I am trying to raise Series A funds for an existing venture in the recruitment space – can you expand on the list of venture firms above to include new names?

Thanks
Ram

Let me add a financial angle to it to explain why there are few seed-level venture funds. Typically, at the seed/early-stage funding level you require only about $100-500k of funding in India. At such levels the traditional business models for VC funds do not work.

Typical VC model would include small percentage (1-2%) of the total fund size being used for operational expenses and then fixed part (say 10%) of the total portofolio returns being paid to the fund managers and the rest (90%) going to the fund investors. However, if you have 20 early-startups in your portfolio with each raising $250k then, the 2% marked for the operations comes to only $100k i.e. Rs. 40 lacs. That makes it very difficult to enter this market for the institutional investors.

That leaves the field open mostly for angel investors unless, there is a scalable business model just like micro-finance that changes the landscape to address the “bottom of the pyramid” in startup ecosystem.

-Girish