Dear Investor,
As India rightfully claims her place in the new world order, she does so with pride. On the back of millions of the brightest minds who are among the largest STEM talent pool on our planet. Each one a celebration of the Imagi-Nation that we are: a nation that can collectively imagine the future of the world and lead it there. And this is where YourNest is best poised to launch these bold minds and make a significant impact.
What makes us different in an ever-growing world of VCs?
We are Challengineers first.
People who actively challenge dreams and engineer outcomes. Challenging them to make their dreams bolder, engineering constantly to ensure that each dream becomes a reality. We call this mantra Nurture Capital. For us, nurture is much more than care, and capital is a lot more than money. It is with this spirit that we greenhouse and catalyse our entrepreneurs, transforming the best ideas into the boldest businesses ready for the world. In doing so, we also seek to build a unique network of DeepTech Indian Internationals.
Because we believe the enterprise-focused, Indian DeepTech startup is an idea whose time has come.
And the following highlights of YourNest VC Fund II and YourNest Angel Fund reinforce this investment thesis
• India remains a steadily-growing startup nation with a strong VC eco-system: from INR 14,330 crore invested by VCs in 2015 to INR 94,840 crore in 2019 (up to Sept.).
• We have over 30 Unicorns (US$>1 bn valuation) and more than 200 Soonicorns (US$ 250 mn-1 bn) and 650+ Minicorns (US$ 25 mn-250 mn). Three of our portfolio companies – Uniphore and Cove IoT from the Angel Fund – and Miko from Fund II are already in the Minicorns category.
• YourNest Angel Fund significantly outperformed key indices in terms of IRR at 17.9% (as of Dec 31 2019) compared to 10.3% of Nifty and 11.2 % of S&P 500.
• Portfolio companies from the Angel Fund continue to gain investor confidence: while we had invested Rs 43 crore initially in them, they have collectively raised more than Rs 600 crore from external investors.
• Angel Fund investors also showed increased confidence in Fund II: with INR 97 crore (116% of the total Angel Fund corpus) invested in Fund II.
• YourNest VC Fund II also outperformed key indices in terms of TVPI: at 1.38x it was ahead of Nifty (1.13x) and S&P 500 (1.17x) by 20%.
• Finally, it gives me great pride that three of our portfolio companies from Fund II featured in the list of 29 Revolutionary Startups from India by US-based Pagan Research: Miko (ranked no. 14), 3RDFlix (no 18) and Orbo.ai (no. 29). They, as well as Lavelle Networks and Cron Systems were also recognised by Nasscom and Cisco at various levels.
• Topping it all, Sneh Vaswani, Co-founder & CEO of Miko, was inducted into the Hall of Fame by TiE Mumbai with the Outstanding Entrepreneur – DeepTech award in January 2020.
We are also confident that 2020 will see the start of our exiting some of the startups with returns on your investments. As we set out to Challengineer the best Indian DeepTech stars to become global powerhouses, we look forward to your continued support.
Sunil K. Goyal
Managing Director
January 31, 2020