1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You mentioned traction. For Mumbai Angels to be interested in a company, what kind of traction do you want to see? It sounds like you don’t do concept financing, do you?

Nandini Mansinghka: We would do concept financing. We will fund anything which is a people company. It’s not an idea stage that we’re looking at for sure. We would require revenue traction in all cases except two. One exception would be highly suspect products. If it’s an IP buildout, we’re okay to say, “We’re funding because we want to walk with you to the IP buildout.” >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Yash Hemaraj of Arka Venture Labs (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Yash Hemaraj was recorded in February 2019.

Yash Hemaraj, Founding Partner at Arka Venture Labs and Partner at Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), discusses Arka’s recent partnership with 1Mby1M to accelerate Indian B2B SaaS companies.

Sramana Mitra: Tell our audience about Arka and we’ll take it from there.

Yash Hemaraj: We launched Arka Venture Labs in the summer of 2018. Arka Venture Labs is India’s first B2B focused cross-border accelerator. Our idea is to seed the next wave of enterprise innovation coming from India and to connect them to the global ecosystem. Primarily, we’re forward-looking at B2B-focused companies. >>>

436th Roundtable Recording on March 20, 2019: With Sumant Mandal, March Capital Partners

In case you missed it, you can listen to the recording here:

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What about sectors? Of course, India has gone through a lot of different cycles already in terms of sector popularity and experiments. So what are your conclusions and investment thesis around sectors at this point?

Nandini Mansinghka: That’s a very interesting question. We’ve seen a slight shift in the trend over the years. So if you look at our portfolio of 130 companies, we were focusing a lot on tech and tech product companies because the hypothesis was that we need to look at startups in a similar way as the Valley. Over the last three to four years, we’re seeing a distinct change in how they are being looked at. >>>

Roundtable Recap: March 20 – How Large Companies Address Existential Threats

During this week’s roundtable, we had as our guest Sumant Mandal, Managing Director at March Capital Partners, a firm that invests largely in enterprise facing businesses with deep technical differentiation. The conversation includes excellent insights into the changing dynamics of the networking space and how companies like Cisco and Juniper are managing their existential threats.

V Words!
Then, Tim Lieu from California pitched V Words! a mobile game that he wishes to raise money for. Unfortunately, games don’t get funded unless there is proven traction.

You can listen to the recording of this roundtable here:

>>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: Can you talk a bit about the way you work? If an entrepreneur wants to work with Mumbai Angels, what would be the procedure? Is it a subset of the angels who are investing? How do you manage that process? Just give us a little bit of color on the mechanics.

Nandini Mansinghka: We receive about 5,000 applications for funding every year. These come through several different channels. One of our strongest ones are recommendations by members and by companies that got funded earlier in our ecosystem. That’s one. A lot of startups have a line to pitch directly at mumbaiangels.com. There’s the outreach that we’re doing continuously. We’re there at events. We’re there at different forums and trying to attend. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Nandini Mansinghka of Mumbai Angels Network (Part 1)

Responding to a popular request, we are now sharing transcripts of our investor podcast interviews in this new series. The following interview with Nandini Mansinghka was recorded in January 2019.

Nandini Mansinghka is CEO and Managing Director at Mumbai Angels Network, one of the oldest angel networks in India.

Sramana Mitra: Nandini Mansinghka, from Mumbai Angels Network, has been a very early entrant into the Indian entrepreneurship financing ecosystem. She’s a big influencer at a big high impact player in the Indian ecosystem. I’m thrilled to catch up after so many years. Nandini and I last saw each other in person back in 2011 when I was doing a workshop in Mumbai. I will let you introduce yourself and the work of Mumbai Angels Network as a starter and then we’ll dive into the details. >>>

1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Preeti Rathi of Ignition Partners (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: If an entrepreneur takes $6.5 million in seed, how much ownership does he have left in the company?

Preeti Rathi: Entrepreneurs have to be careful about making sure that they manage the valuation from that perspective. It isn’t really a good idea to give up so much of the company that it actually will make rates for the next round really difficult. Because if the entrepreneurs don’t really have enough skin in the game, the VC’s also don’t really want to invest in the next round. So if you’re taking in so much money early on, you better have an idea that will lead to higher cap and higher valuation so that money doesn’t lead to really giving up ownership completely. >>>