SMEpost

IAN gears up to bring paradigm shift in seed & early-stage start-up funds

India’s largest business angels group Indian Angel Network is gearing up to become the single largest platform for seed and early-stage investing, having after introduced the Rs 350 crore global fund in April 2017, said Indian Angel Network (IAN)’s recently appointed Managing Partner (maiden fund) Pratik Bose.

IAN’s fund will be transformational for the early-stage ecosystem—we will become the single largest platform for seed and early-stage investing which will be willing to write an entrepreneur a Rs 25 lakh cheque when they start and would be capable of writing cheques of Rs 50 crore if they continue to do well,” said Bose, who was formerly a Director of Cisco Systems Inc, in an interview to Mint.

In the calendar years 2014, 2015 and 2016, IAN invested over Rs 205 crore in around 60 deals. With the IAN Fund, the network aims to create the country’s largest horizontal platform to bring a paradigm shift for start-ups, the Managing Partner said.

With a 20 per cent increase in the number of active investors in 2017, Bose is bullish there’s much to cheer for young start-ups and much more to happen in future.

Over 8,000 entrepreneurs reach out to IAN each year. In over a nine-year period, the network has achieved a gross Internal Rate of Return (IRR) of 32 per cent per annum across 104 companies, he informed.

Painting the future scenario of start-up trends, Bose said, “Start-ups will address multiple cross-border markets much earlier than they used to. Other trends include the next stage of evolution of India and South-East Asia both as a market as well as a global destination for core innovation.