Angel Investor Sanjay Mehta Turns VC With New Venture 100X.VC

An entrepreneur-turned-angel investor, Sanjay Mehta, has invested in more than 130 startups so far across various segments. Mehta has now expanded his horizons with setting up a new venture capital firm called 100X.VC.

In a LinkedIn update, Mehta updated his role as founder and partner of 100X.VC. The firm is looking to invest in early-stage startups and wants to be the first institutional investor in its portfolio companies.

The firm operational in July 2019 has a five-member team: Sanjay Mehta, founder and partner; Ninad Karpe, partner; Yagnesh Sanghrajka, CFO; Shashank Randev, founder VC and Vatsal Kanakiya, CTO.

100X.VC aims to invest in 100 startups every year.  The team said that it goes beyond funding and opens network, expertise and resources that assist founders in crafting a scalable business model. 100X.VC is a sector agnostic fund and will focus its investments in companies across a broad range of industries.

The team has also listed down its approach towards investing in a startups based on five identifiers:

• founding team
• market size opportunity
• business model strength
• unfair advantage, moat
• conviction of a minimum 20x returns.

The ticket size would be between INR 25 Lakh to INR 1 Cr in a startups using India SAFE notes. “iSAFE” stands for India Simple Agreement for Future Equity.  An investor makes cash investment in return for a convertible instrument. To comply with applicable Indian law, iSAFE note takes the legal form of compulsorily convertible preference shares (CCPS) which is convertible on occurrence of specified events.

Mehta and his team have emphasised on iSAFE, noting that the instrument helps the entrepreneurs do away with the need to state pre-money or post money valuation and long agreements.

In a media statement, Mehta said, “Time has now come for us in India to make a huge leap in investing in start-ups, using globally successful models which will lend depth and scale to the VC industry. When startups become part of the 100X.VC ecosystem, they will get all that they truly need. For us, investing in 100 start-ups over the next twelve months is just the beginning.”

After decades of experience in building Indian startup ecosystem, several entrepreneurs as well as venture capital executives have explored venture capital format.

• Flipkart cofounder Sachin Bansal, who exited the company after Walmart-Flipkart deal, launched his new venture – BAC Acquisitions Pvt Ltd – along with his friend Ankit Agarwal to invest in agritech and fintech sector along with other new businesses.
• Delhi-based angel investor Dhianu Das announced the launch of his venture capital fund, Alfa Ventures with a corpus of INR 100 Cr ($14.08 Mn). The fund will be focusing on supporting homegrown early stage startups.
• Flipkart cofounder Binny Bansal along with former McKinsey consultant Saikiran Krishnamurthy launched a Bengaluru-based tech company – XTo10X Technologies – offering technology tools, learning and consulting services to growth-stage startups which are looking to scale up.

According to DataLabs by Inc42, the number of VCs that invested in Indian startups in 2018 fell down to 282 from 315 in 2017.