An alumnus of Harvard Business School and Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, Dasgupta has decided to set up a dedicated angel investment fund with an initial corpus of Rs 10 crore to help young entrepreneurs and start-ups add much needed traction to their vision, growth plans while accelerating growth. “Besides pure play investment, I shall also be using my own experiences to coach and mentor young entrepreneurs while helping them in taking studied strategic decisions,” he added.
Elaborating further, Dasgupta said, “Our investment policy and value system stems from our deep rooted passion for technology driven innovations. We believe that technology plays and will continue to play a disruptive role in how we interact with the world, produce products or services, transact and drive efficiencies.”
Dasgupta is looking forward to investing in companies engaged in developing socially aware products that help reach the benefits of technology to the marginalised sections of society. Under the aegis of BDG Global, he has invested in start-ups like FabAlley – an online fashion destination for taste-makers and trend-breakers, FreshWorld – a company which has ventured into a ‘Farm to Home’ concept by organising fruits and vegetables retailing in a distinctive street vending format employing eco-friendly delivery mechanisms, Spinny – a certified used car portal and Arcatron which builds next generation devices to enhance lives of people with limited mobility and elderly care needs.
“The industry,” Dasgupta said, “is witnessing the emergence of a slew of first time entrepreneurs with no family history of business enterprise. It is an extremely encouraging sign and bodes well for the Indian economy. As a first generation entrepreneur myself, I foresee a need to create an eco-system that nurtures and mentors such entrepreneurs.”
Dasgupta, who is also a director of BDG Global, is among the early pioneers of the Indian Information Technology Industry and has witnessed the emergence of the Indian IT Industry from garage start-ups to billion dollar behemoths.
Dasgupta has also invested in start-ups like Square Plums – India’s leading chain of branded rental homes for singles with presence in five cities and managing hundreds of properties, Blue Book which offers discounts on restaurants, cafes, spas and salons, bars and nightclubs, ShoeKonnect – a B2B commerce mobile application which caters to the footwear industry, LawRato.com – an interactive online platform that makes finding and hiring the best lawyers faster and easier, Get My Parking – an end to end parking digitisation with the technology that provides real-time bird’s eye view of all parking information to urban commuters, parking management companies, and city administration, X-Prime – developer of the world’s first FHE system that processes encrypted data at the same speed as unencrypted data, ESEDS School of Design – the first sustainable design school in India and in FarMart which provide access to the latest agricultural machinery and modern technology to every farmer while simultaneously promoting rural entrepreneurship.
Source: Economic Times