CLUB ah!, the private equity network of ah! Ventures, announced the launch of India’s first seed investment network, ah! Seeders. As their first deal, ah! Seeders have closed a INR 37 lacs investment in uFaber, a Mumbai based edutech company.
uFaber Edutech Pvt Ltd is an online marketplace for courses on professional skill-development, hobbies, crafts, academics as well as vocational courses. uFaber enables the students to build one or more skills through online courses on their portal. The user can learn from individual resources, engage one on one with experts, participate in projects & courses with them and interact with peers as well as build a dynamic resume. The platform empowers experts with teaching tools, pedagogical structures & student interaction events, thus providing them increasing number of ways to ‘productize’ their knowledge and time.
ah! Seeders aims to invest into very early stage companies with strong founding teams. Unfortunately in India, companies at the business plan stage or the ones which are pre-revenue stand almost no chance of raising funds irrespective of the quality & potential of their management team. “Unlike the west, angels in India have become extremely risk averse.” says, Harshad Lahoti, founder & CEO of ah! Ventures. “They no longer look at companies unless they have been in operation for a few years with moderate revenues to flaunt.“ ah! Seeders is helping outstanding founding teams raise funds in the range of INR 25-50 lacs as soon as they have their companies incorporated and business plans ready. Ufaber is an apt case in point in this category.
Until now, seed stage companies were either self funded or raised funds through friends & family. Managing the same now through a professional network, like CLUB ah!, migitages multitude of risks inherent to seed stage investing. “Unlike angel investment where the investments usually happen at a valuation of INR 6-10 Cr, seed valuations are usually between IN 2-3 Cr and hence comparative returns over the long term can easily be 3-5 times higher.” adds Abhijeet Kumar, co-founder & COO of ah! Ventures. “Besides our main focus in such investments is performing stringent quality and background checks on the founders and their top management. Simply put, at seed level, its all about the team, the team and the team”.
uFaber’s vision is to enable experts from around the world to be able to create courses on their portal which will cater to a worldwide audience of subscribers/students. “We are building up the platform that will unbox the learning and open up the possibilities for students to find great experts to learn real world skills.” says Rohit, “uFaber marketplace will host variety of online and offline courses from best of the experts and will disrupt the skill development market by democratizing the process.” uFaber plans on utilizing the funds raised from CLUB ah! in developing the product and aggregating the experts and courses. “For next two quarters most of the bandwidth will be dedicated in getting quality courses on to the platform”, adds Rohit.
uFaber is the first seed investment made by the ah! Seeders network. Rohit says “For me, ah! Seeders solved the real problem of startup seed capital. CLUB ah! connected me with investors and gave references so that investors are confident about the team. Their help in the closing process is also remarkable as understanding the legalities of investment agreement is not easy for entrepreneurs.” Anirudh continued “I think ah! is doing a great job by connecting entrepreneurs with the seed investors. All the investors that I interacted during the process gave really good feedback and I appreciate the quick decision making of CLUB ah! investors.”
With seed investors of ah! Seeders, CLUB ah! now has the full gamut of early stage investor networks, together with ah! Angels and ah! VCs, under one umbrella. CLUB ah!’s impact network ‘ah! Impact’, recently made their first impact investment of INR 77 lacs in the crowd-funding platform, Ketto.org. Since its launch in 2012, CLUB ah! has aggressively expanded and now proudly boasts of more than 280 investors.