The evolvement of Venture Capital Companies is a fresh phenomenon in India. Until 1998, in the absence of venture capital organizations, individual investors and financial institutions played the critical role of providing venture capital. Entrepreneurs were heavily dependent on public offerings, private offerings, and lending by mega financial institutions. Contrary to the earlier days, the number of companies offering growth capital and the number of investors is boosting rapidly. One such company that counts in this is Arka Venture Labs.
Arka in Sanskrit means Sun Beam. As the Managing Partner of Arka, Radhesh Kanumury believes that Arka provides the guiding light to the start-ups from India. In an exclusive interview with Insights Success Radhesh sheds some light on the Venture Capital space.
Following are the highlights of the interview.
Please brief us about Arka Venture Labs in detail.
Arka Venture Labs is a first-of-its-kind India-US cross-border accelerator platform, launched with three leading VC firms – Benhamou Global Ventures (BGV), Blume Ventures, and Emergent Ventures. Starting in August 2018, the fund has invested in 23 start-ups with three exits and five up-rounds (from the likes of B Capital, Nexus, Lightspeed, Matrix, Uncorrelated, Samsung Next, Facebook). The fund has made investments in start-ups in retailtech, the sales tech, marketing tech, energy tech, health tech, cloud infrastructure, DevOps, and machine learning.
What inspired you to enter the industry you are catering to?
There is an inherent advantage for Indian SaaS companies to compete globally. I am outlining the reasons. India has the world’s largest and youngest population of English educated and computer literate people. This has created a massive talent pool of tech, sales, and customer success resources. The new role model for Indian youth are Unicorn founders, and many of them are looking to embark on an entrepreneurial journey.
The cost of product development, digital customer acquisition, implementation, post-sales support is much lesser in India than in the US. Also, the ability to stitch together an array of technologies to gain the product advantage is accessible in India, given the talent pool. Today’s customer requires a high-touch approach, and customer success is critical of customer retention and upsell. In India, companies can deliver high-touch customer success at excellent margins. Finally, with the advent of the BPO industry, there is a massive pool of talent who can provide business processes such as data cleanings and tagging that are needed to provide clean and tagged data for AI algorithms to converge faster. Only in India, you can find a cost-effective way of doing all this in a single place.
But the markets for these B2B Start-ups are much more profound and broader in the US. It is prudent for an Indian B2B start-up to develop products from India, service them from India but sell in the US markets. A fund like Arka Venture Labs bridges the gap between Indian Start-ups and the US market early in the life cycle for a B2B start-up by providing them with investment, mentoring, and connections to the valley ecosystem.
How was your firm/business affected by the Covid-19 pandemic, and what measures did you take to shorten the damages while helping your clients and maintaining the safety of your employees?
Our fund has not been impacted because of COVID-19, mainly because we invest in digital companies. In fact, with COVID-19, there has been a tailwind for digital businesses that Arka and its portfolio companies are harnessing.
What would you like to advice the young generation of entrepreneurs and enthusiasts who want to become a part of the industry you are catering to?
I have seen most of the B2B start-ups founders have worked in either start-ups or enterprises.
Here is my advice for wannabe entrepreneurs working in organisations. Always have a passion for learning new things. Understand if there are specific pain points in the area you are working or for the clients you are catering to. Figure out if there is a better way to solve the problem, which would ultimately improve your clients’ sales, productivity, and efficiency. And if the business problem is pressing and large enough, that could be a starting point for one to explore the entrepreneurial journey. Always have the entrepreneurial zeal on.
What is the current scenario of your industry?
Quoting from a recent SaaS Bhoomi report,
It is estimated that Indian SaaS companies currently generate $2-3 billion in revenues every year, which is about 1% of the global market. There is a potential to generate annual revenues of $50-$70 billion by 2030 and win 4-6% of the worldwide market – a value-creation opportunity of $500 billion to $1 trillion.
To be Designed Separately: (Under the image of featured person)
Radhesh is among the most seasoned B2B investors in India who brings rich operational experience in the enterprise technology space. He is Managing Partner at Arka Venture Labs.
Besides investments, Radhesh mentors his portfolio start-ups in various aspects of their businesses such as product, product market fit, GTM scaleup, channels strategy, branding, and up-rounds.
He is the investment lead for Obviously.ai (upround from B Capital and Trail Mix Ventures), Deepaffects (acquired by Ringcentral), Insent (developed by Zoominfo), Simplicontract (upround from Picus Capital), Nirmata (upround from Uncorrelated Ventures, Zee5 Capital, Samsung Next), dotin Inc, Firsthive, Essenvia, Enact, Glance HQ, Rocketium, and Zapscale.
Prior to starting Arka Venture Labs, Radhesh had a 17-year long stint in IBM with strong technical, sales, and business development experience in various divisions of IBM. Radhesh headed the Global Entrepreneur Program (IBM start-up initiative) for IBM India and South Asia in his last assignment there. He exhibited strong leadership in steering the Global Entrepreneur Program from scratch to one of the companies to be reckoned by the Start-up ecosystem in India and generating solid revenues for IBM India Cloud business.
He has helped many B2B start-ups scale in their journey by mentoring them and facilitating access to funds and customers. He conceptualized IBM India’s Start-up challenge called IBM India Smartcamp and successfully executed the same. Personally, led the curation and selection of the Startups for the finals, many of whom got funding either for the first time or for their subsequent rounds.
Some of the start-ups initially identified by Radhesh and scaled very well include Whatfix, Hasura, Medikabazaar, Vymo, SirionLabs, Loginext, Talview, Signzy, Emotix, Getmyparking, and Sigtuple, with a number of these reaching Soonicorn status. Radhesh also worked with large enterprises to identify next-generation innovations through joint Hackathons and Start-up challenges.
Prior to this role in IBM, he worked as a Software Architect, where he designed Software solutions for Enterprise Clients, ISVs, and System Integrators. Created many first of its kind solutions in areas of Application Integration, Application Server, Database, Portal, Content Management, Business Intelligence, Security, IoT, Infrastructure Management, Application Monitoring, and led several vital Sales wins for IBM.
Radhesh is a self-driven professional ready to take up challenges. He has been successful at achieving turnaround growth and positioning the organization for long-term profitability.
