1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vivek Ladsariya of SineWave Ventures (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: When did you invest in this company?

Vivek Ladsariya: This was a round that was announced in January. It was completed late last year.

Sramana Mitra: It’s already acquired?

Vivek Ladsariya: That’s correct.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the total amount of funding to exit ratio? How much did you put in and how much was the exit price?

Vivek Ladsariya: The total amount the company raised was a little over $10 million. I think it was somewhere in the range of $11 million. The exit size wasn’t announced by Uber and the company. I’m going to respect their process there. It was a good exit all around the table. Most importantly, the ones that were in the company believed in that problem.

I think they have a good home at Uber. It looks like it’s a key issue for Uber. Just yesterday, they announced that they’re going to go into more modes of mobility and not just ride-sharing. Bikes is going to be key for them in cities.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s do a couple of other examples from your portfolio just to understand how you think.

Vivek Ladsariya: We recently invested in a company called Rescale which is a high-performance computing company offering cloud simulation to enterprises. This was a Series B investment. Our view here was as enterprises tend to work on new product, it’s going to be very expensive building simulation platforms themselves.

Rescale is offering a platform to do just that. It was going to be a key product for anyone working on new products. They had success doing that for a variety of verticals ranging from aerospace to insurance. There were more reasonable, fairly traditional SaaS metrics. I believe most investors would say, “I don’t think we’re just investing in metrics. There’s a vision we believe in.”

Sramana Mitra: How much money had already gone into the company? What were the metrics against which you invested in Series B?

Vivek Ladsariya: It was a traditional sized Series A. They had grown to over 120 enterprise customers paying decent amounts of money. What was interesting in that is in traditional finance, people talk about quality of earnings. What I like to call is quality of revenue. They have very high-quality revenues.

By that, I mean it’s not concentrated on just one industry or one customer. It’s across several industries to prove that their product can really scale widely. It’s useful for several customers. Most importantly for almost all of those customers, the revenue has been growing even in those accounts. A lot of those customers had started out with a certain amount of money allocated to this. Over time, that grew significantly. All of those are good signs for us.

This segment is part 3 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Vivek Ladsariya of SineWave Ventures
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