Dear Investors,
In my earlier letter, I had stated that we have never seen such “across the board” optimism in the country. I had not imagined that it will morph into the kind of snowball that it has for YourNest in particular, and the start-up ecosystem in general. We have seen enhanced activity in our deal-flow, wherein we received more than 460 investments proposals this quarter, almost 3 times more than last year. This results in YourNest having a very healthy pipeline of investible start-ups for the next quarter.
I am glad to inform you that we have signed to invest in our 5th portfolio company – www.nlpcaptcha.com. NLP Captcha offers brand engagement with “guaranteed customer attention” & “better recall”. It is about to change the evaluation criteria in digital advertising. While we signed the SHA, they made their first international sale in Spain with Bridgestone as a client.
Last quarter, post Facebook’s acquisition of Little Eye Labs, Yahoo announced its first ever acquisition in India, that of Bookpad. We see this trend only increasing as large global corporates eye innovation led Indian start-ups as they build scale on the back of 600 million plus internet connected Indians in the coming 3-4 years. At YourNest, we are already building businesses for acquisition by such global giants.
We have planned for a meeting of all our investors this quarter and are bringing the founding teams of our portfolio companies together to interact with you. The first “YourNest Investor Day” is planned in Delhi for Sunday, November 30th, 2014. Please do block your calendars and look forward to a detailed agenda before the end of this month.
Seasons Greetings & Happy Diwali
Sunil K. Goyal
October 20, 2014