Venture Capital : Growx Ventures

Logo of Growx ventures

Objectives:

 We Don’t care what sector your idea belongs too, as long is its Brilliant
 We will invest in 50-500 lakhs, depending on your need ,evolution and our
mood, of course .

The Key Tenants of our Approach

 Respect for the Entrepreneur

 We’re a tad bit nosy
 We need to “get it” invest
 We will support you to Hell and Back
The Team Members

 Sheetaal Bhal
 Ashish Taneja
 Manu Rikhey
 Akshata Aggrawal
 Manish Gupta
 Sid Talwar
 Sidharth Dondiyal

Portfolio of Growx Ventures

 AdsSparx
 Aus
 Betterbetter
 Claro
 Doxper
 Foxfast
 Flo
 Fynd
 I2e1
 Jump
 Keypot
 Locus
 Mad street den
 Paper to Stone
 Pay gilant
 Quandl
 Shepherts
 Stashfin
 Table Hero
 Ziploans
 Zolijns

Growx Helps to Create Opportunities

When Ashish Taneja started growX Ventures in 2008, he says, the idea was to provide promising
and innovative entrepreneurs with the management capital that they so needed but did not have
access to. Financial capital was available, but some of the creative entrepreneurs lacked the
ability or the inclination to build large businesses, says Ashish. So, growX Ventures partnered
with a few creative entrepreneurs and set up businesses, some of which are still running.

“While on this journey of working with creative entrepreneurs, we started getting a fair bit of
deal flow. People started to ask us, would you invest and we kept saying no,” says Ashish. In
2012, according to him, Sheetal and he started investing in start-ups in their personal capacity.
After a few investments, some of their friends were keen to invest along with them. “We pivoted
completely from a consulting creative entrepreneur asset class to a full-time early-stage
investor,” says Ashish. They made their first investment through growX Ventures in 2012, made
3-4 more each in the next two years, by when they had completely transformed into an early-
stage investor. It has a portfolio of 23 companies.

“The portfolio has performed quite well. Because of our corporate experience, we ended up
doing a lot of B2B companies. We said these are the kind of ventures we can add value. We had
connections with large corporates and we could help entrepreneurs accelerate growth,” he says.

Managing Portfolio

Ashish, the fund is solely focussed on B2B start-ups leveraging deep technology to solve hard
business problems. “The growX job was to find the right opportunity to do the deal and then we
would go to the network and say, this is what we are investing in, tell us if you are interested. We will
take that capital, go in as a collective, take board positions and manage the portfolio. We ran it like a
fund, but it was an on-demand aggregation of capital. We had about ₹50 crore ($7.5 million) at our
disposal and said we would go out and make seed investments,” says Ashish.

The cheque size varied. The smallest amount was ₹50 lakh and the largest ₹3.5 crore. The purpose
of the network, according to Ashish, was to do seed stage investing. They would rope in other
investors so that the round sizes would be larger. The intent was to invest in more companies in the
seed stage as opposed to doing follow-on rounds. At least 12 of the 23 companies in their portfolio
have raised the next round of capital, with growX participating in 6-7.

Now, growX is setting up its first fund, of ₹200 crore. With this fund, growX will follow the same
strategy – come in at the seed stage and invest in B2B start-ups leveraging deep technology – but
invest in follow-on rounds, at least at the Series A stage. “The core capability we have developed
over the years is largely around helping seed stage businesses go to Series A,” says Manu Rikhye,
Managing Director.

He adds, “we are raising just the right amount of cash that we need to sustain the platform that we
have built and expanded. We will still be able to invest in about 18 companies through the fund and
back some of them at the Series A. We believe that is the differentiator for us in a crowded VC
space.”

According to Ashish, the initial cheque size will be bigger, at about ₹3.5 crore ($500,000) and
growX will invest up to ₹14 crore ($2 million) overall in a venture. The idea, he says, is to put larger
pots of capital behind a concentrated set of investments.

Bullish on Fintech

Ashish says growX will be sector agnostic, but every year will come out with a strategy for the next
12-18 months.

“Today, we continue to be excited about fintech. We think there is still a lot of under-served niche
opportunities for entrepreneurs to go out and tap those. Within fintech, insure-tech is a big
opportunity. Digital health continues to be an area of interest. Within B2B, enterprise SaaS or
emerging technologies continue to be a large area of opportunity,” says Ashish. He adds that growX
also has a negative list. It is not excited about travel as an opportunity, nor will it look at the
education sector.

“From our thesis of creating large differentiated businesses, we think the two sectors offer limited
opportunities,” he says.

growX has invested in a few ventures – Paygilant based in Israel or Quandl based in Canada or
AdSparx, US-headquartered but with a development centre in Pune – that are not based in India. The
idea is they will help these companies become a relevant business in India.

growX, he adds, is also building relationships across different ecosystems around the world, so that
not only will it get a better deal flow, but also enable the entry of Indian businesses into those
markets.