Hyderabad Angels invested Rs 15cr in 12 startups last year, looks at 12 more this year

On Monday, Hyderabad Angels (HA) announced adding 12 startups this year to its current portfolio. The angel investor network has already invested Rs 15 crore in 12 others over the last one year (2015-16).

Established in early 2012, HA has invested Rs 30 crore across 20 startups so far. Of the 12 companies invested in 2015-16, two are follow-up rounds in its existing portfolio of companies, with the rest being new additions.

Pradeep Mittal, Chairman, Hyderabad Angels, states

Our network of investors has seen a consistent growth of 20 percent year-on-year. In the last year, we have almost doubled and are currently close to 100 investors, including investors from US, Japan and Singapore, with around 75 percent of them being active (at least one or more investment). We expect to be at least 150 investors by end of this year.

Pradeep says that on an average, HA receives 250-300 business plans every month from India, US, Dubai, UAE and other geographies.

Mixing up B2B with B2C, some of its portfolio companies include names like GIBSS, NowFloats, Betaout, Explara, Indian Money, Thrillophilia, Spareshub and Evibe. According to Daggubati Suresh Babu, Vice Chairman, HA, the investment network also saw a successful exit last year from its portfolio company Edutor, which gave them 3.5 times the investment.

Although sector-agnostic, HA doesn’t deny investing more in technology sectors like – artificial intelligence, augmented reality, machine learning, data and analytics, Internet of Things (IoT), fintech, edutech, healthtech, logitech as well as enterprise SaaS.

Known for early-stage investments, HA invests up to $1 million as a part of pre-Series A and invests up to $150,000 as part of the seed round.

The market

According to data from YourStory research, Q1 of 2016 saw about $97.9 million being invested in 236 pre-Series A stage startups, of which Hyderabad saw 14 startups getting funded with a total investment of about $12 million. To give some perspective, there were only 31 Series-A deals (worth $133 million), 11 Series-B deals (worth $76 million) and 29 late-stage deals that took place last quarter.

In December, it was reported that early-stage deals were booming in India, with pre-Series A dominating funding in the last two months of 2015. In December, there were 60 pre-Series A deals announced, with only 11 Series-A deals closed.

The industry holds multiple views on the pre-Series A rounds, with most calling it an inability of the founder to raise Series A, while some terming it as a breather against the high bars set for raising a Series A.

Hyderabad Angels also completes with the Indian Angel Network (IAN) and Mumbai Angels, who are older players in the game. While IAN boasts of investing across 16 categories, ranging from agriculture, financial services to semiconductors, Mumbai Angels is known for its successful exits and investments in big startups like Myntra and InMobi.

But with increased activity around early-stage investments, the activity amongst investment networks is gathering pace, with each of them looking to claim a larger share of the pie.

Website: www.hyderabadangels.in