“Change is supremely inconvenient, uncomfortable and naturally scary. Yet we only move through life through the process of change, reinvention and renewal.”
A forest ravaged by a fire is a grim picture. Calamity, though undesirable, is not without hope of renewal. They remind us of fragility of life and possibility of resurgence. When the fire abates, new trees get the opportunity and necessary sunlight and room to grow. Forest fires make way for new growth.
A bull market must correct sometime, it is inevitable. However, hope springs eternal amid all the chaos and gloom. Some companies will get stronger, using this opportunity to build product moats, hire strong talent, and acquire markets. The best of startups get created during crisis downturns. There is room for innovation and new ideas. A new clarity of thinking emerges from the chaos, this separates the truly great founders from the rest.
We are optimists and see opportunity to build stronger companies during this downturn. Even in times of great difficulty, the seeds of renewal continue to exist and will eventually bear fruit. At Kalaari, we are actively backing founders building for the future. Since the start of the year, we have welcomed 14 new startups into the #KalaariFamily. We remain steadfast in our commitment to enabling the shapers of tomorrow to build enduring startups.
Dubverse lets content creators dub a video to many languages, in real-time for half the cost. The platform uses Deep Learning and AI to make every video multi-lingual.
With over 350M video consumers in India and 95% of content consumption in non-English languages, we believe there is a pressing need for every video to go multi-lingual.
Founders, Varshul Gupta & Anuja Dhawan, have strong experience in building deep-tech products and are driven in their mission of removing language barriers in video consumption.
Bombay Play is pioneering the hyper-social gaming genre. Their mobile games bring people together by turning games into live, social, multiplayer experiences. Dice Merge Puzzle, Card Party and Daily Word Puzzle are among the popular games they have developed.
Mobile gaming today is a $2.2B market in India. It is poised to reach $7B by 2025, clocking a CAGR of 40%. Gaming is the biggest form of entertainment in India, with Indians consuming over 8.5 hours of gaming content per week on average, more than the time spent on Movies and TV.
Founders, Oliver Jones and Abhas Saroha, bring 10+ years of experience in the gaming industry, and are committed to their vision of creating a leading hyper-social gaming factory from India.
Eloelo is an influencer-led interactive gaming platform that enables creators to live stream games.
India has over 480M gamers today, and 15.4% of them spend 3-7 hours weekly in watching other gamers play as a form of entertainment.
Founders, Saurabh Pandey & Akshay Dubey, aim to create the go-to streaming platform for creators and eventually pioneer an immersive entertainment platform for Bharat.
Congratulations to Sumit Sinha, Mukesh Bansal, and the entire Phable team on their latest fundraise.
Phable is a chronic-care disease management platform. The number of people with diabetes has nearly tripled from 26M in 1990 to ~75M in 2021. With ~75M Indians suffering from diabetes and over 210M from hypertension, chronic illness is a massive problem in the Indian context. Phable is currently catering to over 3.5M Indians and aims to revolutionize chronic disease management in India.
We are glad to welcome Aflac Ventures, Digital Horizon and Stride Ventures in the latest round. They join Manipal Hospitals, Omron Ventures, SOSV, Social Starts, Fresco Capital, and us as investors in the company.
Congratulations to Himanshu Gupta, Vishal Chopra, and the entire WeRize team on their latest fundraise.
India’s hinterland needs a different set of financial products from what is currently available, and a distribution model that solves the unique challenges of these markets. WeRize is a socially distributed financial services platform that offers customized credit, group insurance, and savings products to users residing in small towns in India.
We are glad to welcome British International Investment and Sony Innovation Fund in the latest round. They join 3one4 Capital, Picus Capital, Orios Venture Partners and us as investors in the company.
We are privileged to have been early partners in their journey.
See our portfolio here
1. “One should not go into business thinking they are going to get lucky in any shape or form"
In this episode of SaaS from Scratch, Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari, and Sourabh Gupta, Co-Founder and CEO of Skit.ai, discuss why product-market-fit is so important, how to achieve it, and how to shape business decisions pre-PMF & post-PMF.
Here are three key takeaways from the session:
Product Market Fit is a continuous learning experience. Talking to your customers is the only way to find PMF. Ideally, it could take you anywhere between 1 to 2 years to get the product market fit.
You should ideally raise enough capital that is sustainable for you to last 2 years.
To increase your network, rely on cold calls, cold emails and events. They still work like magic. Be hungry and have a passion to learn.
Our new live podcast series “SaaS from Scratch” brings deep insights to help young SaaS founders learn the tools of the trade from successful leaders who have helped scale SaaS companies.
2. “The legal bodies in India are not fully geared towards regulating the fast-evolving crypto economy. Policy thinking still reflects the perception that blockchain is 'good' while crypto is bad"
On this episode of our Twitter #Web3Talks, Ravinder Pal Singh, Partner at Kalaari; Meyyappan Nagappan, Leader at Nishith Desai and Raphael Toman, Senior Associate at Brandl Talos; throw light on how regulatory ecosystems for crypto are evolving in India and abroad.
Here are three key takeaways from the session:
There are no regulations in India today that say that a blockchain smart contract is a 'contract in writing'. So, someone buying an NFT without the actual copyright being transferred is just something that doesn't make sense.
For India to stay connected with the global crypto-economy, it is critical for the government to allow private digital currencies/tokens to co-exist with RBI's CBDC - The Indian Digital Rupee
The current tax regime will have to be simplified to continue incentivizing the 'appropriately educated' audience to participate and engage with crypto. Micro-tax frameworks should be the next step.
Kalaari’s #Web3Talks is a series of live-conversations we conduct with different stakeholders from the crypto and Web3 ecosystem, including founders, developers, operators, influencers and regulators.
“At Kalaari, I am excited to partake in the journey of digital nation building and export of high quality India-made software by working with entrepreneurs to solve deep-rooted problems in a scalable & profitable way."
Kumar Ritesh is AVP, Investments, at Kalaari. Prior to joining Kalaari, Ritesh worked with Samsung Strategic Investments where he looked at investment opportunities in India. He has also worked at Amadeus Labs as a software developer and had earlier co-founded a startup in the SMB-SaaS space. He did his MBA from IIM Calcutta & engineering from DSCE(VTU) Bangalore. Outside of work, his interests include writing, reading and yoga.
Kalaari Partners with Meta We recently partnered with Meta’s VC Brand Incubator, an initiative to up-skill and scale young, invested companies as we look to collectively enable this digital ecosystem and turbocharge the growth of our early-stage companies. Indian startups are powerful agents of economic growth and social change. At Kalaari, we are incredibly excited by their potential to drive India’s progress as a global epicenter for innovation. As startups scale, they need to leverage several tools and platforms like Meta to support their growth. T-Hub Collaboration in Hyderabad
We are actively looking to increase our investments in Hyderabad, underlining our deep commitment to enabling the booming startup ecosystem. To expand our reach, we will be working closely with T-Hub, the leading innovation hub and ecosystem enabler based in the city. And to facilitate deeper relationships with local founders, Kalaari Partner Vamshi Reddy will be based in the city. We are hugely excited by the opportunity and believe that the region is fast-emerging as a premier destination for early-stage investments and proving to be a hotbed of tech innovation.
It has never been easier to launch a technology product - and it has never been tougher to scale it. Limited attention from users, high cost of marketing and user acquisition, intense competition mean that new age startups must rely on more than just a great product to break through the clutter. Most products that we use today depend on network effects - they become more valuable as more people use them.
But what exactly are network effects? And why do some products have it while others don’t? In his book, Andrew Chen presents a comprehensive framework for what it takes to build a network, scale it and protect it from decay. His insights draw from his experience of building the Uber ride share network, and interviews with teams at Slack, Wikipedia, Tinder, Linkedin, Instagram, among others.
Here are some key takeaways:
Most new networks fail because users are unable to derive value from them. If users can't find who or what they want, they’ll churn in a self-reinforcing destructive loop.
Solving for the cold start remains the hardest part of building the network. Chen espouses the concept of an atomic network - the smallest set of users who can derive value from the network. Building a dense and interconnected atomic network is the antidote to the cold start - even if it's unscalable and unprofitable in the short term.
