Dear Investors,
We focus on early stage investments in seed/angel rounds predominantly in India. Our aim is to 'institutionalize angel' investments in India.
We are sector agnostic however our focus areas are consumer tech and SaaS. We have done 24 deals in the last 3 years and will continue at the same pace. Because we dig deeper into each of our deals, we will typically do 7-8 deals in a year. We also have an internal framework called 'Founders Attribute Score', which essentially helps us to assess the 'Founder Market Fit' for seed/angel rounds. For pre-series A rounds, we try to assess for early signs of Product Market Fit.
We like tech-enabled businesses, platform plays with inherent network effects. We are biased towards great products (tech or consumer) and are keen on startups tapping the huge opportunity in the mid to lower income households in India. For SaaS startups, we like companies which can build fantastic products in India for a global market. We will not be afraid to take contrarian bets as well provided the deal fits into our investment thesis.
We typically invest in startups that have some paying customers. There will be exceptions to this, if we are doing a pre-seed/seed deal. We believe in founders who are brave and courageous to solve a real, big and interesting problem. We work with our founders, wherever we can add value.
At Gemba Capital we look for three things:
- Founder • Ability, passion and vision in a founder.
- Market • Size, competition and growth in a market.
- Product • Need, differentiation and value in a product.
Across my career spanning 14 years, I’ve been on all the three sides of the table as an Entrepreneur, banker and an investor - which gives me a unique skill set of understanding businesses better.
- To check our portfolio and read testimonials from our founders please visit our website
- To read my blogs please click here
Look forward to your participation and investing in some great deals together !!
We build internal bottom-up investment thesis. This is well research and updated every quarter. Based on this thesis, we identify sub-segments which we want to invest in. Then we reach out to founders in that space through referrals. We also get a lot of our deals referred from founders of our existing portfolio companies. We put a priority to this channel. This is the way we build our prop deal flow.
In some cases, we commit to the founder before the 'lead investor' is identified and actually help the founders in finding the right VC as the 'lead investor'.
Besides this, we receive a large amount of inbound deals due to our relationships with accelerators, incubators, intermediaries, co-investors, family offices, micro VC funds, angel networks and fundraising platforms. This strong ecosystem and network has helped us our deal flow.
- Deal sourcing to investments conversion is <1% for us.
- To know more about how our deal flow was for 2018 Year in Review please click here
- To know more about how our deal flow was for 2019 Year in Review please click here
- To know more about how our deal flow was for 2020 Year in Review please click here
I will be sharing most of Gemba Capital's deals wherever we get an allocation with AngelList.