Inc42 Daily Brief
Stay Ahead With Daily News & Analysis on India’s Tech & Startup Economy
As a part of our series Indian startup Hubs, we have covered some of the amazing startups from the Bangalore startup community. This time we bring you the list of people/organisations who are behind the amazing Bangalore startup ecosystem.
Angel Investors
Pallav Nadhani
Pallav is the co-founder and CEO of Fusion Charts, RazorFlow and is CEO at Collabion, seemingly a serial multi-tasker. He started this company in 2001 as he found himself dissatisfied with Microsoft Excel’s charting capability while completing his high school assignments. The company is a service provider of data visualization products and owing to its success it was included in NASSCOM EMERGE 50 leaders in 2009. He is a graduate from University of Calcutta in Bachelor of Commerce(2002-2005) and Post Graduated from University of Edinburgh in Computer Science(2007-2008). Few of the startups he has invested in includes Plivo, Azoi Inc., iDubba, Shopo.in, Eduora, CarSingh, CapricornGifting, Cropex, Eduora Technologies.
He is the former R&D head of Yahoo! India. Sharad is an evangelist for developing technology product businesses in India and leads in efforts to nurture the ecosystem. He was the chair of the NASSCOM Product Forum and is the co-founder of the iSpirt think-tank. He actively mentors startups, and speaks frequently on industry issues. He is a graduate from Delhi College Of Engineering in Electronic Engineering (1982-1986). Counted among the active angel investors in India, Sharad has been an investors in a number of startups, few of his investments include Frrole, Mobilewalla, HashCube, Kwench Library Solution, Vayavya Labs, Unbxd, Consure Medical, Aurus Network Infotech Pvt. Ltd.
Manish Singhal
Manish is an entrepreneur and an angel investor with technology background. He has over 22 years of operating and advisory experience in different sectors. He has been actively involved in the startup ecosystem in India for couple of years. He had also co-founded LetsVenture.com which is a marketplace for startups and early stage investors in India (enabled 15 startups raising their rounds), later on he moved out of LetsVenture, After doing his engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1992, he has been instrumental in building several products and teams in different startups and established organisations like Sling Media, Ittiam Systems and Motorola. He has experience in building hardware standalone products as well as cloud enabled software products. Few of his angel investments include Ecosense, India College Search, GoCoop, AdSparx, Bluegape, Frrole, FlipClass and AdPushUp.
Venkat Raju
Venkat Raju is an active angel investor and also serves as a mentor & advisor to his investee companies. His current investments cover a wide area spanning Cloud Computing and SaaS, Big Data and Analytics, Mobility and Payments, and next-gen ecommerce. He is an accomplished entrepreneur & seasoned executive with strong business, technology and general management credentials. Most recently, he served as the India Country Head & Managing Director for ACI Worldwide Inc. He has held several roles including as –an Entrepreneur (CEO & Founder of startups backed by Kleiner Perkins, Benchmark Capital etc. in Silicon Valley), an IT Executive (Managing Director & VP positions at Merrill Lynch, Morgan Stanley and Deutsche Bank) in Wall St, Product Executive (GM & SVP Products at VerticalNet in San Francisco), Chief Technologist (Chief Architect for British Telecom in London) and as a Management/Strategy Consultant (owner of a boutique firm focused on Cloud Computing & Saas in New York). He is an alum of Boston University (Management & Business) and Indian Institute of Science (Electrical & Electronics Engineering).
Ganesh Krishnan
Ganesh Krishnan is a serial entrepreneur with four successful green field ventures and exits. Most recently, he founded and led TutorVista which was acquired by US and UK listed education leader Pearson for $ 213 Mn in January 2011. He is a strategic investor / promoter of India based consumer Internet and ecommerce companies bluestone.com (online jewellery), Bigbasket.com (egrocery), MustseeIndia.com (travel packages and content), bookadda.com (academic focused online books) and delyver.com (hyper local delivery). His earlier venture, CustomerAsset was started in mid 2000 and later acquired by ICICI (NYSE listed, India’s largest bank) and is now publicly listed in India as First Source Solutions. He is also on the Board of Governors of Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta and has a post-graduate degree from the Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta, and a degree in Mechanical Engineering from Delhi University.
Ravi Gururaj
Ravi Gururaj is a serial entrepreneur with 5 ventures and 2 public exits, an angel investor, a mentor to numerous entrepreneurs, technology executive, and ecosystem evangelist. He is Chairman & Co-Founder of Frictionless Ventures where he is building and investing in innovative software products primarily in the cloud, mobile, and big data segments. Over his 25-year career, Ravi has held wide ranging roles including promoting an STPI unit exporting software components out of India, product management at Intel, served as Managing Director of the Trilogy Software’s India engineering center, and founded multiple successful software product ventures two of which were acquired by public NASDAQ listed US technology companies. He received his MBA with high distinction as a Baker Scholar from Harvard Business School and is a graduate with honors as Benjamin Franklin Scholar from the University of Pennsylvania in the Management and Technology (M&T) program, receiving a B.S.E. in Computer Science & Engineering from the Moore School and a B.Sc. in Finance from the Wharton School. Few of his investments include GrexIt, Socialblood.org, Tookitaki, Graymatics, PrettySecrets, Explara, myNoticePeriod.com, SyncUsUp and few others.
Amit Gupta
Amit Gupta has been a serial entrepreneur, prior to co-founding InMobi, he founded Analyticsworks, a company that offered a platform for business intelligence. His professional experience includes startups like Andale where worked directly with the CEO to help initiate new areas of revenues for the company. Amit has been helping several young entrepreneurs by advising them on every aspect of running a startup. He has received a highly coveted Distinguish Alumni Award from his alma mater for his exceptional entrepreneurial achievements. Amit completed his undergraduate studies from Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur in Mechanical Engineering in the year 2000. He is also an investor in Tagtile, Admission Table, SlideRule, GetAt, Plustxt.
Ravi Trivedi
Ravi Trivedi is the founder of Srijan Capital, which is focused on angel investments and hands-on incubation. He has been a board observer and board member for several startups in his portfolio. He is a Mentor for IIM-A’s iAccelerator, and Microsoft Accelerator. He is also an hands-on Digital Marketer with experience in running online businesses. His investments include – Explara, Tookitaki, Mechmocha, Collatebox, Venturesity, and CouponRani. Prior to this, he worked as a Principal at Southeast Interactive Technology Funds, an early stage technology venture capital fund in North Carolina, USA. Before Southeast Interactive Technology Funds, he worked as an Equity Analyst with Bank of America, where he covered companies over $120Bn in market capitalization. He started his career as a software engineer at Hewlett Packard and has global cross-functional experience in leading and managing technology functions. Ravi co-authored the book Web Services Security, and participated in creating web services standards. Ravi completed his MBA from Duke University, Fuqua School of Business and has a Masters in Computer Science from Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore.
Phanindra Sama
Phanindra Sama had founded RedBus – online bus ticket booking service in 2005. He hails from Nizamabad, Andhra Pradesh and founded RedBus in 2005, which is currently the largest network of bus operators (350+ and growing). Phanindra received his Electrical Engineering degree from BITS Pilani and Post- Graduation from Indian Institute of Science. He has been active angel investor in the Indian startup scene. A few of his investments include InnovAccer, Venturesity and ShieldSquare, he also offers mentorship to startups or aspiring entrepreneurs, both in his personal capacity, as well as through Kakatiya Sandbox – a platform encouraging entrepreneurship and social innovations. He was also a mentor for the Entrepreneur in Residence programme by Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, his alma mater.
Alok Goel
Alok is the CEO of FreeCharge.in, and was a COO of redBus.in, India’s largest online bus ticket booking website. He lead business for India’s hottest startup and played key role in largest tech exit in startup space with acquisition of redbus.in by Naspers India. He is also responsible for P&L, Business Strategy, Product, Marketing, Operations. With 13 years of experience, Alok has a rich product management experience from Google, Adobe. Before redBus.in, he was global Product Management lead for Google Display Network and was responsible for relaunch of Google’s flagship display ad product – AdSense. Prior to that, Alok was head of Search & Mobile products for Google India where he played a key role in growing mobile Internet ecosystem across India. As of now, he has invested in an angel round funding in Intruo.com.
Founder of Flipkart, Sachin have been seen actively investing in Indian startups. Sachin is a IIT-Delhi alumni and has invested in numerous startups including Ather, TouchTalent, Roposo, NewsInShorts, MadRat Games, Spoonjoy.
Naveen Tewari started mKhoj, a local mobile search firm but later pivoted to a mobile advertising network with a global model which is well known as InMobi. He is also the founder and chairman of India SchoolHouse Fund, a nonprofit enterprise that works to ensure effective delivery of education in poor rural areas of India. He didn’t stop at this and now he uses his spare time to mentor entrepreneurs and invest in startups. He is investor in tushky, moneysights, Mettl and LetsVenture
Meena Ganesh
Meena Ganesh is an entrepreneur and CEO of Portea Medical which is a provider of home healthcare services in India. The husband-wife duo has a midas touch which is evident in the four startups where they invested and then successfully exited as well as their angel investments which went on to raise subsequent VC rounds.
Amit Somani is an Advisory Board Member and Chief Products Officer for MakeMyTrip, heading the online product portfolio along with User Experience and Content. He has worked with Google and IBM where he was the head of Mobile Products for Google in Asia-Pacific region and Director for the Enterprise Search and Discovery business at IBM based out of California. Phone Warrior Inc, Qikwell Technologies India, MindTickle, HotelTravel.com and Ixigo.com are few startups he is part of.
Mentors
Sampad Swain
Sampad Swain is the co-founder and CEO of Instamojo.com, a startup that democratises digital payments for individuals, micro-merchants, infopreneurs, freelancers, SMBs etc with its innovative P2P commerce platform where anyone can collect payments by simply sharing a URL/link over SMS, email, blogs or even social networks. Previously, he was the co-founder of Wanamo, a marketing platform for hyperlocal SMBs which was later acquired by DealsAndYou. Prior to his startup experience, Sampad had worked at multinationals like ITC, Godrej and BrandPotion (Times Group). Sampad has a degree in electronics engineering and an MBA.
Bal Krishn Birla had co-founded ZopNow along with Mukesh Singh in September 2011. Birla is now the CTO of Asklaila, and also the founder of a startup called Adalbadal. He had earlier worked at companies like Amazon, Infosys, Arcot and Potluck Restaurant, and holds a B Tech degree in computer science from IIT Kanpur.
Santosh Panda
Santosh Panda has done his engineering in Industrial & Production but picked up a career in Software Engineering. Santosh has zeal to perform something different and think out of box. In his career tenure he has led B2B products for FTSE 100 companies and startups in London, Helsinki, Los Angeles and Bangalore. His fervor to live globally and work for global products/companies influenced him to be the founder of world class ‘Event Platform-Explara’, which is an aggregator of ticketing-registration, event communities and event apps.
Rohith Veerajappa
Rohith Veerajappa is the co-founder of WowLabz, which was founded in 2011. He has completed his B.Tech from Visvesvaraya Technological University, Karnatka. Prior to opening his own venture he has worked for about 3 years as a Developer for TCS.
Robin Dhanwani
He is the founder of UI/UX Design Lab, Parallel Labs Ltd. He completed his BE in Computer Science at Sinhgad Academy of Engineering in 2009. Starting his career with user generated content startup SadakMap Robin undertook projects on UI/UX Design for event ticketing platform explara.com and FunMango Web and Mobile Apps. In is carreer tenure he has also worked as an Web and Communication executive at National Institute of Securities Markets.
Seshadri Krishnan
Seshadri Krishnan brings his 20 years of experience in his startup Trip38. He actively works with startups as a mentor and also focuses on product-market fit, product strategy, business model and technology strategy etc in the areas of Consumer internet, Mobile Apps, Travel, Ecommerce etc. He is also a charter member of TiE Bangalore and mentor startups as part of NASSCOM, TLabs and other initiatives. He has also been a co-founder of holiday trip planning and destination experience startup iVinca.
Sudhir Verma
Rather than an entrepreneur Sudhir Verma tags himself as SalesPreneur. He is the founder of travel startup Avanturas.com along with a co-founder of cloud based asset tagging and asset tracking service TagBug.me.
Rajiv Mukherjee
Rajiv is a co-founder at First100Sales. FHS is a platform that brings the entrepreneurial ecosystem together to enable aspiring and early stage entrepreneurs to seed their business. Rajiv fosters student entrepreneurship by co-incubating with corporates. Prior to his venture, he has enabled MNCs in India to look at augmenting their technical execution with business focus at Institute of Product Leadership. He even has the like for cricket and represented India for International Primary School Cricket tournament in Australia in 1997.
Sairam Krishnan
Sairam has helped a few startups incubated by TLabs with is inbound and content marketing efforts. He completed his Bachelor’s Degree in Electronics and Communication Engineering from Pondicherry University, moving further to his Master of Business Administration (M.B.A.) in Marketing at Amrita School of Business, Tamil Nadu. Sairam was Product Marketing Manager at Freshdesk Inc., prior to which he headed the same position at iYogi. Based out in Chennai, Sairam is a person who is happy to help startups at any time.
Amit Singh
Amit Singh is co-founder and director of Headstart Network Foundation and Founder of Wow Labz, a turnkey mobile and web app development company based out of Bangalore. Amit is the recipient of the Paragon Fellowship by FYSE, China which recognizes 100 young social change makers in Asia Pacific for his work at Headstart. He started his career with Subex and moved on as Executive Director with Vinfinet Technologies. His past ventures, also include Progressive Politics, a new age branding company that provided powerful branding solutions to political parties and canvassing solutions to political leaders over TV, Mobile and the Internet, before he founded the WOW Group. Amit is a BE from CMR Institute of Technology, Bangalore and is passionate about encouraging people to believe in their dreams and making them happen.
Amit Kumar Mishra
Widely known as “Techenveshi”; Amit is the founder & CEO of Dazeinfo, which is a “Research & Analysis” media & marketing firms committed to expose the true insights and startling inside of Tech Industry. After serving many renowned brands with best of skills and potential, he plunged into Entrepreneurship bandwagon in 2011. He carries more than 85,000 man hours of working experience with multiple global brands like LG, Polaris, ORG telecom etc. Amit’s passion of reading, participation in corporate debates, industry analysis, industry research and doing ‘witch-hunt’ of untold & unexplored stories gave him wings only to establish Dazeinfo. During his 10+ years of Industry experience, he explored different geographies to understand the potential of future technologies and to adopt the versatility in computing. He is also a profound speaker, aggressive explorer, tech enthusiast, columnist and mentor (only for few).
Ashish Sinha
Ashish Singh is the founder of NextBigWhat.com (earlier called Pluggd.in). In his earlier avatar, he was a business consultant, a Product Manager and an engineer. Currently he helps startups/SMBs in defining product strategy, connect startups with angel investors VCs and helps them grow.
Shradha Sharma is the founder of YourStory, which she found as a therapy for her own soul 6 years back and has lived, dreamt, learnt and re-learnt through stories that entrepreneurs have so passionately shared with her in the last half decade. Her prior mainstream media experience at CNBC and Times of India gave her an understanding of how media businesses run, what works and what doesn’t.
Ravi Narayan
Ravi is a pioneer in the Venture Catalyst space in India. He founded Venture Catalyst / Mentoring firm to develop world-class product companies from India for the global markets, specializing in Consumer Internet, Mobile, Software, and SMB solutions. Named as Mentor Partners is focussed not only on providing capital, but also execution support and business development help to its portfolio companies. He is a seasoned executive with more than 20 years of experience building high performance teams that collaborate across various functions to consistently execute for sustainable results. He has taken companies from startup to growth to exit, several times both in the US and India. He is a founding chair of PAN-IIT in Washington DC, TiE Entrepreneurial Summit (TES) in Bangalore and the NASSCOM’s Product Conclave in Bangalore.
Ahimanikya Satapathy
Ahimanikya is the founder and CEO of DocEngage (healthcare CRM), and is a visionary leader and entrepreneur with 20 years of successful global management experience in the enterprise solutions marketplace with excellent product vision, strategy and development skills, combined with in-depth technology knowledge and strong customer facing skills and experience. He has a leadership ability, with an inclusive style of managing and has been creating, marketing and selling enterprise software products and services with profitable customer relationships. Ahimanikya has also built high-performance, culturally diverse and geographically distributed global teams by fostering open communication, empowerment, reduction in hierarchy.
Karthik Padmanabhan
Karthik is responsible for scaling the IBM Cloud Ecosystem in Asia Pacific. Executing strategies and program through GEO teams to win the hearts and souls of cloud developers in AP. Executing “Digital Cities” program to scale Startup and Entrepreneurship ecosystem in Top 10 cities across AP. Prior to this Karthik was responsible for growing the IBM Social Business and Collaboration Solution for IBM Software in India /SA. Karthik’s previous assignment was in the education space, where he was responsible for student acquisition as Director, ThinkVarsity IT Career School. He was with Microsoft India as Director – Partnerships. In all Karthik has over 24 years IT Industry experience with cos. like Wipro Infotech (4 yrs), Tata IBM ( 4 yrs) and Microsoft (10 yrs), ThinkVarsity (2 yrs). Karthik’s core professional experience spans across sales / channel management, strategic partnerships, business operations, education management, product management / marketing, project management, P&L ownership, people management, coaching and counseling.
Sudip Dutta
Sudip is a founder of Relatas, He has spent close to 15 years with fast-growing businesses across international markets. He has also co-founded 2 other companies – Aporv and BITSAA Int., he worked on entire product development of a CRM system for a Billion dollar organisation. Sudip loves working with Internet, mobile and software ventures and has been featured in CNBC, Entrepreneur magazine, Mint (WSJ), Economic Times, Business India, ETNow etc. He is a TEDx speaker and an invited speaker to Business Schools and entrepreneurship forums.
Pratibha Shastry
Pratibha is an entrepreneur and has founded Prathibha Sastry Academy of Women Entrepreneurs and has also co-founded JiniLabs. In a career spanning over 16 years, she has launched a film magazine, hosted a film-based radio talk show, and as entertainment evolved courtesy the influx of technology, and kept pace and co-founded a mobile app based on the Indian entertainment industry. Being a seasoned entrepreneur, she enjoys working with startups used to manage an ecosystem of entrepreneurs, mentors, investors and Customers/Partners for Organisations like Microsoft Ventures, and for Pluggd.in, in addition to promoting women entrepreneurs in India through her activities with PS Academy and other ecosystem partners.
Ajit Yohannan
Ajit Yohannan is a passionate Ecosystem supporter. Ajit feels there are more people required who can bring in the much needed industry support to the Startup Ecosystem. He has been deeply involved with IBM Bluemix awareness and adoption in Bangalore. Last two years he has worked extensively working with the other ecosystem partners to bring in developer and startup engagement be it in the form of Startup Night, Hackathons or Meetups. A true bangalorean, he feels the current energy and action in the startup ecosystem in bangalore is just a tip of an ice berg and there is lot to be desired from technology and management professional in Bangalore to support and nurture new path breaking ideas from young startups.
Gaurav Arora
Gaurav currently heads APAC region for Startup and VC Ecosystem for Amazon Web Services. Prior to that, he was an investment professional with Prime Ventures.
Sijo Kuruvilla George
Sijo is passionate about technology and entrepreneurship, and had founded Startup Village. He has a management consulting experience with the two of the Big4’s, PwC and Deloitte. As a consultant with the Strategy and Operations practice, he has also advised various public and private sector institutions on strategy, business plan, PPP, project feasibility, governance and urban infrastructure. Fresh out of college and after a very brief stint with technology major Infosys, Sijo along with a few friends founded MobME, a young and vibrant startup in the Mobile VAS space. Other than these, he also speaks at college events and conferences in effort to evangelize technology and entrepreneurship. Also, he mentor students, young professionals, entrepreneurs and startups on various aspects related to business and productivity.
Accelerators and Incubators
Tlabs
TLabs, a Times Internet Ltd. initiative, is an accelerator in India that operates a 4 month program with 60+ mentors supporting the companies that become part of it. TLabs had launched its accelerator in Bangalore a few months back. With 6 Batches and 36 startup being accelerated uptill now, TLabs has seen a tremendous success rate with over 65% of the companies getting funded raising over $200k investments per team. It offers USD 50K in investment for 8% equity and over $100k worth of free tech tools and infrastructure support.
Kyron
Kyron is a next gen global business accelerator for ultra early stage technology startups. The Bangalore based accelerator offers a 4 month residential business intensive program for entrepreneurial teams to take their business idea to a whole new level. If already in business, then they work with startup to scale it up and penetrate into the global markets.
NASSCOM – 10000 Startups
10,000 Startups is an initiative of NASSCOM to support technology entrepreneurship in the country. It is India’s most ambitious startup program which was launched to massively scale up the Indian Startup ecosystem. Their aim is to successfully impact 10,000 Tech startups in the next 10 years. 10,000 Startups is supported by Google, Microsoft, Kotak and Verisign.
Microsoft ventures
Microsoft Ventures is a global initiative empowering entrepreneurs around the world. They work with startups at every stage of maturity to provide the tools, resources, knowledge and expertise they need to succeed. Their aim is to help startups scale their business, bring innovative services to market, and reach new customers. Their primary vehicle to empower startups is through their mentor-driven accelerator program designed to help top entrepreneurs get through the challenges of building a sustainable business, gaining customers, and scaling to global markets.
Investment Firms
GrowthStory
GrowthStory is founded by Krishna Ganesh and Meena Ganesh, in an attempt to help each and every startup become a large growth company that generates tons of jobs and makes a difference in our lives. Startups funded by Growthstory include BigBasket, Bluestone, AVAGMAH Education, FlipClass, Delyver, Must See India, Online Prasad among others.
Unitus seed fund
Unitus Seed Fund is the leading seed venture fund supporting startups innovating for the masses in India. Unitus is backed by multiple leadership investors including T.V. Mohandas Pai, Dr. Ranjan Pai, Vinod Khosla, Bill Gates, Steve Singh, Desh Deshpande, Romesh Wadhwani, Michael Dell, Hemendra Kothari and more. Unitus invests in multiple sectors including healthcare, education, mobile commerce, marketplaces & ecommerce, retail & distribution, agriculture, and water & energy. Based in Bangalore and Seattle, Unitus Seed Fund is led by partners Dave Richards, Will Poole, Srikrishna Ramamoorthy, Ravi Venkatesan & Srikanth Iyer. Few of the organisations they have invested in includes, Caravan, Blowhorn, Milaap mGaadi and others.
Accel Partners
Accel Partners is a global venture capital firm with offices located in Silicon Valley, New York, London, China, and India. They typically make multi-stage investments in internet technology companies. A few of Accel’s recent investments include FabHotels, Freshdesk, Chargebee, among others.
Sequoia Capital
Sequoia Capital have been an active investor in a number of Indian startups and have been seen pretty active in the Bangalore startup ecosystem. A few of its investments include Zoomcar India, Akosha, Percolate Pocket Gems and many more.
Kalaari Capital
Kalaari Capital is a $160 Mn venture capital fund with a strong advisory team in Bangalore investing in early stage, technology-oriented companies in India. They have made investments in around 26 companies which include Urban Ladder, Simplilearn, 99Games Online Private Limited and Truweight.
Rebright Partners
Tokyo and Singapore-based VC firm, Rebright Partners had entered the Indian market last year and has recently launched a $20 Mn India specific fund. The fund plans to invest in seed to early stage startups revamping its India operations. Brij Bhasin, is leading the VC firm’s activities in India.
Helion Venture Partners
Helion Venture Partners is a $605 Mn stage independent, India-focused venture fund, investing in high growth technology powered and consumer service businesses in sectors like Outsourcing, Internet, Mobile, Technology Products, Retail Services, Healthcare, Education and Financial Services. Few of their investments include Axtria, ZapStitch, Toppr and QuickoLabs
Nexus Venture Partners
Nexus Venture Partners invests in early stage companies and has offices in India and Silicon Valley. It has over $600 Mn under management and an active portfolio of over 50 companies across technology, internet, media, consumer, business services sectors. The Nexus team plays an active role in helping entrepreneurs and management teams build market leading businesses. Some of the companies that Nexus has invested in India include, Pubmatic, Snapdeal, MapMyindia, Netmagic (acquired by NTT) and Bigshoebazaar.
IDG Ventures India
IDG Ventures India is an India-focused technology venture capital fund. The fund is part of IDG Ventures, a global network of technology venture funds with more than $4 Bn under management, over 200 investee companies and 10 offices across Asia and North America. Few of India-based companies that IDG has invested in include Adadyn, Apalya Technologies, Aujas Networks and eShakti.
Ventureast
Ventureast is a pioneering Indian venture capital firm with close to $300 Mn under management. Ventureast Tenet Fund is the first-of-its-kind Co-creation Venture Capital fund focused on disruptive technology (Cloud, Mobile and Internet), and technology-enabled services startups in the Healthcare, Financial Services and Education sectors. They partner early on, at seed stage in global and domestic successes. Some of the companies that Ventureast has invested in include MediAngels, OneBreath, Little Eye Labs and SmartRx.
Inventus Capital
Inventus Capital Partners is a US-India venture firm managed by successful entrepreneurs and industry operating veterans who have guided and financed nearly 100 entrepreneurs with operations in India and/or Silicon Valley. The firm has financed and guided over 120 founding teams to dozens of successful IPOs or acquisitions, creating over $30 Bn in aggregate wealth for founders and shareholders. Their recent successes include redBus (acquired by Naspers, 2013), ViVu (acquired by Polycom, 2011) and Sierra Atlantic (acquired by Hitachi Consulting, 2010). Few companies that this firm has invested in includes Credit Sesame, Poshmark, Aasaanjobs and SysCloud
Qualcomm Ventures
Qualcomm Ventures is the investment arm of Qualcomm Inc. A Fortune 500 company with operations across the globe. In India Qualcomm has invested in startups including Portea Medical, Birds Eye System, ZopNow, Housing among others.
Ojas Ventures
Orios Venture
Orios Venture Partners is an early stage venture fund which primarily invests in software and technology enabled startups. Orios works closely with companies they invest in to scale them rapidly. A testament to this is that Orios has relocated 4 Indian investee companies to Silicon Valley to greatly accelerate their growth. Few companies they have invested in includes ZapStitch, Taskbob, Yumist, Ziffi and PrettySecrets.
Khosla Ventures
Khosla Ventures is a venture capital firm run by people who listen to, analyze, and advise entrepreneurs. The firm started in 2004 by Vinod Khosla, Co-Founder of Sun Microsystems and aims on environmentally friendly technologies in addition to the traditional venture areas such as the Internet, computing, mobile and silicon technology arenas. They manage a main fund that supports early- and late-stage investments and a seed fund for developing very early-stage experiments. Some of the companies they have invested in includes Smarking, Zenefits, Affirm, MyTime and Color Genomics.
Matrix Partners
Matrix Partners was established in 1977 and has invested funds across mobile internet, consumer and healthcare sectors. The VC firm manages over INR 3,000 Cr. dedicated funds in India. Till date it has invested in genre of startups like Newshunt, Stayzilla, Practo, Quikr and Ola. This also includes Powai-based startups like TinyOwl, which saw an investment of INR 100 Cr. along with other investors and Purple Squirrel, that was recently funded with an undisclosed amount. Last month, Matrix Partners opened up its second office in Bangalore.
Angelprime
AngelPrime does not only provide needed seed funding but also a deep involvement and access to an unparalleled network of global entrepreneurs to catapult startups to the next phase of growth. Some of their investments include ZipDial (recently acquired by Twitter), Ezetap (Mobile PoS for your smartphone), SmartOwner (Real-Estate crowdsourcing), HackerEarth (Big data for online recruiting) and Nimble Wireless (Internet of Things) and few others. The Managing Partners, Shripati Acharya, Sanjay Swamy, Bala Parthasarthy and Amit Somani all have distinguished careers and bring deep experience in entrepreneurship and early stage investing. AngelPrime is backed by Social+Capital Partnership, Mayfield Fund, Jerry Yang and other marquee investors from around the world.
Investment firm Harvard Angel Network and and Venture Capital firm Blume Ventures are also pretty active in the Bangalore ecosystem.
Coworking Spaces
Jaaga
Jaaga is a community arts and technology space in central Bangalore. They provide coworking facilities to young tech startups, research fellowships, and meeting space to community service organizations.
BHiVE Workspace offers coworking spaces in Bangalore.It provide an ecosystem for entrepreneurs and startups to take their ideas to the next level. The BHiVE Team adds value by enabling the startup community to coWork, connect, contribute, collaborate, communicate and commercialize their ideas.
Tech Hub
TechHub creates spaces around the world for tech entrepreneurs to meet, work, learn and collaborate, and runs a load of great events, advice sessions and more. They provide physical and virtual spaces that enable technology startups to work smarter, develop faster and increase their chance of success. Entrepreneurs and their teams drop in or set up shop, advice flows freely (so does beer and pizza), angels appear, relationships blossom, and the likes of Jimmy Wales or Eric Ries may even pop in for a chat.
Bangalore Alpha Lab
Bangalore Alpha Lab (BAL) is a vibrant community of entrepreneurs coming together to interact and communicate ideas while they launch their startups at BAL Space. The culture has been carefully cultivated to create an environment where members keep each other inspired, motivated and help each other to move forward. BAL Incubation provides the best possible shape and support for startups from ideation, forming the company till becoming a viable business.
Bangalore Coworking Hub
Bangalore Coworking Hub is a startup accelerator, coworking platform, shared office space located in a prime locality in HAL 3rd Stage, Bangalore. They seek to improve the lives and productivity of independent workers by providing a great platform for networking and collaboration.
CoWork Cafe
CoWork Cafe provides calm, inspiring, ready to use workspace that has everything you need to grow your venture and be successful, including super fast Internet, conference rooms, and IT services. Their quirky, fun workspaces are your home away from home. Members have access to these amenities all day. They run in India, US and UK shifts. CoWork Cafe is dedicated to providing the most relevant and valuable services available to their members. They are dedicated to working closely with the partners to provide services and benefits that will make a difference.
Organisations
LetsVenture is an online platform for startups and investors to facilitate angel and seed investments. It connects startups with investors and startup programs as well. Last year, $ 6.5 Mn was raised on LetsVenture’s platform across 23 deals and 4900+ connections were made.
Bangalore Startups
With more than 50k members, Bangalore Startups is an active community helping the entrepreneurs and aspiring entrepreneurs. The group allows people from different domains to brainstorm their idea, seek help to remove road blocks, share articles, sort feedbacks and if possible get early adopters for their startups.
Headstart Network Foundation is the largest network of early stage startups in India. It facilitates entrepreneurial learning, hiring, marketing insights and peer mentoring amongst the Startups and addresses their issues through initiatives such as: Headstart Startup Saturdays, Headstart Higher, Headstart Cofounder Search Program, Headstart Hackerspace and Headstart Club.
[Don’t worry if we missed out anyone, we will keep on updating the list.]
[Special thanks to Ravi Trivedi and Amit Mishra who helped us in putting together this list]
{{#name}}{{name}}{{/name}}{{^name}}-{{/name}}
{{#description}}{{description}}...{{/description}}{{^description}}-{{/description}}
.svg){kind=logo}
Note: We at Inc42 take our ethics very seriously. More information about it can be found here.