1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepak Gupta, Founding Partner at WEH Ventures (Part 1)

Deepak Gupta, Founding Partner at WEH Ventures, discusses his fund’s pre-seed and seed funding strategy for Indian startups.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about yourself as well as WEH Ventures.

Deepak Gupta: I had been part of the venture ecosystem over the last 20 years off and on. In the last six or seven years, I have been running a fund called WEH Ventures. We are now on our second fund. We do pre-seed to seed investments which are primarily focused on the Indian market. We have a few companies that are facing overseas. We are fairly sector-agnostic.

Sramana Mitra: How big is the fund?

Deepak Gupta: Almost exactly a billion Rupees. That’s a little under $15 million. It’s a micro-VC fund.

Sramana Mitra: What size checks do you write?

Deepak Gupta: We write checks anywhere from $150,000 to $400,000 to start with. We are slightly more concentrated. We do maybe 15 deals.

Sramana Mitra: You participate in the follow-ons as well.

Deepak Gupta: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You said you do pre-seed to seed which is consistent with your check sizes. What do you look for in the deals? You’ve had quite a bit of success. What characteristics determine that you are ready to write a check?

Deepak Gupta: We operate in a very lean team. I have two partners. The majority of the decision is based on the founder. The remaining chunk is on the market or what it can be. What we try to avoid is taking cues from other investors on whether a certain investor is investing or not. We don’t want to know who is there until we’ve made up our mind. That has also helped us in having a little more conviction.

Sramana Mitra: Talk about some of your favorite deals. Walk us through in what state did you encounter the entrepreneur or the company. What did you see that really attracted you and made you want to write the check?

Deepak Gupta: We have invested in Smallcase. This was three years back. They had received a pre-seed check. They were having difficulty attracting capital for the next round. This company was essentially creating baskets of stocks in a passive investing model. A lot of the fintech investments basically advise on which mutual fund to select. They were signing some good success. Their product was beautiful.

By the second meeting, we decided to invest in this company. It ended up being an in-between round. Since then, they’ve raised multiple rounds of funding. Some of the concerns at that time was that they were attached to only one broker. All of those have been cast aside. Everybody in the Indian financial market knows about them.

We reached out to them while researching their sector. When we liked it, we moved quickly. The bridge round turned out to be larger than we expected. We backed in all four rounds so far.

Sramana Mitra: Is FinTech an area of particular interest?

Deepak Gupta: There are three of our areas where we’ve done more work. One of them is the whole Indian content space which began to take shape around 2016 to 2017. Most Indians consume content in their own language. Over time, it’s mostly video. YouTube is the biggest platform. We took some early bets then. That’s one big piece.

The other big piece is B2C brands. Over time, it has become a broader commerce strategy. The third sector is fintech. From our second fund, we did a company called Jar which is in the savings space. Then we have other sectors. We’ve invested in a livestock company called Animall.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Deepak Gupta, Founding Partner at WEH Ventures
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