Dear Investor,
Even as I write this letter, a winter fog shrouds India’s capital in its icy grip. And yet there is a warm glow within every one of us at YourNest. We stand at the threshold of a new year, looking back at one of the most exciting periods since we established the company in 2011. The calendar year just ended – 2024 – was marked by one single aspect: speed. This has been a year in which we accelerated hiring to strengthen critical functions across the board with a blend of experienced and enthusiastic professionals joining our high-energy team. As partners, we spent many days devoted to redefining our vision and mission statements and sharpening our strategies for a volatile future. But the high point of the year was the launch of our Velocity Fast-track Funding Program in May along with SanchiConnect, a focused accelerator.
Velocity was a 15-day initiative inspired by the success of the 2020 YourNest SOAR program: in that one fortnight, our team received 1,282 applications from DeepTech startups that led to months of intensive analyses, meetings and audits of 79 shortlisted potential investees. By November, it was clear that eight had made the cut, and we have begun investing a corpus of INR 48 cr in them from the YourNest Innovative Products VC Fund III.
To crown the program, a four-day residential Founders’ Camp was held in December at IIT Kanpur’s Extension Centre in Delhi NCR with founders from selected startups as well as some earlier investees attending. The curated learning and experiential sessions inducted the entrepreneurs into a diverse range of best practices as part of our nurture capital thesis, led by our specialist partners. Stalwart industry founders including Satya Narayanan R of CareerLauncher, Dinesh Agarwal of IndiaMart, Neeraj Saxena, XScale, along with professionals – Pankaj Rai, Aditya Birla Group, Abhinav Suri, Stride Ventures, Aparajita Jethy Ahuja, CX Partners, and Arul Mehra of Baring Private Equity – conducted intensive sessions with the founders.
The Velocity program reinforced our belief in the potential of India’s DeepTech entrepreneurs who are innovating to address industry’s problems with cutting-edge products. The response also proved that we remain the first port of call for startups in search of venture capital.
Going forward, we will update you on several more initiatives as we gear up to reinvigorate YourNest. Thank you once again for being with us, and partnering us in our mission to nurture India’s DeepTech startup ecosystem.
Yours sincerely,
Sunil K. Goyal
Managing Director & Fund Manager
December 31, 2024