Sunday, December 03, 2006

A seedfund.in India

Okay, that pun was largely wasted. But check out <seedfund>, a company that does extremely early stage investments in India. Their "seedfunda" is:


Big backing + tiny fund = giant impact

The folks behind it are Pravin Gandhi, Bharati Jacob and Mahesh Murthy.

They invest under $500,000 in their seed rounds. That's enough rokda to start small - what does one need to start an Internet company these days? Let's see.

A typical startup would have some development time to get the idea into the next stage.
- Salaries for the founders - money for the late night egg burjis, the petrol kharcha and the like - should be around 50,000 per month (averaged). For around 5 people, over a 6 month period, that adds up to 15 lakhs. (Initial cost: nil, running cost: 15 L)
- A 1500 sq ft. office would cost Rs. 75 K per month to rent, and plonk down 5 L for the deposit. Need to spend about 5 L on the UPS, carpeting, A/C, tables and that kind of stuff. (Initial cost 10 L, running cost: 4.5L)
- 5 laptops, 5 Desktops, 2 servers and network equipment would set you off by around 10 lakhs. (initial cost: Rs. 10L, running cost: nil)
- Internet connection, electricity, maintenance, paper, cards etc: Rs. 30K per month. (Running cost: 2 L)
- All the propaganda and internet space and all that would cost another 50K per month. (Running cost: 3 L)
-ATOB (All the other bull***) : Approx. 20 K a month (running cost: 1.2 L)

So getting a company up and running for six months will involve an initial cost of Rs. 20 Lakhs, and a running cost (total) of Rs. 25.7 lakhs.

That's about 45 Lakhs in total, a $100,000 fund in total. Scale that up to 10 people, 12 months and you're talking about approximately 200,000 to 250,000 dollars. Probably very much on seedfund's radar.

They have some major names on their investor list, like KB Chandrashekhar, B V Jagadeesh, Kanwal Rekhi and the hotshot companies like Reliance ADA, SVB's financial group and Edelweiss capital.

Check them out. They don't need me to advertise, of course. But they probably need smart ideas, so if you have one...

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