Entrepreneurs Views

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Indian startups have been making news recently for all the right reasons. This boom has been mainly due to young entrepreneurs willing to take risks and give their best.

Investments have been on an upswing in the recent past. E-commerce is the most popular choice while travel and education related startups are not far behind. The increasing interest has resulted in almost a deal every day with a venture capitalist firm.

This rate of investment has been steadily growing since the last 5 years.  In fact in the last few years, especially from 2010 to 2013, US$3 billion came to India as investment by various venture capitalists that were willing to place trust on Indian startups. Now it has further increased in the last 2 years.

A few of them are based in India like Blume Ventures, Kalaari Capital, IDG Ventures India and Kae Capital while many others have their head office abroad. However, the interest in Indian startups remains the same by these venture capitalists irrespective of their base or location.

Let’s have a look at these positive venture capitalists who have invested in making dreams a reality in India:

Accel Partners

Accel Partners has been far-sighted enough to know which all were excellent ideas and wisely invested in those. The names that are associated with Accel Partners itself narrate the story of its success.

E-commerce giants— Flipkart and Myntra's series E, BabyOye's US$12 million series B, and real estate website CommonFloor's series C and D rounds, etc have been the talked-about ones. Freshdesk and hugely popular BookMyShow have also received backing from this venture capitalist firm.

Accel Partners has managed to shake and shape up the Indian startup scenario at an initial stage. It is based in California.

Blume Ventures

Blume Ventures is based in Mumbai and is a venture capitalist firm that is known for a collaborative approach of investing. They help in roping in other investors and angels, thus, making it easy for budding entrepreneurs to realize their dreams.

They have been successful in this daring initiative. A few names that are associated with it are cab aggregator TaxiForSure and Grey Orange, robot maker.

500 Startups

Dave McClure’s Silicon Valley based country-specific fund called 500 Wallah made more than 20 investments into ideas and start-ups like language learning innovator CultureAlley and price comparison site PriceBaba

Its accelerator program is investing in more Indian startups.

Tiger Global Management

Tiger Global Management has funded some of the best startups in India like MakeMyTrip, Flipkart and JustDial. It was one of the early venture capitalist firms to invest in Indian start-ups.

Inspite of the successful names associated with it, it was shut down in 2009 as it was not able to find appropriate scale of work which was interesting enough to invest in. However, it has again made a comeback in 2011.

IDG Ventures India

IDG Ventures is based in San Francisco. It has generously invested in countries like India, China, Korea, and Vietnam. It enjoys the reputation of being one of the biggest investors in Asia.

Some names associated with it are Newgen which is a business process management provider, Forus- an online ophthalmic health provider, FirstCry which is known for babycare products and iProf which is a tablet-based education provider.

Kalaari Capital

Kalaari Capital’s main face is Vani Kola who returned to India from the Silicon valley and now is the managing director of this venture capitalist firm that is based in Bangalore.

He had the vision and far-sightedness to invest in famous names like Snapdeal and Myntra much before the ecommerce industry took the country by storm. Other investments include Urban Ladder and Zivame which are equally loved by online shopping enthusiasts.

Intel Capital

Intel is increasingly investing in tech startups in India. Vizury, data analytics firm, has been a beneficiary of this global chip-maker’s US$16 million funding. It has even invested in hardware startups like Saankhya Labs which is a high-end modem-maker.

Helion Venture Partners

Helion Venture Partners is based in Mauritius; nonetheless, its focus has been Indian startups. It invested in bringing eyecare and dentistry online for Indians with Eye-Q and Denty's respectively.

Housing.com is another real estate portal that is associated with this venture capitalist firm.

Nexus Venture Partners

Nexus Venture Partners was started by a team of Indian entrepreneurs who were on the lookout for talent and innovation. The firm has offices in Silicon Valley and Bangalore.

Many cloud-based ideas have been appreciated by this firm, but one biggie that it decided to invest in at a nascent stage was Snapdeal after understanding that this idea could do wonders in the long term.

Kae Capital

Kae Capital has increasingly encouraged Indian tech startups by investing in them. It was founded by Sasha Mirchandani who was previously the managing director for BlueRun Ventures India though the organization is based in the US.

Kae Capital is a homegrown venture capital firm and one of its investments also includes Little Eye Labs which was the first Indian company to be acquired by Facebook.

In the recent past, other venture capitalist firms that have been in the news due to their investment in growing Indian startups are:

Sequoia Capital- It has reserved more than US $500 million funding for Indian  startups.

Inventus Capital Partners- It plans to invest in internet, cloud computing, software, mobile computing and services-based startups.

SAIF Partners- It has reserved $350 million (around Rs 2,170 crore) for Indian startups. Its recent investments include mobile payments firm Paytm and online ticket booking portal BookMyShow. Its focus is on technology based businesses. It includes 27 investors and plans to invest in sectors like mobile, internet, consumer products, industrials, financial services and IT.

GSF Global- GSF India started investing in India- besed startups in 2012. It has now gone global with the commencement of the Global Accelerator Program and is investing in various startups outside India too.

VentureEast- Venture Capital firm Ventureast has been in the news for raising $150-200 million for its technology-focused fund Ventureast Proactive. It plans to invest more in technology start-ups.