1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sateesh Andra of Endiya 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 Sateesh Andra was recorded in April 2019.

Endiya Partners’ founding team – Managing Director Sateesh Andra, Managing Director Dr. Ramesh Byrapaneni, Director Abhishek Srivastava – talk about their Seed and Pre-Series A VC fund focused on India.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by each of you taking turns to introduce yourselves, your background, and how you see the India venture opportunity. Let’s start with you Sateesh.

Sateesh Andra: I’m one of the Founders of Endiya Partners along with Dr. Ramesh and Abhishek. I’m an electronics and communications engineer with a Masters in Computer Engineering.

I spent, roughly, 16 odd years in Silicon Valley prior to coming back to India. I started my career in semiconductors designing chips. Then I moved from engineering to product management and joined a startup.

While actively pursuing my career in semiconductors, I used to avidly follow internet and the software ecosystem. I started a company called Euclid. I raised around $40 million of venture capital. We were one of the hot startups in the IT government space.

I built a company. Once the company exited, I wanted to move to the other side of the table. I wanted to work with great entrepreneurs. I was a venture partner at DFJ for five plus years before I realized my calling. Early-stage product startups is what I love. I got to know Dr. Ramesh and Abhishek through TiE. That’s how Endiya Partners was born. 

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about Dr. Ramesh next then.

Sateesh Andra: Dr. Ramesh is a cardiologist. He was in the US and came back. He started a tertiary care hospital with 300 plus beds.

After two and a half decades as a clinician, he wanted to work with entrepreneurs to work on the next disruptive idea, either in digital health or medical devices. He got actively involved at TiE. Dr. Ramesh left his practice and moved to venture capital full time.

Sramana Mitra: Abhishek, how about you?

Abhishek Srivastava: I’m an engineer by background. I did my engineering at Delhi College of Engineering. I then spent around five years on enterprise startups, largely on the product development side.

Then I did my postgraduate from Indian School of Business and switched gears a bit. I was doing consulting and investment banking at Deloitte and then followed by PricewaterhouseCooper. I stayed there for around five years.

Beyond that, I wanted to get back to the operations side. That’s when I joined another company called Cyient, which is one of the leading product and networking engineering companies in India. They were on the cusp of their growth. I learned a lot more about what’s now called IoT.

Back in those days, it was more focused around smart grid. For the last six years, I’ve been involved in early-stage investing. I got to know Sateesh through one of the TiE forums. We jumpstarted a program. We used to teach entrepreneurship to kids.

I figured out very soon that it was a calling given that directions were pointing towards India becoming the next hot destination for product startups. I wanted to leverage my previous experience and work with Sateesh and Dr. Ramesh.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners
1 2 3 4 5 6