1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: When I think about Nexus, one company comes to mind immediately, which is one of the biggest and oldest success stories in India. It’s Druva. The company is maturing very well. I wouldn’t call that exactly as a self-serve go-to market. That’s an enterprise product.

Jishnu Battacharjee: Exactly. Not all companies follow that. We invested in Druva in 2011. At that time, Druva was a small company with a few hundred thousand bookings.

The interesting part was that, at that time, this product was being used in 26 countries. He has talked to none of those buyers or customers in person or on the phone. He had that DNA of building a product that people can get started with.

As the company evolved, it turned out that there are bigger deals happening. Bigger enterprises are showing interest. That’s when we decided that we needed to amplify the market outreach and effort.

Sramana Mitra: It’s actually incredibly convenient if you have a groundswell inside of an enterprise with people already downloading products from the internet. Then you can upsell that into a large enterprise deal much more effectively.

Why don’t we talk about some of the investments that are particularly representative of how you are thinking? Do it for both B2C and B2B. Try to give the audience a flavor of how these people came to you. What did you see in them when you first invested in them? What was it about them that got your attention?

Jishnu Battacharjee: Druva is also a fantastic case study but I will select two other companies. One company is a company I’m on the board of. It’s called Postman. The company started in 2014.

The present state is that the company is the de facto standard for all things API. At this point, about 10 million developers out of the total 32 million in the world are using the product. It has taken up fantastically. After GitHub, I haven’t seen anything like this.

The idea is, in today’s enterprise application development stack, the starting point today is often the API. The way applications are being written today is more of getting together those modules and services and gluing them with API. That is where things are.

Let me walk through the journey a bit. In 2014, there was one gentleman Abhinav. At that time, he was 26 years old. He was trying to do a company and he was also working. He was solving a problem for himself. He was dealing with a lot of APIs.

As a young engineer, he needed to test a lot of APIs. If I’m using somebody else’s API and if that doesn’t work, then my code will not work even though I might not have done any mistake. Testing of API is a core problem to solve. It was a very simple product. He released it as open source.

To his surprise, he became the representative of many people who were facing the same problem. What happened is that one of our other companies told my colleague in Bangalore, “This has been a life changer for me. It’s one of the most simple products I’m using.”

We didn’t waste any time. We found him. He was just one person. We gave him a million dollars and helped him incorporate. When we funded, it was about 80,000 to 100,000 people across the world using the product. He just released the product in a GitHub repository and that was it.

There was no big vision. His inspiration was that the world was being driven by API and that movement will continue. But there wasn’t any big vision or top down approach of company-building at that moment. There was no talk of monetization.

We saw that interest was coming from all over the world. We invested and in 2016, he came to the US. The company got incorporated in the US. We gave him another $6 million.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Jishnu Battacharjee of Nexus Venture Partners
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