The fund scouts for startups in the enterprise healthcare, fintech, logistics, energy and utility space. It then works closely with these startups to establish a go-to-market product and connects them to large companies in the US by leveraging its network. “In the US, there is a massive shift from investments in China and Israel to India… Microsoft, Amazon, Google, Facebook, Salesforce, Oracle, SAP, every single large company has formed large investments in India in the last 18 months without any exception, and there’s a deep realisation that if you want to source innovation at scale, India is a viable alternative to Israel and China,” Season Two founder Sajan Pillai said.
According to Ravi Narayan, CEO of T-Hub, a Hyderabad-based accelerator, the potential to connect corporates with young startups is immense. “The objective of these engagements is to help corporates uncover startups working in their focus areas, understand the innovation landscape, and engage with relevant startups on proof of concept development with an intention to onboard these organisations and license their technology,” said Narayan.
For instance, T-Hub-incubated health tech startup Nexrea already sells to Johnson & Johnson, Tech Mahindra, GE Healthcare, Cyient, and Siemens, the company said.
Season Two Ventures will make about 30 investments from this fund, starting with an initial cheque size of $500,000 to $1 million, and invest about $1 million in additional capital later on, to scale up the ventures. However, a third of the fund will be deployed towards backing founding teams and seeding in ideas and problem statements that the fund identifies from corporates in the US and to help build those businesses. In such cases, Season Two will hold at least 50% stake in the venture. “We want to be committed with our distribution system, advisory and shared services so that our portfolio companies can get into at least five Fortune-500 companies, and in less than 2 years build a $15 million revenueplus business,” Pillai told ET.
In less than two months of launch, the fund has made one bet in India — Uvik, a mobile payment platform that enables contactless payments across utilities and transport.
