1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Vishesh Rajaram was recorded in November 2020.

Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner, Speciale Invest, discusses his fund’s investment thesis.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your background as well as about your funds. 

Vishesh Rajaram: We are a seed-stage fund investing in enterprise software and industrial hardware. The fund has been in existence for the last four years. Our first fund, a $10 million fund, was launched in 2017. We are in the middle of raising our second fund.

For the first fund, we made about 12 investments and got a couple of good exits along the way. We are about 75% through. We are going to begin investing from our second fund early next year. The kind of companies that we invest in fall under software and hardware.

In terms of my background, I’ve been in the venture capital business for the last 15 years. Before that, I was in financial services. 

Sramana Mitra: Talk a bit about stage and geography. What do you mean by stage? What are you looking for before you are going to write a check? 

Vishesh Rajaram: We operate in a round of financing of half a million dollars or less which, by definition, is a pre-seed round. This means you are talking about companies that are less than a hundred days old. It is for founders who have an idea and an insight.

We are looking for founders having a founder-market fit with the product they want to build. They decide to build a company based out of unique and deep insight. By definition, we are pre-revenue, pre-profit, and mostly pre-product. 

Sramana Mitra: What about geography?

Vishesh Rajaram: We are in India and over two-thirds of our money is invested in India. We are hoping to invest in the US and India. We have active investments in both geographies. 

Sramana Mitra: When you are investing in the US, I presume that you are looking for companies that are going after the US market but with an Indian backend? 

Vishesh Rajaram: That is right. 

Sramana Mitra: From your last fund, you have made 12 investments and you have had a couple of exits. That would be a good segue on where I am going next.

Let’s talk about the exits you had already. Talk about what they were doing. At what stage did they come to you? What propelled you to write the checks? What was the nature of the exit?

Vishesh Rajaram: The first one was a gaming company. We invested in them because we were excited about the team and their insights about building a gaming engine from the ground up. They are building an online poker platform. We invested in this company back in 2018.

In a couple of years, the company scaled to 7x to 10x. There was an offer by another large gaming company that wanted to buy into the gaming base. It was not natural for us to see an exit that early, but it was the best thing to do to align with a strategic partner to enhance distribution and market penetration. After raising, we played along with the founder’s decision to go sell the company. 

Sramana Mitra: Was it an American company that bought the company?

Vishesh Rajaram: It was an Indian company. 

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vishesh Rajaram, Managing Partner at Speciale Invest
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