1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra of Unitary Helion Ventures (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Do you want to talk about a couple of companies that you’ve invested in that you are particularly excited about? What are they doing? What value proposition are they providing? What are they experiencing in penetrating the market?

Rahul Chandra: We are saving some of the new names from Unitary for a formal announcement. I’ll cover some of them without the names. Of course, the Helion portfolio that I’m managing is also doing well.

I could start with Topper which is an EdTech company out of Bombay. The business is a learning app that is built for schools with 50 students in a class where personalized learning is not something we can talk about. 70% of the students are being left behind and concepts are not being revisited. Personal assessment is hard.

With personalized learning apps, the app is learning where the concepts need to be reinforced. The power is being shifted over to the students where they’re able to access multiple times without worrying about standing up in class. This is the power of bandwidth.

Three years back, we would traditionally think of this as running a live class. How many people would have that kind of bandwidth? A large part of learning at Topper is happening through live classes. After school, students are back in an online classroom. This is with the background of what the student has been doing in the past.

This is a good example of how the adoption and app interaction is blending between what is live and what is a low-bandwidth engagement.

Sramana Mitra: This is a company that’s selling to schools?

Rahul Chandra: They sell directly. The parent pays for the year. It’s 6th grade to 12th grade.

Sramana Mitra: Adoption is high?

Rahul Chandra: The telling number is the engagement on the app – the time that they’re spending on it. One easy way to describe is, it exceeds the Instagram time spent.

We clearly think that this is more interesting and more useful. We see a high degree of engagement per day. It’s daily usage. The drop off rates is lower. There is a very high degree of daily engagement.

Sramana Mitra: I have a question on the stage you’re investing in. What stage and with what proof point does an entrepreneur need to come to you for you to want to invest in something like this?

Rahul Chandra: We feel that there is far more angel capital and far more institutionalized seed capital now in India. In terms of a Series A VC going into seed, we generally like to stay in the Series A zone.

The expectation in that round for us is that the company has already raised $0.5 million to $1 million round, and they have a product with some traction. What we are trying to also do more of is to rely a lot on analyzing the customer engagement data.

The idea is to then predict the single most important question at a high level, which is the product-market fit, and what are the trends towards that. We could be looking at apps that are trending towards a better fit or diverging away. The main idea is to get enough engagement data that we can then use to predict what kind of engagement we are seeing.

That helps us in two ways. One is, it confirms the size of the round, whether it is still at a stage where we’ll need to keep moving towards finding that fit or is this at a stage where we need to start pressing on the pedal. Both need different kinds of investors and different kinds of rounds. It also helps us plan better and plan for the next year. The ability to look at traction is important.

Sramana Mitra: You’re looking more at engagement and then you can throttle it with customer acquisition. What you’re looking for is really the product fit.

Rahul Chandra: Yes. Mindset-wise, we go in looking for less experimentation on the product and more company building. We shift the focus from product to company building. Otherwise, we do budget for more experimentation till we get it right.

Sramana Mitra: This is really fascinating and thrilling to see what’s happening. Thank you for sharing your thoughts.

This segment is part 4 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Rahul Chandra of Unitary Helion Ventures
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