1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripati Acharya of Prime Venture Partners (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: You’re based in Bangalore?

Shripati Acharya: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: Do all the companies need to be in Bangalore?

Shripati Acharya: Most of our companies are in Bangalore. We do have companies in Delhi. There is more effort to do that. We have to make that extra effort.

Sramana Mitra: I would like to do a few examples of companies that you have invested in and are particularly excited about.

Just to understand how you are thinking about these companies, what did they have when they came to you? How did you encounter them? What stage did you encounter them? What is it about them that really convinced you?

Shripati Acharya: Let’s take TredX, an invoice discounting marketplace. Let’s say I’m a supplier of laptops to Cisco, Cisco will give me an invoice. They might pay me in 90 days because those are the payment terms.

However, I would like to have a faster cash flow. You take a $10,000 invoice and say, “I’m willing to take $9,500 if I get the money now.” This has traditionally been done within banks; TredX has brought it to retail. I can buy invoices of companies that are going to list it. It was just two entrepreneurs and they had this idea.

They had a very good understanding. They were thinking about some mockup about this product. They both had deep domain understanding of banking. They had spent 10 years in banking. They explained the whole concept. They had a very clear understanding of how they were going to market.

That was a napkin-stage investment. They’re a category-creating company in terms of being the first to market. We were talking about entrepreneur-opportunity fit. This is one of those cases where this was such an involved and intricate product. Unless you worked with it, it’s not something you’d be able to figure out. It’s the domain expertise that matters.

There’s another company called Cuivivv. Here is a company which is based in Bangalore. They have an office in the US. For teachers, it takes 10x the time to make a quiz than it takes for students to solve it. It might take them an hour to create a 10-minute quiz. What Cuivivv provides is a repository. Any teacher can come and pick up and create their own quiz.

If you want to teach Algebra for Grade 6, you can go and compile a quiz easily. Now it’s really fast. It’s a very large scale repository. What we really liked about it is that it was actually making the lives of the teachers better and, in one sense, also helping the students.

Sramana Mitra: What is the problem on this one?

Shripati Acharya: They are providing a platform for teachers to quickly create and administer a quiz in the classroom.

Sramana Mitra: What is the business model?

Shripati Acharya: You can either charge the teachers or the parents. This is a great way to go ahead and monetize the parent through a monthly subscription. 

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Shripati Acharya of Prime Venture Partners
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