1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at the later-stage SaaS market, there are tons of companies that have scaled nicely. There are a lot of $150 million to $200 million SaaS companies that are looking to grow. They may have grown on top of one product line.

To be successful in the public market, they cannot be one-trick ponies. They’re going to need five other product lines to be able to generate fast-paced growth. This is a market opportunity into which India should play really hard. How do you parse the unicorn mania?

Brij Bhasin: There was a rush to help companies scale as quickly as possible to get them into the unicorn club. A lot of money >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan of Clear Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: An aspect of running a company that’s not pleasurable at all.

Coming back to Clear Ventures journey, let’s double-click down a little bit on what stage are you looking for. When you say you are willing to put in very early stage, what are you looking for in terms of validation? Are you looking for just concept or revenue? What is comfortable for you?

Rajeev Madhavan: We have done all the way where the concept was not fully baked. We have had people who just sit here with us. We take them to some of the customers and refine the generic idea. We’ve done investments at that stage. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 4)

Brij Bhasin: When it comes to Series A and B and further, the bar tends to be set up really high. We’re starting to see that in 2017. We’re seeing more of that in 2018 and 2019. As these new domestic funds start to deploy and their portfolio companies start to hit the Series A wall, we will see more cleaning up or consolidation of the early-stage startups.

There is a lot of money available at A or B. It’s just that VCs at that stage are also being very selective, having burnt their hands a little bit during the boom years of 2015 and 2016. A lot of those companies didn’t take off. Now those are being consolidated in the market.

Sramana Mitra: This is true both in India as well as in the US. There’s going to be two different categories of 

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1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rajeev Madhavan of Clear 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 Rajeev Madhavan of Clear Ventures was recorded in January 2018. 

Rajeev Madhavan, Founder and General Partner at Clear Ventures, was first a highly successful serial entrepreneur, and brings to the VC game an entrepreneur’s view of the world. Rajeev highlighted the Series A gap in a big way.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about Clear Ventures. How big is it? What is the investing focus? What sized investments are you making? >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: There is one point that I want to double-click down on and listen to what you’re seeing in your deal flow. Most of the VCs operating in India have come to the conclusion that if it’s to do with deep tech, they have to go after the global market. The Indian B2B market is very slow-moving. Is that reflected in your deal flow?

Brij Bhasin: Absolutely. While our portfolio companies are selling into Indian customers, our realization is that the sales cycles in India are much longer. There is a fair bit of customer education that you have to do to explain the concept and bring the product in. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about your current portfolio. You said you’ve made 10 investments. Tell us a bit about what you’ve invested in. In particular, let’s focus on a company or two that are scaling well. Has anything crossed the $5 million annual revenue mark?

Brij Bhasin: Let me give you a few examples of companies that have started scaling in a significant way. We’ve invested in a company called LetsTransport. It’s a last mile logistics marketplace for small trucks. In India, the cities are quite congested. You have these smaller sized trucks that are used for local deliveries.

We have a curated managed marketplace for corporates and companies of various nature to essentially avail the logistics services >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Brij Bhasin of Rebright 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 Brij Bhasin of Rebright Partners was recorded in January 2018. 

Brij Bhasin, Principal and India Investment Lead at Rebright Partners, which is a Japanese Venture Capital firm, discusses their India strategy. The conversation encompasses broader trends in the Indian startup market.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us about your investing focus. How big is the fund? What sized investment do you make? Let’s familiarize our audience with you activities. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Bruce Cleveland of Wildcat Venture Partners (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Last question on trends, what do you make of unicorn mania? How do you parse it? How do you strategize given that it is a factor in the market right now?

Bruce Cleveland: One of the reasons why we like to do early-stage investing is there’s a lot of capital that has been locked into a lot of what we would call the established firms. They have a lot of capital to put to work. Once something is working, then what happens is you have a bunch of firms that rush in to put money in.

Once they’re in, what they want to do is try to put more dollars to work in that particular deal even if it’s not going to end up being a 10x multiple. A 2x multiple can still be quite effective to generate substantial returns if you’re putting $50 million or $100 >>>