50K Ventures to invest in 50 idea, early-stage start-ups

50K Ventures, a Hyderabad-based investment platform to back technology start-ups at the idea and early-stage of their lifecycles, is planning to invest in and provide mentorship to at least one start-up every month, according to its co-founder Vineel Nalla.

"Holistically, what we want to do is to invest in 50 Indian firms over a period. We are primarily looking at startups in the consumer Internet space, and ideally plan to invest $50,000 (around Rs 32 lakh), with the upper limit being $200,000 (Rs 1.26 crore), in each firm," he told Business Standard.

Founded by Nalla and Sanjay Enishetty in 2014, 50K Ventures brings together accredited investors, high networth individuals and mentors under 50K Network, which it has floated a month ago, to seed, nurture and accelerate early-stage start-ups, besides guiding them in securing the next round of funding etc.

50K Ventures has so far invested in two Hyderabad-based start-ups - Violet Street, a social fashion discovery portal to browse fashion looks and shop real-time with friends, and Zify, a carpooling service that connect car owners with empty seats and passengers travelling in the same direction.

50K Network currently has 10 members, including redBus.in co-founder Phanindra Sama, CtrlS Datacenters Limited's chief executive officer Sridhar Pinnapureddy, Sanjay Jesrani among others.

"Our idea is to have around 50 HNIs on board of 50K Network, which will be officially launched by July this year," Nalla said, adding that 50K Ventures was setting up a 14,000-sft incubation centre in Hyderabad, which would be ready by August 2015.

"The incubation centre will provide office space to around 10 startups that we will invest in, enabling them to build their products, besides hosting some matured companies from the US," he said.