While 2016 saw a distinct drop in funding and the deal sizes, Venture Catalysts invested around Rs 30 crore in early stage startups in its year of inception 2016.

The firm which plans to add another 1000 angel investors in the company this year, will be looking to invest around Rs 60-75 crore across the sectors including artificial intelligence, food-tech, Augmented Reality, manufacturing.

Along with this, the capital firm also plans to expand its footprint in India and globally and is looking to invest in Japan and Qatar.

“We focus on tier 1 and tier II cities but we are definite tier II cities will take over the metro cities soon and we are expecting more innovation from these regions,” said Dr. Apoorv Ranjan Sharma, Co-Founder of Venture Catalysts.

Commenting on the cities, Sharma said that the venture capital is witnessing a lot of innovation from cities including Jaipur, Ahmedabad, Nasik, Nagpur and Kanpur.

Adding to this, he says that starting up in these tier II cities adds the benefit of affordability and notably many foreign returns are passionate of finding solutions to the pertinent problems in their cities which is strengthening the ecosystem in the interior cities.

“Essentially, a founder should understand the nitty-gritty of business and therefore unit economics is the foremost parameter. Along with this, the idea should be scalable which makes the execution process critical for the business viable,“ said Sharma.

Furthermore, he added that with market dynamics getting better and at a juncture when the market is also grabbing the global investors’ attention, the time is right to invest and take the game a notch higher.

Source: ET Tech

Image Courtesy: livemint