Dear Investors,
Interest in early stage investing in India is seeing an unforeseen frenzy. More and more eminent personalities – be it Mr Ratan Tata, or Mr Azim Premji – are getting on the bandwagon as are large corporations. The leading consumer Internet players such as Flipkart, Snapdeal and even the established technology player like Infosys have set-up internal Mergers & Acquisition teams with a firm eye on this market. Clearly, early stage investing is here to stay.
We, in India, often see the value a business creates for the investors during exits. Exits are the primary source of value realisation for early stage investors. Recently, Twitter acquired ZipDial, a start-up where the angel round was led by one of the founding members of YourNest.
YourNest entered a new phase in this quarter with Religare Global Asset Management (RGAM) becoming our partner in the Asset Management Company (AMC) along with committing capital as Co-sponsor in the Fund. RGAM, as many of you might already know, has a stated policy of partnering with best of breed asset managers in various alternative asset classes and has established itself as a multi-boutique asset management platform. RGAM’s affiliate Northgate has USD 4.2 billion Assets Under Management (AUM) as a Fund of Funds and direct venture capital with strong relations within VC industry in US. Through this alliance with Religare, YourNest gets access to the hotbed of new ventures and venture capital – the Silicon Valley.
On the portfolio front, we are glad to inform you that YourNest has invested recently in our 6th Portfolio Company – www.golflan.com. Golflan is in the pioneer in online aggregation in the explosive growing international golf market bringing easy access of Golf courses for golf enthusiasts around the world. It has a unique gold tee-time booking mechanism for its members and golf-concierge facilitation for banking customers of leading credit card providers. Its business model allows it to create values in multiple ways and is YourNest’s first investment in the lucrative sports market. With this funding Golflan will be able to strengthen its technology product platform allowing it to offer more services and the develop the network of golf courses.
The opportunities pipeline continues to grow and the quality of deals has also shown a marked improvement, indicating more exciting times ahead. And with the pace of contributions to the fund picking up we are very excited at the prospect of having great companies to invest in and enough money to see them succeed. And make you, dear investors, very happy.
With best wishes for a great Budget
Thank You and Best Regards
Sunil K. Goyal
February 25, 2015