1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Suresh Shanmugham of Saama Capital (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: I understand that in 2007, it was betting on Vijay as the entrepreneur. How long did you stay in that company? Did you seek an exit somewhere along the way? What has been your evolution with that company?

Suresh Shanmugham: We have exited a good portion of our position. The company split into three different pieces. We had ownership in all three pieces as a result. What we did was, we sold off the piece that contained the payments business. We maintained ownership in one of the other entities, which is Paytm Mall. We remain invested although we’ve monetized a substantial portion of our investment.

Sramana Mitra: Aside from Paytm, what other companies have you invested in? Please focus the discussion on IT and IT-enabled services which is the bulk of our work. I do remember when you guys were getting started, I had lunch with Ash. He told me about your investment in Sula. He was very excited about all of that. I’m sure those are great stories but for this conversation, let’s focus on the IT side.

Suresh Shanmugham: Another company that we were early investors in was Tutorvista. We had backed Ganesh back in 2006. Ganesh is somebody that we indirectly backed in his earlier venture CustomerAsset. SCB had made an investment in Jump Startup, which had invested in CustomerAsset.

Back in those days, we had the ability to make strategic investments in funds to not only get access to the portfolio but also to build relationships with the GPs of the firm. We got introduced. After one meeting, we said, “We’d love to invest.” He said, “I’ve known you guys for years. I would welcome the opportunity for you guys to participate and work with the company.”

As a result, we were given the opportunity to invest in shareholders. Ganesh never really spent time in the Valley. When he needed to raise his Series B round, he parked in the SCB office and had a number of firms that Ash and I had introduced him to help bring that round together. While we were very interested in the online tutoring opportunity, we really like the fact that it was Ganesh.

Sramana Mitra: What about more recent ones? What’s happening in the more recent years?

Suresh Shanmugham: In terms of more recent companies, one tech company in fund two is Snapdeal. We had come into that company in 2013. We met with Kunal and Rohit and really liked what they were doing. It was a difficult time in the e-commerce world. We really took a liking to what they were doing and how they were thinking about the business.

We came at a good time at a round that was being led by eBay. I think Intel Capital participated. That was when e-commerce, as we know it, really started to take off. I thought it was a good sector. It was out of favor. We were making a contrarian bet. It worked out phenomenally well for us.

Sramana Mitra: What year was that?

Suresh Shanmugham: 2013.

Sramana Mitra: Did you exit that one?

Suresh Shanmugham: We did exit that one in October of 2015. We sold our shares in a secondary transaction to Ontario Teachers.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Suresh Shanmugham of Saama Capital
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