Anand Chandrasekaran, who quit as the Chief Product Officer at Snapdeal a month ago, has announced investments in six startups — Truce, MagicX, Lucideus, LoanCircle, Lernr and Rupeek — and plans to invest in three to five more companies this year.
Chandrasekaran has become an active angel investor in Indian startups over the past 12 to 15 months and typically invests about $25,000 (Rs 17 lakh) in each entity. He declined to say how much he invested in these six startups.
The investor, who has met about 200 companies since leaving Snapdeal, has built a portfolio of over 15 startups, including gaming network Gamezop and online marketplace RentOnGo.
Chandrasekaran, a Co-Founder of mobile applications software company Aeroprise (acquired by BMC Software), moved to India in 2014 and played a key role at Airtel, building products such as My Airtel, Airtel Money and Wynk Music. Later, at Snapdeal, he ran technology initiatives and worked on products such as Freecharge, Shopo, Exclusively, supply chain efforts and post-product customer experience.
He turned angel investor after spotting a trend of growth in startups being primarily driven by a couple of 100 million people on Android smartphones and about 30 million of them with active mobile data connections. For each of these startups, products and technologies started becoming core differentiators to their businesses. “I started getting a lot of folks writing in to me. It all started very informally, serendipitously,” said Chandrasekaran.
So far, he has kept away from angel networks mainly to keep his investment decisions independent. “I got into angel investing to learn about new exciting areas where startups are setting up companies. If I purely follow what other people are doing, I would rob myself of opportunities,” he said.
Source: The Economic Times
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