Shanti Mohan, the cofounder and CEO of investor syndicate platform LetsVenture, has launched a new micro venture capital (VC) firm Propell, to invest in early-stage startups. The fund is aiming to deploy Rs 50 crore in a total of 30 startups across sectors like e-commerce, fintech, Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and direct-to-consumer (D2C).
“Having been in the early-stage ecosystem for a decade and having scaled LetsVenture, I believe this is a great time for me to invest and work closely with founders who are building for the next billion-dollar opportunity in India. With the current slowdown, I do believe this is a great time for early-stage investors to work with some of the best founders building sustainable business models,” said Mohan.
The fund, which was founded in late 2021, has already invested in 15 startups including savings and investment app Jar, social commerce app GoBillion, e-commerce player Zaamo and upskilling platform Seekho, among others. It has also co-invested with Y Combinator, Sequoia, Accel, Tiger Global, 3one4 capital, and several prominent angels.
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Propell will look to invest in 15 additional early-stage startups in the next one year.
The micro fund will be part of LetsVenture platform and is anchored by angel investors such as Reliance Jio president Vikas Choudhury and supported by the likes of Vivek Khare, advisor-corporate development and early-stage investments, Naukri.com; and Sudhi Herle, engineering, Android Platform at Google. Despite a looming funding winter, the early-stage funding environment in India continues to be vibrant. Seed and Series A investments were up by 88 percent and 22 percent respectively in Q4FY22, according to a report by Venture Intelligence. “Typically early stage ecosystem remains insulated from the market conditions. This is probably the best time to start a company because you can’t go lower than where the market is today. You will very high quality founders starting companies. The founders know it’s going to be an uphill task and they will have to answer harder questions when they go for fundraising,” Mohan had told CNBC-TV18.
Mohan added that, “We will see better pricing in the early stage. For investors to win, they need good entry price to enter a company.”
