1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do one example from your rocketship portfolio that illustrates more of what you’re doing today.

Anand Rajaraman: I’ll give you an example from India. We are an investor in Moglix. It’s a company based in Delhi. They are in the B2B e-commerce space.

India’s industrial base is modernizing. As the industrial base modernizes, everything will operate 24/7 and not have downtime. Moglix integrates into the ERP systems in India. What helped this company take off is the change in the tax regime in India, which made it necessary for companies to change the way they do record-keeping.

Moglix also became the place that enables you to keep track of all that. Plus there’s the marketplace. The company has scaled really well. Somebody called them the fastest-growing company in Asia outside of China.

Sramana Mitra: B2B e-commerce is a very interesting space. I’ve seen a lot of interesting companies in B2B e-commerce especially in immature markets like India where the attention has been more on the Flipkarts and Amazons.

Anand Rajaraman: That’s a prototypical company that we look for. Moglix is not just in India. They’re all over Asia. Another company out of India is a company called Locus based in Bangalore. They provide machine learning driven models for logistics optimization.

Their early customer wins were the people who had to do lots of deliveries in India. BluDot uses them. They also expanded to Southeast Asia. They did a big round of funding recently. They’re planning to enter the US market.

Sramana Mitra: You’re bullish on India.

Anand Rajaraman: India has been an interesting story for us. We actually had very few investments in India from our fund as of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: The quality of companies out of India is improving greatly.

Anand Rajaraman: Yes, I’m seeing amazing entrepreneurs. It feels no different from talking to an entrepreneur from Silicon Valley. 

Sramana Mitra: The check size that you are writing is very much in our comfort zone in the sense that we like the philosophy of bootstrapping first and then raising money later.

Because we work a lot in geographies where bootstrapping is very popular and almost essential, it forces them to really look at the fundamentals and why customers are buying. We like this model of taking companies that have been able to achieve product-market fit on their own and then going into a small Series A. More like a $3 million Series A.

Out of this conversation, that’s where I see a good fit between what we’re doing and what you are trying to do.

Anand Rajaraman: Definitely. I’m a big believer in that model. 

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Anand Rajaraman of rocketship.vc
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