India VCs see early-stage explosion - AVCJ Forum

Sanjay Nath, co-founder and managing director with Blume Ventures Advisors, said the early-stage ecosystem has grown considerably since his firm was founded five years ago but the market is still very nascent.

"There has been an explosion not just in terms of the seed stage level, but also in the levels below us," he said. "Now you have more university incubators, super angels, angel group funds, and a clear distinction between accelerators and incubators."

With a much larger pipeline of potential pre-Series A investments, identifying potential outperformers is difficult. "The challenge has been how to filter and curate," Nath added. "Our intention now is to to build a platform which will work through very highly curated referrals."

His comments were echoed by Rahul Chowdhri, managing director and co-founder with Helion Venture Partners, who said there are now more quality entrepreneurs in India. While this translates into more better-run companies, increased competition in certain sectors has seen the size of early-stage rounds grow significantly.

"In sectors like e-commerce and consumer tech there is a desire to raise more funds." he said. "You are seeing larger Series A rounds because maintaining market leadership is so very important."

This phenomenon is apparent in the ever-larger sums raised by e-commerce rivals FlipKart and Snapdeal. They have received rounds of $1 billion and $627 million, respectively, in 2014.

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• Topics
• South Asia
• Early-stage
• Venture
• Technology
• India
• Venture
• Helion Ventures
• Blume Ventures
• TMT