Waterbridge's Sarbvir Singh Likes to Invest in Social Impact Companies Waterbridge was started with an objective to provide money, support and direction to early-stage entrepreneurs.
By Siddhartha Ahluwalia •
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Sarbvir Singh, Managing Partner, Waterbridge Ventures started his journey as a Venture Capitalist in 2007 with Capital 18, the VC arm of media conglomerate Network 18. Back then he was one of the first institutional checks in Bookmyshow, which is today a unicorn and Yatra, which went public on NASADAQ. Waterbridge was started by Manish and Sarbvir in 2016. The early stage venture capital fund based out of India has invested in 16 companies, some of which ones are Unacademy, Chalo, Ziploan, MagicPin and DoubtNut.
"My first exposure to investing was when I joined as an analyst and portfolio manager at Citi group in the US. However, we used to invest in the big listed companies but that was my foray into investing which taught me a lot," Singh says.
Singh likes to be associated with the big things and the companies which make some social impact. "I like to invest in the companies which bring meaningful impact or change in people's life. It could be anything like entertainment, medical or education," he adds.
He claims that his entry into venture capital was an accident. Singh met Raghav Bahl, founder of Network 18, who wanted to setup a venture capital fund and that is how he started.
When asked about his idea of starting a fund of his own he says, "As the venture capital funds stated getting big in India after the first wave of funding, we thought the space for early stage investing was getting lost. We started Waterbridge with the objective to provide not only money to the early stage entrepreneurs but the support and direction also which they need at the beginning stage of a start-up."
"A lot of funds used to come to us and we treated all of them like friends," he adds. Singh did not just like to help the early stage founder but also saw a great opportunity in them.
Speaking about his investment styles at the Waterbridge ventures he says their average cheque size is between $0.5 million and $1 million and they take about 7 to 15 per cent of the partnership in the firm which they are planning to increase.
(This article was first published in the November 2019 issue of Entrepreneur Magazine. To subscribe, click here)
