Dear Investors,
The year 2012 has started on an encouraging note for early stage venture capital and angel investing in India.
The regulator formally acknowledged that venture capital has positive spillover effect on the economy, and has formulated Regulations imparting higher level of transparency & disclosures. The Finance Bill 2012, has clarified the tax pass through status for investors in SEBI registered funds, and also extended concessional tax rate of 10% on the long-term capital gain from investments in Venture Capital Undertakings by a Foreign Investor (this is in addition to 10% rate for the Non Resident Indian).
The momentum has continued in this space with over 50 investments announced in Q1 on the back of nearly 200 investments that were made in 2011. The enhanced activity being seen in the early stage is visible from the multipilicity of platforms that the entrepreneur has access to as they conceptualize and execute on innovative business models. These include programs like like The Economic Times Power of Ideas in collaboration with Centre of Innovation, Incubation and Entrepreneurship (CIIE), TechSparks, The Pitch, Start-up Weekend as well as the events hosted by TiE, Indian Angel Network, Mumbai Angels, VCCircle to name a few.
Post the initial closure announced in the last week of March 2012, YourNest is now uniquely positioned to identify business models coupled with great entrepreneurial teams that build on consumer and business insights based on the emerging themes in India including – attitudinal shift to immediate gratification; Internet penetration; mobility; media; shift in IT from services to products; to name a few.
YourNest’s maiden investment is in Proof of Performance (PoP), a company offering cloud based video analytics of the real world video archives and solving unmet customer need. Our second investment is in www.mycity4kids.com, an online market place that is a hyper-local solution for kids related services and products. Details of these investments can be found in the subsequent sections of this report.
This is our first annual report. We have tried to keep it lucid and simple. Hope you enjoying reading it.
Sunil K. Goyal
June 30, 2012