1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020 (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: What are the highlights of your portfolio currently? If you have exited some, you can talk about those as well.

Sasha Mirchandani: Before I co-founded Kae capital, we’ve done several investments which were very successful like Myntra. We did a company where I am still a shareholder. I was the first investor in a company called Fractal Analytics which we closed with 200 million apex partners.

Within Kae capital, we have several exciting companies like Porter which has been funded by Sequoia and Espada. We have HealthCard which has been funded again by Sequoia and Supina. We have this company called 1mg which is one of India’s online pharmacy businesses.

We did a company called Zetwork two years back which is a B2B marketplace for manufacturing companies funded by Lightspeed, Sequoia, and Access. We have been lucky to have many very exciting companies over the last 10 to 20 years since I’ve been investing.

Sramana Mitra: Could you double-click down on each of the two categories that we discussed at length with one in consumer tech where the consumer base is expanding beyond the early affluent urban customer base.

If you have a company in your portfolio that is experiencing that expansion of the consumer base geographically with tier-2, tier-3 city consumers.

Sasha Mirchandani: This would be 1mg.

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit more about what they are doing? What is the go-to-market strategy? How are they handling their economics? 

Sasha Mirchandani: It’s not rocket science. It’s an online pharmacy business. Online pharmacy as you can imagine is a massive market. A massive market is critical and this is a great example of an existing humongous market that is completely fragmented. It’s probably one of the fastest-growing categories in India.

With COVID, people anywhere were extensively using the product. Now once you get locked up, people start using it substantially faster. I can’t reveal the numbers unfortunately, because we’re in the middle of a fundraise.

The numbers just have exponentially exploded in the last six to nine months and now we can see this becoming a multi-billion-dollar business in the next five years.

Sramana Mitra: What is the customer acquisition strategy? Is it Google AdWords? What makes this unit economics work? I would imagine that it’s the tier-2 or tier-3 city consumers, but traffic is still relatively inexpensive, right?

Sasha Mirchandani: Each of our companies works differently. We call it picking a lane. A lot of companies try too many things now. I don’t talk about what they do specifically, but what I’ve seen work well is if a company picks one lane.

A lot of times you need a lot of money to expand your marketing and online channels. What I advise people is to pick one lane and then go deep into that lane because those are the companies that end up winning. 

Sramana Mitra: Do you have an example of a company that is catering to Indian SMBs in your portfolio of B2B tech companies?

Sasha Mirchandani: Porter is one. It’s an intercity logistics company. It’s like Uber for SMEs. These small little trucks go from company to company delivering goods during the day. It’s a huge opportunity. We just closed the large round post COVID.

I can see this business eventually becoming a public company. It’s just incredibly early. It’s a huge and exciting opportunity because we’re just in six cities right now and can be in every city in India in the next five years.

This segment is part 5 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Sasha Mirchandani, Managing Director at Kae Capital 2020
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