Raghavan, who works out of  Singapore and Mumbai, has been angel investing in Indian startups for about four years through the Delhi-based Indian Angel Network (IAN). It is not clear whether he continues to be associated with IAN, though he no longer seems to be listed as a member on the IAN website. Update: IAN clarifies that Raghavan is still associated with the angel network. Prior to becoming an angel investor, Raghavan, led Accenture India’s domestic business as managing director of the company. Amit Patni currently heads Mumbai-based Nirvana, an Internet and mobility focused venture capital firm that invests in the early and growth stages. Nirvana is backed by the Patni family, who recently sold Patni Computers to iGate Corporation.

“We had earlier announced that we would be looking at enlisting the support of six to seven angel investors to join our Charter Angels program. As Shravan and I met potential angel investors individually, we were pleasantly surprised by the strong support we received and finally ended up signing up almost double that number,” Ravi Kiran, co-founder of VentureNursery said in a press release. Kiran, former CEO of Starcom MediaVest’s South East Asia and South Asia operations, teamed up with Fame Cinemas founder Shravan Shroff to launch VentureNursery in March.

Applications for the accelerator’s maiden bootcamp closed on April 23 with 120 entries from 17 cities. The final shortlist of between five and eight startups will be announced shortly.

Here’s the list of charter angels at VentureNursery:

1. Amit Patni, co-founder and chairman, Nirvana Venture Advisors
2. Anand Ladsariya, CEO and promoter director, Everest Flavours
3. Arihant Patni, director, Nirvana Venture Advisors
4. Ashok Kumar Damani, co-founder, K Damani Group of Companies
5. Bhanu Chopra, founder, Rate Gain
6. Bharat Banka, CEO, Aditya Birla Private Equity
7. Kaushal Kumbhat, managing director, FMS Group
8. Nitin Agarwal, managing partner, N M Fashions and CEO, Devesh Agriexim
9. Sadeesh Raghavan, Member, global advisory board, Acumen Fund
10. Sanjay Mehta, CEO, MAIA Intelligence
11. Siddharth Raisoni, executive director, SGR Advisors
12. Sameer Brij Verma, vice president, Nexus Venture Partners

The imminent IPO spells massive returns for venture capital investors such as Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Elevation Partners, serial entrepreneur Mark Adreessen and his firm Adreessen Horowitz and, Kleiner Perkins Caulfield and Byers, who invested in the company across multiple stages.

Ahead of the IPO, catch up on what’s been written around the most exciting technology IPO out of Silicon Valley since Google in 2004, via Themeefy’s magazine on the listing:

What’s Themeefy? It’s a personal publishing Web 2.0 tool developed by Pune-based startup Sievelogic Software Technologies.  The company was bootstrapped in April 2010 by former Symantec executive Titash Neogi. It has also developed Bibkosh, a knowledge networking platform that allows users to connect with people on the basis of ‘what they know’ as opposed to ‘who you know’.

Tell us what you thought about the Themeefy app.

The acquisition creates an exit for Hyderabad-headquartered venture capital investor Ventureast, which had invested $2.5 million in Atyati from its Proactive Fund in August 2008. This is, however, not stated in the press release.

Atyati, founded in 2006 by former iflex Solutions executive Prakash Prabhu, has developed a mobility-based technology platform called GANASEVA that is designed to deliver fully automated and secure banking services with smart card and biometrics-based authentication capabilities to rural consumers. The platform is hosted on a private cloud that banks can access on a pay-per-transaction or pay-per-village basis. The company currently partners with six large public sector banks and one private sector bank. The platform serves 2.5 million customers in 6,500 villages. It expects to reach 9.8 million customers and 16,000 villages by 2013.

For Genpact, the acquisition opens up the possibilities of cross-selling several of its own products and services to Atyati’s banking sector partners, apart from access to the GANASEVA platform. “It (the platform) leverages all of the latest cutting-edge technology around mobility and biometrics that makes it highly scalable and able to be taken to the global markets, including to microfinance institutions.  Emerging markets such as India and China are becoming an increasingly important part of our global strategy,” Genpact president and CEO NV Tyagarajan said in the press release. Tyagarajan took charge at the Gurgaon-headquartered business process outsourcing company last June.

Following the acquisition, Atyati’s 60 employees will be absorbed by Genpact and will work closely with the company’s India-to-India global IT services business. Genpact currently employs over 56,000 people across 64 delivery centers in 17 countries. The company reported a net income of $38.5 million on revenues of $435.5 million for the first quarter ended March 31, 2012.

Image Courtesy: Atyati Technologies

HLC was founded in June 2010 as a separate business under Hippocampus, a education services venture started by Bangalore Labs co-founder Umesh Malhotra in 2004. Hippocampus also runs a non-profit called Hippocampus Reading Foundation which sets up active libraries in government schools and community centers in collaboration with government and other non-government organizations.

“The academic year of 2011 was our (HLC) first, full-fledged year of operation. During this period, we worked in 39 villages with 50 teachers and 700 students across two districts in rural Karnataka,” Malhotra told StartupCentral via email responses to queries. The company is currently on a recruitment and set-up drive and aims to start the current academic year with more than 250 teachers who will reach out to over 5,000 students, he said.

Under the HLC model, local teachers, usually women, are employed and trained to coach students between the ages of 3 and 12 at the pre-school and primary levels. It employs an in-house curriculum developed in collaboration with veteran educationists, which is designed to allow children of various age groups to learn at their own pace. Students who attend the center are charged between Rs 60 and Rs 100 per month. The centers are usually located inside the homes of the women who run them or community spaces such as schools or rented premises. HLC pays its kindergarten teachers a salary of Rs 2,000 per month and after-school teachers are paid Rs 1,500 per month. “Teachers are a big priority for us. We recruit less than 20 per cent of applications received. Every teacher goes through a four-round selection process,” said Malhotra. Training follows recruitment and each teacher attends a 10-day training programme. In addition, 12 days of follow-on training are spread through the year.

For Lok Capital and Acumen, the investment in HLC represents their first in the education sector. Delhi-based Lok, a bottom-of-the-pyramid focused investor that is backed by the Rockefeller Foundation, recently raised a $65 million second, India-focused fund. The launch of the new fund has also seen the venture capital investor refocus from its earlier preference for microfinance companies to broader sectors such as education, healthcare and employment services. Read our earlier post on Lok Capital’s realigned investment strategy.

Image Courtesy: Hippocampus

The company launched its services under the eHealth Access brand name in January this year. The company’s founder, S Jayadeep Reddy, a pharmaceuticals and hospitals executive, started Dialurdoctor in 2009. “Dialurdoctor provided only tele-doctor services. When we decided to diversify into video, chat and email, we rebranded as eHealth Access,” Reddy told StartupCentral via email.

Users need to sign up in order to consult doctors. The site offers three kinds of subscription plans — individual, doctor and corporate. Under the individual plan, a single consultation costs Rs 99 and a yearly family consultation plan costs Rs 999. The company has not set revenue growth targets for the next 12 months but targets 1 lakh customers by the end of the current financial year, including corporate and retail customers. “Though our core business is corporate, we have seen consistent growth in the retail area with better ecommerce options,” said Reddy.

On fundraising plans, Reddy said that since the company currently in expansion mode, it has not yet planned for its second round of funding. “Investors are approaching us, but we are looking to start discussions only after third quarter,” he said.

The company claims 33,000 customers and 27 corporate clients at present. It also sets up on-premise health kiosks and conducts health camps enable easier access to its services. Expansion plans in the medium term include an office in Bangalore and other metros.

Image Courtesy: eHealth Access

Basix Krishi Samrudhi:

Limberlink Technologies: Online education services startup Limberlink Technologies has raised $2 million from Accel Partners. The Bangalore-based company has developed the JED-I programme to provide engineering students training in core engineering. (Source: The Economic Times).

Cbazaar: Chennai-based ecommerce startup Cbazaar has raised $3.5 million in Series A funding from Inventus Capital Partners and Ojas Ventures. The funds will be used for upgrading technology and expanding marketing operations in India and overseas. (Source: Financial Express).

Image Courtesy: FreeDigitalPhotos.net

How it works

The site provides information on legal and business procedures and relevant forms. Users need to be registered to access the site’s services. Certain forms are made available to the user after payment, which aim to collect relevant information for the execution of the service. The only exception is the site’s newly launched document drafting service, where currently questionnaires are shared via email.  The reason for this is that since the site has over 60 document types available, generating the automatic forms is expensive and the company first wants to find out which are more popular. Payments can be made online. Once the user has submitted relevant information, a domain expert is assigned to execute the order.

The Stylishyou acquisition follows Delhi-based SnapDeal’s acquisition of online sports goods store eSportsBuy last month. Earlier in February, Bangalore-based books-to-music etailer Flipkart bought Gurgaon-headquartered peer Letsbuy in a cash-and-stock deal.

Stylishyou (the website is currently not live) was founded in 2011. The company also received incubation support from Indian Angel Network (IAN), through the IAN Incubator programme, which is a partnership with the National Science and Technology Entrepreneurship Development Board, Department of Science & Technology, government of India. Stylishyou offers designer and branded jewellery for women. Further details on the company’s scale of operations were not available.

Delhi-based Yebhi, founded in 2009, is an ecommerce site promoted by Big Shoe Bazaar India. The site was earlier known by Bigshoebazaar and started out with an exclusive focus on footwear. It rebranded to Yebhi when it decided to enter the broader lifestyle category. The company continues to run a footwear site called Bigshoebazaar, but focuses on the business-to-business segment selling products to shoe retailers.

Big Shoe Bazaar India raised a $2.2 million Series A round from Nexus Venture Partners in early last year and followed with a $9 million Series B round in July from Catamaran Ventures and Nexus. The company’s founders include former Vishal Retail executive Manmohan Agarwal, Nitin Agarwal, a co-founder of online education company Brainvisa Technologies, Danish Ahmed and Rajul Jain. Yebhi currently offers over 150 brands on its site.

Image Courtesy: Yebhi

Clarity is yet to emerge on what kind of entities would qualify as the proposed notified class of investors. But, Mukherjee’s move to establish a notified class sets the stage for a formal, self-regulated industry association of angel investors, on the lines of Kansas-based Angel Capital Association (ACA). The ACA is the nodal North American trade association of angel groups and private investors that invest in high-growth, early-stage companies. Importantly, it serves as the public policy voice for the professional angel community in the US.

The creation of an ACA-type of body in India will serve two important purposes. One, it will help identify and organize legitimate angel investors on a formal platform. The driving factor behind the Budget’s proposal to tax capital raised from angel investors was to prevent black money from being channeled into startups. Currently, as in the US, there are three kinds of angel investors active in the Indian market:

1. Formal angel networks such as Hyderabad Angels, Indian Angel Network and Mumbai Angels pool the resources of high networth individuals and invest in startups. However, while such networks represent fairly significant amounts of capital, the actual scale of their investments is still quite small. For example, last year, Indian Angel Network, the largest angel network in the country with 200-odd registered members, invested just over $8 million.
2. Professional angel investors, typically small businessmen, serial entrepreneurs and former entrepreneurs who are sitting on capital after successfully selling their own businesses, invest on their own, independent of any formal network. This group also includes professionals who often channel gains from investments in stock markets or real estate to startups. Again, this group is also relatively small in terms of scale of investments.
3. Family and friends, a largely faceless group, constitute the bulk of angel investing activity in India. Given the nascent nature of professional angel investing here, most Indian startups end up raising the first Rs 20 lakh or Rs 50 lakh from these sources. It would not be incorrect to assume that more than 90 per cent of the angel money currently raised by startups comes from this group.

An organized, legally defined platform, that includes all three classes of investors, would go a long way in growing the angel investor ecosystem that is sorely lacking today. It would also, importantly, give startups access to a larger and transparent pool of investors.

The second critical purpose that an ACA-type of platform would serve is that, in future, it can work more effectively with the government on fostering angel investing rather than choke it. For instance, in 2010, the ACA, along with other industry associations, was particularly successful in thwarting proposed amendments in a financial reforms bill that would have potentially hurt angel investments. The amendments proposed to increase the asset requirements of accredited angel investors from $1 million to $2.3 million and require startups raising funding to register with the Securities and Exchange Commission (and wait 120 says for the markets regulator to review their filing).

Of course, a platform for angel investors could be created under the aegis of the Indian Venture Capital Association (IVCA), which is the nodal trade association for private equity and venture capital investors. But given the very unique nature of such investors  – angels invest their own money, much smaller amounts, and roll up their sleeves to work alongside startup teams — and the IVCA’s preponderance with bigger issues, a separate body may serve the angel community better.

This is not the first time that the need for a comprehensive platform that aggregates angel investors has been felt or articulated. Back in 2009, SAIF Partners’ Mukul Singhal, then a part of the Canaan Partners India team, explored the idea of setting up of a platform, under the Canaan umbrella, to help entrepreneurs get in touch with angels more effectively. Singhal’s view was that the angel community was much larger than the already known pool of serial entrepreneurs, big corporate honchos and other high networth individuals. But most of these people never got into the system because either they didn’t know how to didn’t want to join an angel investor group.

We don’t know what happened to that particular initiative. But now is a good time as any to revive it, though as an independent platform. Mukherjee has inadvertently made the first move. Will the angel community take the lead?

Image Courtesy: digitalart / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Bangalore-based Ujjivan, founded by former Citibank executive Samit Ghosh, provides micro loans to women in urban and semi-urban areas. It proposes to use the funds raised from IFC to finance expansion and execute strategic and operational changes in its business to cope with the changed regulatory and business environment for MFIs in India and meet its capital adequacy requirements for the next 3-5 years. The company raised a $25.5 million fifth round of equity funding from Wolfensohn India Advisors, Dutch developmental finance institution FMO and existing investors earlier this year. The other investors in the company include Bellwhether Microfinance Fund, Unitus Corporation, Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Sequoia Capital, Lok Capital and Indian Financial Inclusion Fund.

As on 31st January 2012, the company had disbursed over Rs 29,227 million (about $548 million) to more than 1,091,366 customers at 302 branches in 20 states including 49 under-banked districts across India. The proposed IFC funds will be used to enable the company to increase access to finance in low-income stated, including the northern and eastern regions of the country.

Equitas Holdings, founded in 2007 by former Development Credit Bank executive PN Vasudevan, is headquartered in Chennai and currently has a borrower base of 1.2 million spread across five states, including Rajasthan and Madhya Pradesh. The company has recently diversified in affordable housing loans, through Equitas Housing Finance, and user commercial vehicles financing through Equitas Finance. It plans to use the funds raised from IFC to finance its geographical expansion, scale up new businesses and meet its capital adequacy requirements for the next 3-5 years.

In 2010, Delhi-based Canaan Partners invested about $9 million while CLSA Capital Partners invested $24 million in the company. The Canaan investment, in September that year, created a partial exit for Mumbai-based venture capital investor Aavishkaar, whose Aavishkaar Goodwell I fund was the first institutional investor in Equitas in 2008, investing $1.5 million at the time. The other investors in Equitas include Sequoia Capital, SIDBI, Bellwether Microfinance Fund, India Financial Inclusion Fund, Aquarius and Helion Venture Partners.

The proposed investment from IFC comes at a time when the overall MFI sector is anticipating a respite from its recent troubles with the passing of the Micro Finance Institutions (Development and Regulation) Bill, 2012, in the current session of Parliament. The draft bill proposes to make it compulsory for all micro finance institutions to be registered with the Reserve Bank of India, which would be in charge of governing the sector. Importantly, it is designed to bring MFIs under a central law, which the industry hopes will override state laws such as the Andhra Pradesh Microfinance (Regulation of Moneylending) Act, which dragged the industry into a crisis beginning October 2010.

Already the proposed bill has run into fresh roadblocks following reservations expressed by rural development minster Jairam Ramesh — read details here. The current session of Parliament ends around the third week of May.

Image Courtesy: Equitas