INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
Rohan Malhotra and Arjun Malhotra left their jobs in London and Silicon Valley to explore opportunities in India in late 2013
A year later, the brothers launched Investopad to connect with local startup founders and product managers and built a community to exchange
Somewhere in the journey, they wrote early checks to social-commerce startup Meesho, which now counts Facebook as an investor, Autonomic,
which got acquired by Ford, and HyperTrack, among others
Now the duo is ready to be full-time VCs.On Monday, they announced Good Capital, a VC fund that would invest in early-stage startups
helped startup founders raise money, provided guidance, and helped them find customers
realised returns, with every dollar invested already returned, the brothers said.Good Capital will focus on investing in startups that are
startup that has amassed over 2 million users who are engaging with the platform to sell products across India.In a statement, Vidit Aatrey,
They have a phenomenal global network of entrepreneurs, operators and investors
They helped us early on with introductions to such people; who brought not only capital but, more importantly, valuable operational inputs
which helped us learn quickly and find product-market fit faster
million from Symphony International Holdings, a host of European family offices, and a number of other Silicon Valley entrepreneurs.Sundeep
Madra, CEO of Ford X, and Yogen Dalal, Partner Emeritus at the Mayfield Fund and founder of Glooko, and Dinesh Moorjani, Managing Director
identify trends and bring together founders and investors to go after the unique problems that India needs to have solved
as Uber and Zenefits.The fund has also set up an investment committee whose members are Sanjay Kapoor, former CEO of Airtel and now a
senior advisor at BCG, Rahul Khanna, formerly a managing partner at Cannan Partners and now founder of Trifecta Capital, and Kashyap Deorah,
a serial entrepreneur who is currently building HyperTrack.Good Capital has also already made two investments: SimSim, a video-based
e-commerce platform that is trying to replicate the experience consumers have in offline stores, and Spatial, a cross-reality platform that
allows people to collaborate through augmented reality
Garrett Camp, a founder of Uber and Expa, and Samsung Next have also invested in Spatial.The VC fund is also interested in funding
business-to-business startups, though they say these startups would ideally be building solutions for overseas markets
arrival of Good Capital should help the Indian startup community, which today has to rely on a handful of VC funds that invest in early
scale with a supporting ecosystem for the first time, has been refreshing to see
decline in the number of deals they participated in and the amount of capital they received.Early-stage startups participated in 304 deals
in 2018 and raised $916 million in funds last year, down from $988 million they raised from 380 rounds in 2017 and $1.096 billion they
raised from 430 deals the year before, research firm Venture Intelligence told TechCrunch.As for Investopad, the brothers said they have
hired a number of people who will now continue its operation.
