1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eva Yazhari, General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You are investing post-revenue. What benchmarks are you using to gauge whether you can build a venture-scale company?

Eva Yazhari: Because we’re a multi-sector fund, a lot of our metrics relate to specific sectors. Often, we’re looking at the growth of average order value. If it’s more of a services company, we’re looking at the growth of their contracts, the relationships that they have, and the booked contracts that they have. A lot of it is centered around the ability of the company to take what it is doing now and take that to scale.

It is tricky if it is fintech. Fintech is not just lending. It can be savings, insurance, lending credits rather than capital. Just taking average loan value or even repayment rate doesn’t exemplify what we need.

We are very bespoke in how we approach our due diligence. We do extensive work in the companies we invest in with the hope that we are building a relationship for the future and that we can help attract additional capital. The conversations that you have on this topic center around how can companies raise additional funding beyond the Series A raise as well. We do focus on that.

Sramana Mitra: These two markets that you are interested in – India and Africa – we are quite big in India. Of late, we are seeing a lot of African companies come here. I would say that in the last couple of years, it has accelerated significantly.

How do you synthesize the trend in Africa? How do you synthesize it in India? There is of course the whole group of Indian tech sector investors who are not necessarily impact investors. From an impact investment point of view, how do you synthesize the state of the union?

Eva Yazhari: Today, it is really important that it’s contextualized on December 16th. In our markets, money is moving in really fast and it’s changing the landscapes. Let’s talk about Africa. There’s never been more money invested in startups than in 2021. It’s about $4 billion across the continent.

Our focus is East Africa so that’s Kenya, Rwanda, Uganda. We do look at companies that are scaling across the continent. We’re excited about industries that have not yet been disrupted. We are in the med supply industry. That was our first investment. That industry has sleepy incumbents that don’t think about how to innovate around what their customers need.

There are a number of industries in East Africa that have not yet been disrupted. We see a lot of great fintech companies. What we’re seeing is the next iteration of these businesses. One great company is not giving cash; they’re giving credits to gig economy workers for things like petrol or repairs. We’re also seeing a lot of wage advances as well. These credits are needed. There are different ways of slicing through the fintech verticals.

In India, we are very cautious. I would say that the deal flow is a lot. We do think that there is a lot of FOMO. We do try to stay away from rounds where they have very high valuations or where they are copies of other companies. There are a lot of incredible businesses that have been built. These companies have created and been able to absorb a lot of market share in a unique time when they didn’t have as much competition. Now the competition is starting to come in.

We’re very wary about these me-too strategies. We’re also wary of technologies that are not relevant in our market of reaching low-income consumers. We are looking for authentic impact and true dedication to lower-income consumers. It’s very easy to come in with an idea and say it’s end-to-end technology. It’s not going to work for all of our markets. It needs to be tech-assisted models.

This segment is part 2 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Eva Yazhari, General Partner at Beyond Capital Ventures
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