DeVC

Hello Bangalore👋 it has been a while! We've got a small surprise lined up for this Thursday evening: A (very) well known global Product Management coach is dropping by our office in Indiranagar to do a short session on every Product Management. The session will be moderated by our MD Aakash who built large Product orgs at Hotstar & Housing before becoming a VC. We're opening this session for founders & PMs (esp. those who want to start up soon!) Some of the topics we will cover include (1) How is Community the new Growth engine? (2) Why is Trust even more important today? (3) Metrics That Matter (4) The PM role post Gen-AI (5) How should founders approach hiring their 1st PM Event details below ⤵️ #india #startups

Excited to share that our portfolio company Apptile has raised $1.2M in additional financing 🥳 This round was led by Singularity Early Opportunities Fund with participation from Crown Trust, us (DeVC) and select Angels Apptile allows companies, brands & creators to build visually appealing & highly performant mobile applications in minutes. Over 300 organizations use the product to manage their websites & run marketing campaigns to drive traffic. Apptile has a stellar founders: CPO Vishal was a Product lead at Apple and Amazon in the USA. CTO Samyam has worked at Adobe, Microsoft, TambdaTest & other high performing engineering organizations. CEO Rohit worked at Amazon before spending 9 years building Livspace with Ramakant Sharma (Livspace founder & DeVC Collective member). We wish the Rohit, Samyam, Vishal and team the very best for their journey 🙏 #startups #india #venturecapital

Hello Bangalore 👋 After a ~2 month hiatus from Bangalore — we’re back for the DeVC DugOut — and in a BIG way! We’ve partnered with Grayscale Ventures who are hosting the Magicball AI Week in Bangalore. We will be hosting the Friday closing panel with a terrific line-up of speakers: (1) Paras Chopra -- Founder, Turing’s Dream and Wingify (2) Soumyadeep Mukherjee -- Co-Founder & Engineer @ Dashtoon (3) Aakash Kumar – Managing Director, DeVC All 3 of the panelists are deeply embedded in the world of AI — as builders, investors & operators. They will speak about the emerging frontiers of AI (especially how Indian startups can capitalize on the AI application boom) Post the panel discussion, we will also host a networking session over dinner & drinks for founders, operators & builders to get to know each other better Note: This event is heavily oversubscribed (we have ~100 seats available with ~300 registrations) and will be by invite only. Logistics: 📅Date: 4th October (this Friday) 📍Location: DeVC BLR Office ⏰ Time: 6:00 PM onwards ➡ RSVP on Luma: https://lu.ma/r5vltdx3 Looking forward to seeing you there 🙏 #startups #india #ai

🦅 DeVC is excited to share that Mohit Sadaani, Founder of The Moms Co, has joined us as Managing Director in our Gurgaon office. After an extensive stint at McKinsey & Co, Mohit stepped into the startup world by joining Snapdeal as VP-Growth. In 2016, Mohit partnered with his wife to start The Moms Co back when D2C was unknown as a startup category. The company was subsequently acquired for ₹500 crore in 2021 by Good Glamm Group— India’s largest D2C exit back then. Post his exit, Mohit began his investing journey — today he has 30+ Angel investments. We have had a long association with Mohit — he initially was a member of the DeVC Collective. After making 10 investments with DeVC, Mohit decided to spend his time mentoring founders full time. At DeVC, we live by the mantra:‘For Founders, By Founders.’ Our entire team has launched companies, faced failure, scaled against the odds, and exited on both good and bad terms. When we say we understand the founder journey, it’s because we’ve lived it. And, Mohit is a prime example of this. Please join us in welcoming Mohit to DeVC 🙏 #startups #india #venturecapital

कसा काय, मुंबई 🙏 We are coming back to town on Friday (27th Sept) to host a DugOut session on building AI Applications for India. The panelists for this discussion are: (1) Aakrit Vaish — Advisor on AI to MeitY, Founder of Haptik & peercheque (2) Tanuj Bhojwani — Head of People+ai (3) Aakash Kumar — MD @ Z47 (fka Matrix Partners India) All 3 of the panelists have been founders (on more than one occasion) and will provide a 360* perspective on building AI applications from & for India —> they will cover AI from the lens of investing, tinkering, building (for public good) and public policy. Post the panel discussion, we will also host a networking session over dinner & drinks for founders, operators & builders to get to know each other better Logistics: 📅Date: 27th September (this Friday) 📍Location: WeWork, BKC ⏰ Time: 7:30 PM onwards ➡ RSVP on Luma: https://lu.ma/wmqpvcyv We've continued our partnership with WeWork India Labs (Arvind Radhakrishnan, Aniket, Shenjit, Mohini and Karishma) & are grateful for their help Looking forward to seeing you there 🙏 #startups #india #ai

We are excited to share that our portfolio company Crackle Tech has raised a $1.7M pre-Seed funding round 🙌 Crackle was founded in Oct ‘23 by 3 former Google executives - Harsh Mittal, Shashank Dudeja and Jaivir Nagi This round was co-led by We Founder Circle and AC Ventures with participation from us (DeVC) and select Angel investors. Crackle Technologies was started with the aim to helping mobile app publishers (gaming, OTT, news etc) improve their monetization using AI to optimize ad placement, conversion & slot pricing. Our thesis for investing in Crackle was quite clear at the outset: 1️⃣ Founders - All 3 co-founders have extensive experience working with Google’s ad platform, network & client base - They have seen the evolution of mobile advertising & ad networks over the past decade; this gives them a birds eye view of the future (which they now seek to build) 2️⃣ Network validation - Virendra Gupta from DailyHunt and Siddharth Jain from PlaySimple were extremely positive on the team, approach & timing - Both are members of the DeVC Collective; their validation & inputs into the decision making process were critical in our evaluation 3️⃣ Market & Timing - AdTech as a category is poised to grow at ~25% CAGR for the rest of this decade as companies ramp up their marketing spend through digital channels - Right now, the process of optimizing ad inventory is still rudimentary (from a publisher lens) and there is scope to extract efficiency using AI We wish the Crackle team the very best for their journey 🚀 #startups #india #venturecapital

Hello Delhi 👋 We are super excited to bring our DugOut series to town on 20th September 2024 (i.e. this Friday) We recently visited Mumbai and hosted our DugOut at WeWork with Shashank (Whole Truth Foods), Aniket (Bizongo), Romita(Foxtale) & Arjun (Dr Vaidya’s).. the event was a smashing success — we had over 150 founders show up & security had to (literally) escort everyone out at 11 PM Mohit Sadaani (Founder of The Moms Co) asked us: “So you folks do Bangalore every week, you’ve done Mumbai now — when do I see you in NCR?” Therefore, Mohit has banded together with members of the DeVC Collective in NCR to bring an evening full of real & unvarnished conversations about the 0-1 journey of company building. We will have ~5 separate roundtables on the evening which will be led by members of the DeVC Collective: (1) Mohit Sadaani (Co-Founder of The Moms Co) (2) Amit Lakhotia (Co-Founder & CEO of Park+) (3) Vasant Sridhar (Co-Founder of OfBusiness) (4) Nitin Jain (Co-Founder & CBO of OfBusiness) (5) Sachin Gupta (Co-Founder & CEO of Probo) & a few more surprise guests who will be there at the venue This is an ideal opportunity for NCR-based founders at the 0-1 stage of their journey to ask questions & learn from founders who have scaled their companies across various sectors (Consumer Brands, B2B marketplaces & FinTech) Logistics: 📅Date: 20th September (this Friday) 📍Location: One Horizon Center ⏰ Time: 7:30 PM onwards Please register via the link below ⤵️and if approved you shall receive a confirmation mail. ➡️Register here: https://lu.ma/l0iy387j #startups #india #venturecapital

Excited to share that our portfolio company Answers AI has raised a $1.5M pre-Seed funding round In a short span of time, AnswersAi has crossed 350K lifetime users and answered 2 million user questions. They have also scaled their online presence to 200K followers and 150 million cumulative views. This pre-Seed round was led by Array Ventures with participation from the Dorm Room Fund, Courtyard Ventures, California Innovation Fund & us (DeVC) Our thesis behind this investment was based on 3 pillars: (1) Phenomenal Founder Market Fit  🤝 - Mamoun Debbagh & Brianna Wilburn are market wizards especially on short format video channels like TikTok due to their past experience - Siddhant Satapathy & Shubhan Dua bring the Tech chops & empathy to the student’s problem statement; in their own words: “We recognized the challenges higher learning had once we were stuck in Office Hour lines at Berkeley for over 4 hours.” (2) Early traction (product & GTM) 📈 - The high level metrics were shared above - The “hero” feature is their ‘SnapSolve’ mode which can convert illegible handwriting into readable text (super useful for students copying notes from peers OR taking lecture notes from the whiteboard) (3) Problem statement resonance 😅 - Soumitra Sharma, a member of the DeVC Collective, had incredibly positive views on the approach, problem statement & team - Divyanshi from our team summarized this by saying: “Their student-first platform breaks away from the rigid, traditional models. Instead of simply ingesting and spitting basic info, they leverage multimodal tech to craft a more interactive and personalized learning experience.” ➡ Most of us have struggled at some point with a particular subject / topic / lecture at University —> Answers AI is the tutor we wish to have had — patient, available & personalized. Wishing them the very best for their journey 🙏 #startups #venturecapital

कसा काय, मुंबई 🙏 We are super excited to bring our DugOut series to town on 2nd September 2024 (i.e. coming Monday) After running the DugOut for 14 consecutive weeks in Bangalore, our DeVC Collective members based in Mumbai told us “Why should Bangalore have all the fun & learnings?” Therefore, they’ve banded together to bring an evening full of real & unvarnished conversations about the 0-1 journey of company building We will have ~7 separate roundtables on the evening which will be led by: members of the DeVC Collective: (1) Shashank Mehta – Founder & CEO of The Whole Truth Foods (2) Mohit Sadaani – Co-Founder of The Moms Co (3) Arjun Vaidya – Co-Founder of V3 Ventures and Dr Vaidya’s (4) Aakrit Vaish – Co-Founder & CEO of Haptik | Managing Partner at Peercheque (5) Aniket Deb – Co-Founder & COO of Bizongo (6) Aakash Kumar – MD at Z47 | 2x Founder (7) Romita Mazumdar - Founder & CEO of Foxtale & a few more surprise guests who will be there at the venue This is an ideal opportunity for Mumbai-based founders at the 0-1 stage of their journey to ask questions & learn from founders who have scaled their companies across various sectors (Consumer Brands, SaaS and B2B marketplaces) Logistics: 📅Date: 2nd September (coming Monday) 📍Location: WeWork BKC ⏰ Time: 7:30 PM onwards Note: This is an invite only event. Please register via the link below ⤵️and if approved you shall receive a confirmation mail. ➡️Please register here: https://lu.ma/w88tnbio We’ve partnered with WeWork India Labs ( Arvind, Aniket, Shenjit, Mohini and Karishma) to make this possible in Mumbai & hope to do several such events over the rest of the year! #startups #india #venturecapital

Excited to announce our investment into HealthCRED - a B2B healthcare financing startup! 🎉 HealthCRED was founded in 2022 to provide financing solutions tailored for the healthcare sector. Their goal is to build India’s 1st healthcare-focused Small Finance Bank (SFB). HealthCRED has raised ~$1.2M in Seed financing. We co-invested alongside Antler, TRTL VC & iSeed India Our rationale for making this investment was: (1) 🧑Founders: Shrey Jain & Arpit Jangir bring complimentary skills to the table for building out this venture - Aprit has over a decade of experience in lending across Kotak, Capital First, Axio etc - Whereas, Shrey is a serial entrepreneur having built 2 companies prior to starting HealthCRED (2) 💪Strong conviction on founders + market + business model from multiple members of the DeVC Collective - Many of our Collective members decided to invest as well such as Amit Lakhotia, Nitin Gupta & Utsav Somani (via iSeed) (3) 📊Market & Timing: There is major gap in terms of working capital options for small to mid-size hospitals in India - Health Insurance penetration has inflected post COVID, due to which an increasing part of the patient base is now insured. - This means that a typical hospital sits on a large amount of receivables from insurance companies (private sector & public schemes) - Health insurance claims payouts alone are growing ~10% CAGR (5 year window) and represents a ~₹80,000 crore market today itself ➡️HealthCRED is on a mission to provide working capital & other finance solutions across the healthcare value chain. We wish them the very best for their adventure! #startups #india #venturecapital