1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sateesh Andra of Endiya Partners (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: If you look at your last 12 months of deal flow, what do you see as standout trends in the Indian market? What do you see as interesting?

Sateesh Andra: We look for B2B companies that are in cyber security, semiconductors, digital health, and medical devices. Our investment approach is about 15 investments in a fund over a three-year cycle. You’re looking at five investments in any year.

We’re seeing very good teams. Previously, we used to see founders with strong engineer or marketing skills and they would have to find other executives or employees. Now the founding teams are really strong and they have complementary skills.

In the product ecosystem and the enterprise ecosystem, we see a combination of returning Indians and people who have worked for R&D companies in India. Some of them are graduates who have appetite to build products.

The quality of the deal flow is good. If you look at FinTech or healthcare, you’ve seen the revolution. We’re seeing more people on mobile payments than people who have bank accounts.

Sramana Mitra: Yes, there is such a weak healthcare sector and such a weak financial sector for the broad population. This is completely an opportunity to leapfrog. 

Sateesh Andra: Absolutely. We see very innovative models in that area as well. Again, Dr. Ramesh has been spending a lot of time looking at very interesting ideas like gene sequencing. Several are in digital health.

Dr. Ramesh Byrapaneni: Our focus is more B2B. We see a lot more flow coming from the B2B side. Apart from all the emerging technologies and applications, I see quite a few people coming up with a distributed team especially for global opportunities. Not every deal we get is of that nature.

What we noticed is, people are in different geographies. The second thing is they get a lot more homework done at their end. It’s getting farther and farther away from just theory. It’s getting a lot more practical. They also expect investors to get into the practicality of what has been put together.

Abhishek Srivastava: I can give you a flavor of our portfolio so that you understand the kind of startups. We’ve invested in a company called Cygni. Cygni is a solar storage platform that is also a DC microgrid. You have losses when DC is converting to AC for transmission and conversion back for consumption.

Slang Labs is voice infrastructure for mobile apps regional languages. They’re building an infrastructure for apps that connect to their API. They’re doing three things. One is the regional language wrapper. The second is the NLP engine to understand intent. Third is execution on the device as opposed to cloud.

We talked about Darwinbox. Hansel.io is helping product marketing and product management teams to allow UI personalization without development cycles involved. They’re a great platform.

Steradian is doing 4G imaging chips that are used in the automotive industry, industrial automation, and even drones. These are our portfolio companies.

Sramana Mitra: Great. It’s good to see what you’re doing. Thank you for your time. 

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