Investing focus areas at Malpani Ventures

At Malpani Ventures, we largely operate as a sector-agnostic early-stage investor. However, we do believe in the saying that ‘Great businesses have a point of view! not just a product or service. You have to believe in something’. Putting our money where our mouth is, we are sharing our key focus areas over the short term:

·         B2B Enterprise Software/ SAAS:

We are big believers that Indian software will dominate global markets. Following the success of Zoho & Freshworks, India has created thirteen unicorns and at least 50 SaaS companies that are now worth more than $l00 million at the last count. What excites us about the space more than the purported valuation is the potential of founders to build sensible businesses for cash flows. One can’t simply throw money at customer acquisition in enterprise to grow! Our investments in Callify, VDocipher, and more recently Clodura have helped us build a certain level of understanding/ appreciation of the space which we hope will stand us in good stead going forward.

We have written about a brief framework we apply for screening B2B startups, whilst this is by no means exhaustive it allows us a good starting point for our assessment:

·         Healthtech/ Medtech

The Covid-19 pandemic has allowed all of us to look at healthcare in a new light. Whilst this is typically a sector that is usually ignored by VCs due to the long gestation period involved & limited successes in the space, we believe this is an area that can generate tremendous value – both social and economic. We are keen to back entrepreneurs who are looking to develop affordable efficient innovations which can be deployed at scale. Dr. Malpani, our principal investor, is a practicing IVF specialist running his own clinic – this helps to provide unique insights in appreciating new breakthroughs in the space.

Our working hypothesis for backing entrepreneurs in the space is for the startup to have the following elements in place:

o   Large Addressable market catered at affordable price-points  

o   Clear commercialization plan with a well-planned GTM

o   Initial validation of innovation/ solution through customer surveys, clinical tests, etc.

·         Education/ Ed-tech

Education is a space close to our heart at Malpani Ventures – this reflects in our gamut of investments across the space. Multibhashi, Bibox, Concept Owl, and Dux Education are some of our investments while we work closely with social impact startups and initiatives like Beyond Exams, Learn with Comics, Learn from Peers, More Than Marks, and have the opportunity to support Barefoot Edu, The Apprentice Project, Giv Funds among others.

Our investments in the space allow us to cross-pollinate ideas to help deliver rounded outcomes to learners efficiently! While there has been a barrage of funding in edtech, we still believe that better models are yet to play out – we are open to ideas in home-schooling, vernacular-based education, blue-collar training, amongst others.

Do reach out to me or Siddharth if you are a founder building in any of the above-mentioned areas. We are open to backing founders outside of our area of comfort. As ever, our learning never stops and we are keen to experiment!