Venture Catalysts made 207 bets in 2021, biggest exit brought 80x returns

IPO rush encourages early stage investor to dial-up deals up to Series C rounds

Venture Catalysts Group, which runs an angel network and VC firm 9Unicorns, saw the number of its deals rising two-fold to 207 this year compared to 2020. The investments were made in 178 start-ups – and saw $86 million of its own corpus being deployed, while more than $600 million was invested by its syndicate of angel investors.

Although Venture Catalysts Group is known as an early stage investor in start-ups, or young companies before they raise a Series A round, the past year has seen it make investments up to Series C rounds.

“In the last four months, we have made more than 20 investments in Series C rounds with cheque sizes of $3 million - $5 million. Although 80-85 per cent of our investments are still at the early stage, the slight change in strategy to invest in the growth stage was inspired by the IPO exits that happened this year in India,” said Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, co-founder and president, Venture Catalysts Group.

Founded by Dr Apoorva Ranjan Sharma, Anil Jain, Anuj Golecha and Gaurav Jain in 2016, the start-up investor said that it has made it to the list of top 10 global most active accelerators and incubators for the second consecutive year. “The group has surpassed popular accelerators such as Techstars, Bpifrance, 500 Global, and SOSV and now only behind YCombinator,” it said.

Some of the prominent investments for the year include BluSmart, Dukaan, Klub, Melorra, Kala Gato, Mitron TV, Rage Coffee, Power Gummies, Coutloot, Prescinto, Resolve AI, Toch, Zingbus, RoundLabs, and Stage, amongst others. Among the sectors, DeepTech, B2B Saas, FinTech, InsureTech, F&B, HealthTech, and Media dominated the investments this year.

Venture Catalysts said it saw 62 exits and uprounds (where its portfolio company raised funding in a successive round) in 2021. Its most successful exit of the year was BharatPe with 80X returns while other significant exits were in start-ups such as Dukaan, ImpactGuru and Rooter.