Indian Angel Network is a network of Angel investors keen to invest in early stage businesses which have potential to create disproportionate value. The members of the Network are leaders in the Entrepreneurial Eco-System as they have had strong operational experience as CEOs or a background of creating new and successful ventures. They share a passion to create scale and value for startup ventures.
Started in April 2006, the Indian Angel Network in addition to money, provides constant access to high quality mentoring, vast networks and inputs on strategy as well as execution. The Network members, because of their background are better able to assess the potential and risks at the early stage.
The beginning of the journey with dynamic leaders
Padmaja grew up in CPI-M’s Calcutta at a time when entrepreneurship was not even a buzzword. She studied management, dabbled with CA, and in the late 1980s, picked up the family’s real estate business. After marriage, she moved out of home for the first time to Delhi, where her husband worked. She got a job at a small computer training start-up and then later shifted to a media house. Eventually, she joined a software services company, helmed by herwould-be mentor, Saurabh Srivastava.
Then through a series of fortunate events and learning received on account of a combination of decisions both good and bad, she went on to perform a range of roles in multiple positions in various corporate organizations. In her role as a corporate communications professional, she was heavily engaged with industry bodies like NASSCOM which exposed her to the outside world. Having been in the ecosystem for a while, she realized what it was lacking: a robust support group for empowering start-ups both financially and in terms of mentorship and strategic guidance. That was when IAN began to take shape in her mind, and she hasn’t looked back since.
Padmaja – A dynamic woman leader who is featuring among the 10 most influential women entrepreneurs.
Padmaja is a dynamic leader who believes the most important qualities in her for being a successful visionary are being a great learner and listener, learning how to align your vision with your personal capacity and the resources you have at hand and being able to communicate effectively with their peers and people across verticals, departments, and organizations. She also believes in being kind. Contrary to popular belief, kindness is not a hindrance rather a great catalyst to keeping things in motion and driving them towards success.
Padmaja believes in taking out time for oneself while it is great to be motivated and entirely invested in your work. As part of the self-care routine, she usually devotes at least one hour a day to exercising, reading, and listening to music.
She likes to meet a lot of new-age innovators across sectors who are dedicatedly trying to resolve some of the greatest challenges plaguing society today. It is both overwhelming and heart-warming for her to see India’s youth – for most of them are youth – coming forward to drive the nation down the path of progress. The knowledge that she is playing some role, however small, in nurturing and empowering such visionaries fills her with great satisfaction.
Padmaja’s schedule usually involves attending start-up-focused events, listening to start-up pitches, and interacting with various industry leaders, and figuring out ways to bolster the country’s business landscape with policymakers. While it leaves little to no time for her to spend with her near and dear ones, she makes conscious efforts to not let her personal life be subsumed with her professional life.
Overcoming the challenges
All entrepreneurial journeys are full of struggles and challenges. In the course of operationalizing TiE Delhi-NCR, Indian Angel Network, and IAN Fund, it required Padmaja to invest a tremendous amount of energy and will in strategizing as well as building trust amongst investors and stakeholders. Another challenge was to drive the engagement of Investment Committee of the IAN Fund. IAN wanted it to be more than just approving the investments or meeting once a quarter. Padmaja was committed to ensuring that the IC members that comprise successful entrepreneurs as well as industry-builders such as Raman Roy (Founder of BPO) were able to make time and have one-on-one interaction with founders of potential investee companies. The goal was to facilitate deep mentoring sessions and valuable inputs to companies even before they are approved for investment. This empowers entrepreneurs to generate immense value. This was easier to conceptualise than to implement but IAN persevered, and the results are there for all to see.
What does IAN do and how does it impact the markets?
IAN invests in innovative start-ups and early-stage ventures, thereby enabling high-value companies by offering local as well as global entrepreneurs’ access to global markets along with networking, mentorship, and growth opportunities. IAN brings driven investors, HNI, and domain leaders together to drive a much-needed alternate funding mechanism to encourage innovation and entrepreneurship in India. IAM also works closely with the Government of India to create a sustainable ecosystem for start-ups and new businesses in the country. Their concerted and indefatigable efforts have managed to bring India’s start-up ecosystem on the global map. 10 years since the Network was formed, it is still leading the development of the entrepreneurial and angel investment ecosystem in India while continually and proactively participating in various committees and reports across the Ministry of Finance, Information Technology, SEBI, and DIPP to achieve the said objectives.
Vision, future growth and success stories
The mission of IAN is to support high-potential Indian start-ups by providing them with funding, mentorship, and networking opportunities. From being an institutionalized global angel platform, IAN envisions evolving to become the single largest horizontal platform for seed- and early-stage investing. Their aim is to support over 500 Indian start-ups with an investment in excess of INR 5,000 crore in ten years and creating more than 50,000 job opportunities in the process. IAN is also committed to maximizing market returns for its investors while creating lasting positive impact at the same time. They also aim to leverage out eponymous Fund to invest in innovative companies across new-age sectors such as healthcare and medical devices, VR, AI, software as a service, marketplaces, fin-tech, big data, artificial intelligence, agritech, and hardware, etc.
Built “By Entrepreneurs, For Entrepreneurs”, Indian Angel Network, today is perhaps the largest angel investor group in the world. IAN is the only angel group in the world with operations across multiple countries and a mix of around 470 institutional and individual members, comprising the who’s who of successful entrepreneurs, spread around the globe. This gives IAN the unique and unparalleled ability to help its investee companies not only succeed locally but scale globally as well.
IAN’s IRR over eight years was 40 percent, which is huge given how early they invest in a company. And their failure rate was 10 percent-which was also very low.
IAN Fund is another venture that IAN is proud of. It is a uniquely differentiated and innovation-focused Fund which aims to enable innovative ventures operating in new-age sectors such as cleantech, agritech, healthtech, advanced technologies, etc. In addition to seed and early-stage investments, the Fund is committed to facilitating growth and scale for domain-defining ventures by leveraging the strong industry linkages of IAN.
Apart from its focus on empowering start-ups, the Fund is also dedicated to shaping synergies with the VC community, as well as promoting collaboration between enterprises and prominent VCs. Since its launch in April 2017, the Fund has achieved multiple milestones, including successfully closing its capital fund at INR 375 crore, far surpassing its ambitious initial target by INR 25 crore. The Fund’s reach and visibility have also scaled phenomenally, and this has clearly helped it in building its pipeline of projects, create a network of domain experts across geographies, establishing synergies between co-investors and, of course, helping raise the capital itself. A plethora of partnerships have been signed up and operationalized, with both private & public incubators / accelerators, BIRAC (Govt. of India’s Dept of Biotech), co-working spaces, entrepreneurship hubs such as TiE Chapters, NASSCOM 10K, etc.
Moving forward, the Network and the Fund together aim to build on their impressive performance and support over 500 Indian start-ups with an investment in excess of INR 5,000 crore by the end of the next decade.
IAN was not built in a day. It is a legacy built in over a decade which is backed by a very strong member base, who are the who’s who of the industry and the corporate world. The value addition they bring as world’s largest angel investor group is something that every member who joins them looks forward to. They get deals across 17-18 sectors from all over the globe. What IAN is doing is something unique and helps build their portfolio. They are the only angel group that gave 8 successful exits to their members last year. All this helps in amplification for the brand – IAN to the best of our capabilities.
