Gemba Capital Ropes In Pratilipi Cofounder Ranjeet Pratap Singh As Advisor

Micro venture capital (VC) firm Gemba Capital has appointed publishing platform Pratilipi’s cofounder and CEO Ranjeet Pratap Singh as its consumer tech venture advisor. 

In a statement, Gemba Capital said that Singh will aid its investment team in evaluating consumer tech deals along with mentoring its portfolio companies.

“His (Singh’s) operating experience further augments our investment capabilities and portfolio value-add. We are super bullish on the consumer tech domain and continue to partner with resilient founders building in this space,” Gemba Capital’s principal Govind Lohia said on the new appointment. 

In July this year, the firm floated its second fund with a target corpus of INR 250 Cr, including a green shoe option of INR 50 Cr. Gemba Capital plans to back 30 seed and pre-seed stage startups in the fintech, consumer tech, and B2B platforms space. 

It is looking to back the startups with an average ticket size of INR 5 Cr and will reserve 30% of the corpus for making follow-on investments.

Founded by Adith Podhar in 2018, Gemba Capital invests in seed and pre-seed startups. It counts startups like Plum, Grip, Threado, Zuper, LightFury Games, Volt Money, MoMoney, Docube, among others, in its portfolio. 

Meanwhile, this would be Singh’s first association with an investment firm. The FMS alumni has been helming the Indian language story-telling platform Pratilipi since 2015. 

Founded by Singh, Sankaranarayanan Devarajan, Rahul Ranjan, and Sahradayi Modi, Pratilipi connects readers and writers in 12 languages, including Tamil, Malayalam, Bengali, Hindi and Marathi. The startup has raised over $80 Mn since inception and counts the likes of Alteria Capital, Nexus Venture Partners and TLabs as its backers.

Pratilipi narrowed its loss by 22% year-on-year (YoY) in FY23 to INR 152.64 Cr. 

The development comes at a time when seed stage funding has been seeing strong growth. Seed stage funding in the Indian startup ecosystem surged 126% to $360 Mn in Q3 2024 from $159 Mn in Q3 2023, as per an Inc42 report.

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