Suresh Sambandam, the founder and CEO of Chennai-based SaaS firm Kissflow, has launched an accelerator venture capital fund called Mudhal VC, along with his son Aravind Suresh. This adds to the growing trend of founder-led VCs gaining momentum in India.
Mudhal in Tamil translates to first capital and Sambandam describes the venture as ‘adventure capital’.
“Our core differentiator is that we want to call it adventure capital as we will be investing in startups where other people might shy away from putting money. Most VCs put money first but we want to put efforts and time first with startups and then invest,” Sambandam told Moneycontrol in an interaction.
Sambandam’s son Aravind Suresh, who is the founder of a restaurant MeenSatti, will be running the VC firm as the managing partner and Sambandam will be the general partner.
Mudhal VC will invest $25,000 - $100,000 in startups and the main focus will continue to be on mentorship and offering scaling support for these startups. The VC firm is charting to make one investment every month.
The idea for Mudhal VC sprung from Sambandam’s mentorship efforts through Idea Pattarai, which is a a Dream Tamilnadu initiative that promotes mass entrepreneurship in Tamil Nadu.
“We wanted to help founders and that’s when we launched Idea Pattarai. Idea Pattarai focus on events and workshops that help founders in various topics. We also do a lot of team networking.
We created small format workshops, one is called validate workshop with 25-30 people, and scale workshops with just 10 people. For two years, we focussed on tier-iii and tier ii cities,” Sambandam said.
The programme helped at least 1,500 founders.
“We have around 70-75 companies that we have mentored. To further enhance support, we started giving them a small capital as investments. That became 15-16 investments,” He added.
The new VC firm will focus on Tier II and Tier III cities in Tamil Nadu.
“The VC will also break the myth that to become a founder one need not be an IIT or IIM graduate, or be good in english and more. You can still a very good brand with right coaching and mentorship,” Sambandam said.
Sambandam’s venture goes live at a time when several top operators and founders have turned into venture capital investors. Girish Mathrubootham, cofounder of Freshworks, along with Eka Software founder Manav Garg launched the Together fund.
Similarly Mithun Sacheti, who sold his remaining stake in CaratLane, has been backing startups in the D2C space.
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