Raghav Chandra

AI-powered blue-collar recruitment platform Vahan.ai has raised $10 Mn (INR 83.7 Cr) in a Series B funding round led by existing backer Khosla Ventures.  The round also saw participation from Y Combinator, Gaingels and Paytm founder Vijay Shekhar Sharma among others 👇 The latest round takes the startup’s cumulative funding to $18 Mn till date, including $8 Mn and an undisclosed amount raised in 2021 and 2019, respectively. Vahan seeks to use the fresh money to develop its AI recruitment technology, which will support eight major Indian languages, including Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Marathi, Bangla and Gujarati. Currently, Vahan’s AI recruiter conducts interviews in English and Hindi. However, within the next year, the platform will expand into other languages To read the in-depth article, click here: https://lnkd.in/gSrziXGT #news #AI #startup #funding

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Indian venture market has exploded. Someone reported that there are 800+ funds/networks/syndicates/ accelerators active in Indian venture market now. Not sure, if that number is correct but if you are an early stage tech founder on your fundraise journey, chances are, you would meet hundreds of people. While majority of the fund houses are doing incredible work and shaping the ecosystem. There are certain kinds of investors you need to identify & avoid to save time and stay focused: Sharing from my personal experience, top 5 such cohorts to avoid and the takeaways for the founders: 1. Data collectors: At early stage, you don't have historical data to present. Your projections are just that, Projections. I wasted one whole week discussing with a prospective angel investor on why the CLTV to CAC ratio is x, and not y. Takeaway: Discuss high level strategic numbers only without going into the details. None of the projections would be accurate anyway when rubber hits the road. 2. Document collectors: Met few folks, who would watch from the fences and ask for n number of documents, data rooms, statements without sharing the purpose of the ask or even revealing their investment intent. Takeaway: It is supposed to be a bi-directional conversation. Say 'no' often, till the time, an official relationship is established. 3. Valuer (! investor): At early stage, valuation is a function of multiple parameters, the opportunity itself, the team, or anything else except steady cash flows, because you don't have much. I wasted another week with a prospective investor trying to justify valuation, had to shut down that conversation, after both of us started quoting Aswath Damodaran and his valuation principles. Takeaway: Too much content on the internet for both parties anyway. Shouldn't be a bone of contention at early stages. 4. Facilitators posing as investors: Met numerous people, who would go to any lengths to pose themselves as serious investors, even buying paid media articles. Only to reveal at the last: The success fee. Takeaway: Avoid facilitators until Series A 5. Brokers posing as market makers: People posing as market makers sharing tons of gyaan on LinkedIn but are actually deal brokers looking to make quick %. Personal experience: Two rounds of conversation happened and then out of blue, they added a third party in the mail trail, someone who facilitates mergers & acquisitions. There wasn't even a single instance in the past conversations where we indicated any such intent. Takeaway: Avoid name & shame in public but at least share within founder communities. #venture #fundraise #startups #investing

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Highperformr.ai, a marketing SaaS startup floated by former Freshworks executives Ramesh Ravishankar and Srivatsan Venkatesan, has raised $3.5 Mn (INR 29.2 Cr) in a seed funding round 👇 The startup’s first product, Highperformr for Teams, leverages generative AI and LLMs to help B2B businesses maximise their return on investment (ROI) on social media campaigns. The fresh capital will be deployed to further the startup's research and development activity, build the platform's native AI capabilities, and expand its distribution network. To read more in detail, click here: https://lnkd.in/gV8tqWyU #startups #fundraising #growth #saas

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🚀23 startups 💰~$600 Mn total funding 🌱17 early stage deals 🧑‍💻 11 key hiring 🤝 5 M&A 💵 2 ESOP buybacks Top funding ◾ Zepto: $350 Mn ◾Healthkart: $153 Mn Startup weekly round up by Shashank Pathak and Md Salman Ashrafi https://lnkd.in/gF32miad

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🚨Swiggy IPO gets oversubscribed led by QIB bids Swiggy’s IPO was oversubscribed 1.07 times by the third day, driven largely by QIBs, who oversubscribed their portion 1.52 times. Retail investors subscribed to 97% of their portion, while Non-Institutional Investors (NIIs) made bids for 22% of their allocation. Swiggy's employee quota also saw strong demand, with a subscription rate of 1.38 times. Swiggy raised around Rs 5,085 crore (approx. $605 million) from anchor investors like HDFC, ICICI, SBI, and global players including Fidelity and BlackRock. by Akshita Toshniwal | #SwiggyIPO #IPO #QIB #RetailInvestors #Foodtech Read more 👇 https://lnkd.in/ggm_piMt

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🚀 Masterclass on navigating 0 to 1 product building + GTM for startups. 🚀 Here is the WEEKEND OFFER valid till Sunday Midnight only. Join our Product Management Workshop on Building Product Startups and gain the skills to take your startup to the next level. 📅 June 29th, Saturday 📍 IIM Kozhikode ⏰ 10 AM - 5 PM 🎟 https://bit.ly/HSKwkp3 Who is this for? For Founder/Teams building: 1. B2C/B2B Marketplaces 2. B2C Tech Solutions 3. SaaS Products Not Relevant For: - Offline-first distribution startups - Tech/Non-tech services businesses - Hardware Startups Hands-on session to cover: 1. Problem Discovery & Qualification: 2. Finding the First 10 Power Users & Defining Tablestakes Roadmap for V0 3. Identifying Metrics That Matter 4. Hard Skills That Matter for Founders/Founding PMs 5. Development Approach 6. Building your team Register Now: https://bit.ly/HSKwkp3 Hamad Jowher Nevin Robert Mittu Tigi Sana Thayyil Rabin Baby Murshid Basil Muhammed Haris T M Reema A Raheem Ashwathy Venugopal Geethu Agit Vaishnav Nair S IIMK LIVE Abraham Varghese Jofin Joseph

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Who would invest in founders who have wasted $50M? Koo, an Indian microblogging platform, recently shut shop after raising $50M in capital. Everyone has their views on why Koo failed. IMO, the biggest reason behind its failure was a lack of PMF (Product Market Fit). Koo spent much money on marketing and didn’t build a product people wanted. It kept harping on nationalism, a Twitter for Indians, made in #India. This approach failed. However, this doesn’t mean Koo’s founders aren’t smart or intelligent. I wrote in an earlier post that we shouldn’t be surprised if Koo’s founders raise fresh capital for a new startup. To many of us, this might seem grossly unfair. Millions of smart, hardworking founders are struggling to raise capital while investors are backing failed founders who have wasted millions of dollars. How is that fair? It confirms the widely held belief that the #venturecapital industry is broken and corrupt where a few people with the right connections get all the capital while others don’t see a dime. It shows that the VC industry is a closed group, a cabal where who you know matters more than anything. While these are just complaints, most people who criticise VCs don’t understand how startup investing works. VCs welcome failures. They embrace them because they know failures are inevitable. When VCs invest in 20 #startups, they know 15 will fail. The goal is to invest in startups that can give them a 100x return. Failures are part of the game. They are unavoidable. The aim is to back founders who can build such 100x return companies. Hence, failures are not looked down upon in the VC industry. It’s similar to the American culture where society appreciates the people who take risks, and it easily accepts personal bankruptcies that result from this risk-taking approach. There’s no taboo in failing in the USA and the VC industry. I’m sure Koo’s founders have learnt from their mistakes. It’s an expensive mistake and not everyone is so lucky to have this luxury to spend $50M on their education. ;) However, most VCs will back Koo’s #founders because these founders know how to raise capital and they know how to not build and scale tech companies. Their past failures have improved their chances of future success. In the VC industry, Failure is Good.

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Top News of the Week in Indian Startup Ecosystem: 1. The week saw the first mega funding deal materialise for an Indian startup in the form of healthtech unicorn Innovaccer’s $275 Mn Series F fundraise. 2. On the back of this, healthtech emerged as the most funded startup sector this week. Besides Innovaccer, BrainSinghtAI and Zoplar also raised $5 Mn and $3.4 Mn this week. 3. Fintech, cleantech and ecommerce all saw three funding deals materialise this week, leading to fresh capital infusion of $48.9 Mn, $14.2 Mn and $13.3 Mn respectively. 4.  After months of speculations, Ritesh Agarwal increased his stake in his startup OYO with a capital infusion of $65 Mn via his venture capital firm Redsprig Innovation Partners. This funding round made travel tech the second most funded sector this week. 5. This week’s most active investor was VC firm Alteria Capital, investing in BrainSightAI’s $5 Mn pre-Series A funding round and Pratilipi’s $1.2 Mn funding round. 6. Eyewear major Lenskart is said to have initiated talks with bankers for a $1 Bn IPO that could value it in the range of $7 Bn to $8 Bn. Its IPO could hit the Indian bourses toward the end of the next financial year. Read the full post on link below Stay up do that with the Indian startup ecosystem on Medial.

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BizDateUp! Co-founders Jeet Chandan and Meet Jain have acquired an undisclosed stake in IPO-bound foodtech giant Swiggy through an "off-market" secondary deal. This investment showcases the growing confidence in Swiggy's innovative approach in the food delivery sector. Jeet Chandan shared, "As an entrepreneur since the age of 13, I have always been driven by a passion for creating businesses that showcase disruptive potential and significantly impact consumers' lives. Swiggy's innovative approach and leadership in the food delivery sector align perfectly with my investment philosophy." Founded in 2020, BizDateUp enables angel investors to support Indian startups with investments starting at just INR 1 Lakh. In April 2024, BizDateUp also announced the launch of a new INR 200 Cr fund aimed at investing in technology startups. Read more at: https://lnkd.in/gqf8ekp2 #bizdateup #swiggy #angelinvesting #foodtech #startupfunding #investment #techstartups #startupstory

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Topic: "Understanding the losses of Indian Unicorns by diving to its core" Out of the total 89 unicorns that disclosed their financials in FY22, only 23 were profitable. This number is slightly lower compared to FY21 when 29 unicorns boasted healthy profits and we have 114 unicorn startups with the combined valuation of $350 Bn as of March 2024. Startups aiming to raise funds today must exhibit robust fundamentals, ensuring their valuations align well with the value they bring. Only those unicorns with transparent financials, strong corporate governance, great teams and good company culture may loosen the purse strings. Source: Inc42 Media In my view, unicorns are the startups that are over $1 Bn in valuation which is an estimation based on the projected TAM and future scope in the market by the founders to their investors. Then investors value startups according to the projected competitors performance across the globe and favorable conditions they had among the market place and in the govt, i.e., so-called valuation game these days. And as we all know, most of the unicorn valuated startups have their revenues in megabytes, profits in kilobytes and valuations at gigabytes. Might sound odd but numbers are speaking so. But I think that's how investors play for gaining profits and maintaining a good portfolio despite huge cash-burns but with a proper exit strategy. Don't take me wrong, it's purely my personal understanding of the current reality. It might change with my everyday learnings. And the core reason I personally believe is the lack of understanding their customers behaviour and their cultural ideology for any startup loss. The reflections we see such as unit economics, market analysis and business scope are projected by clear understanding those aspects. A paradigm shift in right analysing and better understanding their customers might reduce the marketing costs, CAC and also expansion costs. Every Indian newcomer to serial entrepreneurs has to know about the rise of Airbnb, Automobili Lamborghini S.p.A., Tata Group, Reliance Industries Limited, Wipro, Mahindra Group and many more legendary business tycoons & entrepreneurs of India on how they learned to persevere and pivot according to their market conditions and been profitable till date with their never give up & friendly competitive nature. You read this long, thank you so much. Also do share your views with me. Y Combinator Brian Chesky Michael Seibel Ritesh Agarwal Nikhil Kamath Kunal Shah Inc42 Media #startups #entrepreneurship #entrepreneurs #founders #insights #businesslessons

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my thoughts on this: i think lightspeed's report was dumb because while the facts and numbers they pulled were true and great to know, their conclusion slide (slide 2 or 3) showed that ultimately they don't actually believe in the region's potential. it concluded "SEA companies should be regional since day 1" instead of "global since day 1". they simply overfit to the past decade's data, and have a subconscious inferiority complex that prevents them from believing any SEA founder/company can do better than the past decade's SEA unicorns and become a *globally* important startup with great unit economics. they forgot that VC is about what is possible first and foremost, then what is probable. that's how you benefit from the power law. lightspeed report is all about probability. so disheartening to see it, and more disheartening to see gojek cofounder signing off on it. the bitter truth: the SEA tech startups that are unicorns mostly rushed to copy US or Chinese unicorns within months of the US/Chinese companies' breakout days, without doing the first principle thinking on "does this create $X in value in SEA and can we capture Y% of X and do X and Y, 2 independent variables, look attractive?" in other words, first gen SEA tech unicorn are built by founders who are great doers but not great thinkers. Travis Kalanick of Uber is a great think and a great doer. pardon me but the founders of Grab/Gojek were just doers. im sure they are capable thinkers, but they haven't applied it yet to creating anything massively valuable and original from the ground up. sad but true. the Lightspeed report looks at this truth and concludes SEA will fail to ever have thinker/doers, because it failed to have billion dollar thinker/doers in the past decade. i think this will further push away the talent that is indeed billion dollar thinker/doer but just needs an environment that doesn't doubt it every day. for the record, i absolutely believe it's possible to build a global tech giant from SEA today. it does not defy the laws of physics. to say this is impossible is to say nobody here will ever be great enough. the truth is, people who think that are the ones who are not great enough.

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Prosperr.io, the AI-driven startup specializing in income tax solutions, has secured $1.5 million in a pre-seed funding round led by Silicon Valley investor Gokul Rajaram . Indian angel investors, including Livspace founder Ramakant Sharma, CEO Saurabh Jain, and CRED founder Kunal Shah, also participated in the round. Founded by Manas Gond and Dev Kumar in March 2022, Prosperr.io aims to simplify income tax management for salaried individuals through its subscription-based services. Their offerings include the Super Saver Product for tax planning and Prosperr-FBP (Flexi Benefits Plans) for employers. The funding will strengthen Prosperr.io's technological capabilities, enhance product features, and support sales and marketing efforts. With ambitions to achieve an annual recurring revenue of $2 million by year-end, Prosperr.io is poised for growth in both B2C and B2B segments, competing with industry giants like ClearTax and TurboTax. #ProsperrIO #AI #IncomeTax #StartupFunding #GokulRajaram #Livspace #RamakantSharma #SaurabhJain #KunalShah #TechInnovation #TaxSolutions #startup77

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Mass products or limited-quality product?🤔 That’s the question Saumya Kabra founder of Confetti Gifts , posed to Mohit Yadav (founder Minimalist ) during our Elevate Cohort 1. Want to learn from the best D2C founders? Fill out the form in comments to join us for Cohort 2. Take your business to the next level! 💼✨ #letsElevate #D2CInsider

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While going through the YC S24 batch, I couldn’t resist making my own list of top picks. These are based on what gets me excited—industry potential, founder-market fit, team chemistry, and that compelling founder story. If your favorite isn’t here, don’t take it personally. Every company in the batch is phenomenal. But hey, I can’t put all 254 on my list! So yeah—here’s my top 10 picks for YC S24 batch (in no particular order): • Blaze (YC S24) by Faiyam Rahman, Luc Succes, and Igor Zagnieński - Global venmo for cross border payments. • Cartage by Abdul Basharat, Harman Sahota and Josh Lampen - Your end-to-end logistics partner that delivers beyond freight - speed, transparency, and peace of mind shippers count on. • Modus by Lin Ling and Amar K. - Unlock revenue per employee with AI powered headcount management. • Decisional AI (YC S24) by Sai Neeraj Kanuri, Adit S. and Dhruv Tandon - AI Agent that helps Financial Professionals do deep thoughtful financial work. • Merlin AI (YC S24) by Kumar Siddhartha, Ayantika Dey , and Sneha Kumari - the AI-powered ERP for construction. • Dimely (YC S24) by David Pang and Peter S. - An AI copilot built to automate your manual billing workflows. It understands your business and is as accessible as sending an email. • Offstream by Varsha Ramesh Walsh and Zach Janicki - Streamline compliance for your carbon project. • Fazeshift (YC S24) by Caitlin Leksana and Timmy Galvin - Automating invoicing & accounts receivable. • Terra by Lev Glushkovskii and Dylan McFarland - A new world of furniture procurement. • @Modern Realty by Raffi Isanians and @Raymond Xu - Your AI real estate agent. • LedgerUp (YC S24) by Joseph Johnson and Bailey Spell - Your first and only finance hire. • Manaflow (YC S24) by Austin Wang, Wesley Tjangnaka, and Laurence Chen - Automate repetitive white-collar work that fits in tables with AI.

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Portfolio for 2050 I am building a new portfolio from scratch. I will allocate mostly in India specific index funds, select midcap, smallcap and maybe 2-3 startups ( if I can find good ones, never easy unfortunately ...). I would like to create the portfolio in say 5 years. By 2050 I would like to grow > 50x. When we create portfolios from scratch we would like fresh ideas. Anyone with suggestions? Thank you Arnab #investor #portfolio #equities #capitalmarket #stocks #nifty #sensex

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Comment your D2C landing page and I will edit it in the next video for better conversions. Watch below👇 video to see how elements of a #D2C BigMuscles Nutrition (used as an example) landing page are changed in 2 mins with the help of CustomFit.ai 1) Move & Align elements 2) Add Ratings and Reviews 3) Product Description

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