Founders and top executives become the real-time Sharks (from the TV Reality Show ‘Shark Tank’), forming a collective fund, Bharat Founders Fund, for new startups.
About 65 entrepreneurs have now donned the investor’s cap through the Bharat Founders Fund (BFF) launch to invest in pre-seed stage companies. Among them are the famous Unicorn founders Vidit Aatrey and Sanjeev Barnwal, co-founders of Meesho; Gazal Kalra, co-founder of Rivigo; Cars24 co-founders Vikram Chopra, Mehul Agrawal and Gajendra Jangid; Smita Deorah and Sumeet Mehta of Lead School; Vamsi Krishna, co-founder of Vedantu; and Saurabh Garg, co-founder of NoBroker.
Investopad partners Maanav Sagar and Sera Arora are managing the fund at present.
“Today, founders and senior operators in a startup have created wealth through either successful exits or employee options (ESOPs) and are actively looking to give back and invest in startups. Bringing these founders together as venture partners will allow Bharat Founders Fund to connect its portfolio companies with senior startup operators which have the experience of taking an idea (or business) from zero to one,” said Arora
He also said that BFF would not participate in the companies but hold the right to appoint a director if needed.
With a corpus of $20 million in the funds in BFF, founders-turned-Investors have decided to invest $100,000 to $200,000 on average in various early-stage startups and companies which are still at the idea stage.
“We would like to invest and enter a company as early as possible. The idea is to help these companies get access to the best mentorship and interact with a wide portfolio of our venture partners who have built successful startups,” said Sagar.
While Bharat Founders Fund (BFF) has already made 20 investments until today, it aims at providing 100 early-stage investments this year. BFF has currently invested in the learning platform Yellow Class, jobs platform Skillbee, lending startup Basic, and direct-to-consumer brand BlissClub.
