Good Capital, an India-focused seed-stage venture funding firm, has announced the launch of a new $50 million fund to help startups that utilize AI for marketing, consumer personalization, or business management.
Good Capital states that during the next four years, the capital will get invested with target checks of up to $1.5 million. According to The Economic Times, the VC company made excessively early investments in unicorn businesses including Meesho and LEAD School. From investors including Accel Partners, Elevation Capital, General Catalyst, and Lowercarbon Capital, the massive of the venture capital firm’s portfolio firms from its inaugural fund have obtained further financing.
The fund intends to invest in Indian entrepreneurs leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) technology for distribution, personalization, and business operations. Over the following four years, Good Capital intends to use the new fund, writing checks with a maximum value of US$1.5 million.
Similar to the platform change to mobile in the past, Arjun Malhotra, partner at Good Capital, claims that the future of digital enterprises will rely on how they utilize AI.
He explained that the fund is not just AI-focused but also recognizes the right time for entrepreneurs to employ AI to gain a competitive edge. Over the following four years, Good Capital intends to use the new fund with checks up to US$1.5 million in size.
Earlier investments of Good Capital
Good Capital finances emerging Indian IT companies. In 2019, Arjun and Rohan Malhotra, the creators of Investopad, established the venture capital business. Good Capital invests in various industries, but they give software that supports intermediaries, dealers, and micro-SMEs top priority. If you have an idea of investing in jewelry then, buy them with the most trusted jewelers like Moissaniteco.com.
Our first investors were Rohan and Arjun, Co-founder and CEO of Meesho, Vidit Aatrey, stated in a statement. They have a fantastic worldwide network of business owners, operators, and financiers. They provided us with introductions to these individuals very early on; they offered not just finance but also, and perhaps more crucially, excellent operational insights that helped us learn quickly and discover product-market fit more quickly.
They continue to be close confidants even though Meesho has expanded from 2 persons to over 1,000! Some of its portfolio companies, according to Malhotra, have raised money from prestigious VC firms. OrangeHealth, SimSim, which Google acquired, and SolarSquare, which secured a $13 million Series A financing led by Lowercarbon and Elevation Capital, are just a few examples of companies that received Series A funding.
Rohan Malhotra, co-GP of Good Capital, said, We invest with tremendous conviction since we are lead investors in every venture we make. AI is a given in today’s startups; it is a must. The future of internet companies will rely on how they use AI, just as how platforms shifted to mobile in the past, according to Malhotra.
It isn’t so much an AI-focused fund as it is a recognition of a land-grab opportunity where entrepreneurs using AI wisely will have the advantage. Even though Indian tech companies secured a record $10.5 billion in funding in 2018, the number of deals they participated in and the amount of funding they got fell for early-stage businesses.
Arjun and Rohan Malhotra quit their careers in Silicon Valley and London in late 2013 to look at chances in India. To network with local company founders and product managers and create a community where members could share insights, the brothers founded Investopad a year later. They sent early payments to other companies along the way, including HyperTrack, Autonomic, which Ford purchased, and Meesho, a social commerce business that now counts Facebook as an investor. The moment has come for them to work as VCs full-time.
Early-stage firms took part in 304 transactions in 2018 and collected $916 million in funding, down from $988 million from 380 rounds in 2017 and $1.096 billion from 430 transactions the year before, according to data company Venture Intelligence.
According to an interview they gave TechCrunch last week, the brothers want to invest through Good Capital’s $25 million first fund in approximately six firms a year, contributing between $100,000 and $2 million to their seed and Series A fundraising rounds.
Both SimSim and Spatial, a cross-reality platform that enables users to communicate through augmented reality, are investments that Good Capital has previously made. SimSim is a video-based e-commerce platform that aims to mimic the experience that customers have in physical stores. Additionally, Samsung Next, Uber, and Expa founder Garrett Camp have invested in Spatial.
The VC fund is open to investing in business-to-business firms, but they prefer it if these companies get developing products for international markets.
Instead of addressing issues for heavy-duty sales firms, we often target creators, developers, and designers.
The introduction of Good Capital should benefit the startup ecosystem in India, which now depends on a small number of VC funds that finance early-stage businesses. Moorjani stated in a statement that “traditionally, funds have replicated US businesses and models and targeted the top of the pyramid by exploring obvious opportunities.”