we started the fund. There really doesn’t exist a very diverse ecosystem in India for supporting these kinds of plays. What we have been able to do in a short span of time is start the process of building this ecosystem.

Interestingly, one emerging investor group that we work very closely with is Indian family offices. Like I mentioned, the investors in >>>