LetsVenture subsidiary Trica secures $3 million from Accel, others

Trica is led by Nimesh Kampani as cofounder and CEO

Trica, a subsidiary of early-stage investment platform LetsVenture, has raised $3 million in seed funding round from Accel, LC Nueva AIF, Secocha Ventures and a clutch of angel investors including Shaadi.com founder Anupam Mittal, Cred founder Kunal Shah, BharatPe cofounder Ashneer Grover. Family offices of Pidilite's Apurva Parekh and DLF Group's Rahul Talwar also participated in the financing round.

Trica offers software products to facilitate equity management and transactions and is led by Nimesh Kampani as cofounder and CEO with LetsVenture co-founders Shanti Mohan and Sanjay Jha as the head of strategy and head of product, respectively.

The firm's suite of products include Trica equity, which is essentially a rebranded version of LetsVenture's employee stock ownership plan (ESOP) management and cap table SaaS product MyStartupEquity that was launched in January last year and Trica capital that will facilitate investments in growth stage and pre-IPO companies from family offices, ultra high-net-worth individuals (UHNIs) and Indian and global funds.

“With Trica, we now aim to be the market leader in equity management, primary fundraising and liquidity solutions at the growth stage of the market, thereby becoming a one-stop-technology led full-stack platform for founders,” said LetsVenture cofounder Shanti Mohan.

Kampani told Moneycontrol that they have signed up over 400 customers across India, the United States and Singapore for its ESOP management and cap table product in the past 15 months, of which 30%-40% of them are Series B startups. Among its customers include Delhivery, Pharmeasy, Zetwerk, Jupiter, Khatabook, Scripbox and Mobikwik.

The platform is free for startups upto 100 employees, following which Trica charges Rs 1,000 per user per year.

"Startups are becoming mainstream at an ever faster pace, and just like the Demat moment for public markets, we believe we're at the right inflection point where private company ownership needs to be managed and scaled digitally" said Subrata Mitra, Partner, Accel India.

For its growth investment platform, the company has onboarded more than 200 family offices, 500 plus UHNIs and 100 plus funds. "In the last year, the team has fulfilled exclusive investment mandates in over 20 growth stage startups, pre-IPO companies and venture funds from India and overseas" he said. trica said it is a venture partner to revenue based financing fund N+1 Capital and Axis AMC’s Growth Avenues Fund.

Trica plans to use the funds raised to expand the team, build out the technology infrastructure stack for equity management for startups and investors and scale the product.

"We currently have a lean team, operating with around 10 people on the business side and 10 people on the tech side. However, we see a huge exponential growth possible on both the parts of the business, due to which we want to increase our team size to about 100 people" Kampani said.

The firm has strengthened its leadership team by roping in former Expedia executive Siddhartha Sharma to head Trica equity's global SaaS business and former ITI Capital executive Pranav Mahajani to head company relations at Trica capital.

In terms of a product roadmap, Trica plans to initially focus on building a full stack platform on the equity side. "I want to make it a product for the CFO who should be able to do anything with equity at the click of a button," Kampani said. In the future, it plans to work with other stakeholders including investors and startup founders.

Kampani said there is also a lot of synergy between both the businesses to work together, by basing their business model on relationships instead of being just a software vendor.

"Today, anybody offering an ESOP product is just a vendor who has no standing in the ecosystem. When we look at the fundraising side as well, although there are bankers and advisors involved, it becomes very transactional after a point" Kampani said "What we are trying to do by offering the complete equity solution is to build the entire business model based on relationships. This will offer me tremendous opportunity on the relationship side where I work with the founders and management on everything related to equity"

Over the last year and a half, many firms have announced ESOP buybacks and also expanded the stock options pool to cover more stakeholders, a move aimed at motivating employees and retaining them. This includes startups like Razorpay, Zerodha, Cred, Cars24, Urban Company, Udaan, and Whatfix. On October 6, Swiggy rolled out a two-year ESOP liquidity programme worth $35-40 million.

The investor interest in the equity management space is also increasing. Earlier this week, Qapita raised $15 million funding from East Ventures (Growth Fund), Vulcan Capital and others. NYCA and existing investors including Endiya Partners and MassMutual Ventures also participated in the funding round.