1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Chandrashekar Kupperi, General Partner of Peaceful Progress Fund (Part 1)

Chandrashekar Kupperi is General Partner at Peaceful Progress Fund, an angel fund in India. We have some very interesting discussions on consumer startups in India, especially the ones targeting lower economic strata consumers.

Sramana Mitra: Tell us a bit about your background as well as what you’re doing with Peaceful Progress Fund.

Chandrashekar Kupperi: I’m an old guy. My professional journey began as early as 1997. I have almost two and a half decades of experience. My basic qualification is in finance and accounting. I’m a chartered accountant from India. I started my career at ExxonMobil and then I moved to KPMG.

My last stint as an employee was with a UK-based multinational. This company had consumer brands, mainly in the skincare and haircare. It operated more like private equity. We used to buy brands from Unilever or Procter & Gamble.

I had a phenomenal experience and journey with them because I was able to meet some amazing private equity funds, venture capitalists, hedge funds, and law firms. That’s how I truly understood how you structure a transaction and how to say no to a transaction. I did 11 acquisitions and four divestments. We sold the business to another multinational.

As I was doing that, the entrepreneurial bug bit me. That’s how ANOVA was born. It’s an advisory firm focusing on two verticals. One is M&A and the other is fundraising. We help mainly on the equity side. We are sector-agnostic, but our sector focus is generally consumer and manufacturing. Peaceful Progress Fund is an angel fund of 50 Crore focusing on technology, consumer, and electric vehicles.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down on Peaceful Progress Fund. Tell us a bit more about tech-related stuff. There is a lot of consumer brand-building going on right now in an internet-first mode. I presume that if you’re doing consumer, that’s part of your purview. Tell us about your investment thesis relative to where we play.

Chandrashekar Kupperi: We’re keeping it simple. We’re keeping it plain vanilla. It’s the world of fintech, health tech, edtech, food tech, consumer tech, and manufacturing tech. Also B2C. Definitely e-commerce. The idea of investing in technology is to ensure that the technology is an enabler rather than a pure-play. It could be the likes of AI/ML or even augmented reality which enables the business to perform better. That’s where our focus is.

We don’t want to take the credit that we are the first institutional investors. We want to ensure that we co-invest with other angels or venture capital firms. If you’ve already raised money from an angel platform, feel free to approach us because we’ll want to review your business.

Sramana Mitra: What sized checks do you write?

Chandrashekar Kupperi: Typically between $150,000 to $400,000. It can be higher too.

This segment is part 1 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Chandrashekar Kupperi, General Partner of Peaceful Progress Fund
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