If Your Start-Up has a Global Vision, This Venture Capital Will Bet On You Arka Venture Labs is an India-US cross-border accelerator fund designed to facilitate a faster global transition for Indian B2B start-ups
By Vinayak Sharma •
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Eyeing rewarding bets, Radhesh Kanumury, managing partner of Arka Ventures, aims to achieve milestones through investing in start-ups and other business entities. Arka Venture Labs is the first of its kind India-US cross-border accelerator fund designed to facilitate a faster global transition for Indian B2B start-ups by providing them with a combination of seed capital, mentoring, access to Silicon Valley ecosystem and infrastructure support.
So far, Arka has made five investments. Besides having the backing of three funds—Blume Ventures, BGV and Emergent Ventures—Arka has on-boarded senior corporate professionals working in the Valley, India and Singapore as individual investors.
Radhesh Kanumury, Managing Partner, Arka Venture Labs
According to the Kanumury, "Arka Ventures Labs is a founder-first fund. We are hands-on active investors who help companies through our capital and provide them the platform to help them pursue their ambitions. We view ourselves as partners in the journey of entrepreneurs."
"We assist start-ups in as many ways we can, by providing them inputs on various aspects of businesses right from product market fit, go to market, product engineering, product roadmaps, connect to the valley ecosystem, besides the capital," he added.
The Arka Venture Labs team consists of experienced professionals with expertise in investments, technology, operations, mentoring and assisting start-ups scale. The coming together of the three funds mentioned above at Arka Venture Labs is synergistic for start-ups. The cumulative investment and operating expertise of the three funds provides start-ups with a platform to enable them to scale rapidly. Collectively, these funds have more than 70 companies in the B2B space and more than $250 million in assets under management spanning seven fund cycles.
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Traits that Arka Venture Labs seek in a start-up
Team: "We are looking for talented founders, preferably a well-rounded team which can handle both technical and business side of venture, however, we are open to admitting purely technical teams as well," said Kanumury. The fund prefers founders who have the ability to understand a particular situation and adapt basis the tradeoffs available. "We look for coachability, ability to hire global talent and tenacity in our founders," he added.
Global Ambition: The founding team must have an ambition to go global. This means an emphasis on the US market with an aim to achieve US customers, a US presence, and US investors within the next 12 months. The same applies to the western European markets as well. "Global ambition is an inevitable element to be present in the industrial trait as it is substantive for the giant success," Kanumury added.
Ability to hit milestones: Arka Venture Labs foster interest to invest in start-ups where it feels that it would contribute and take the venture to meaningful business milestones by the capital they have invested in. Besides the milestones, Arka also tries to measure the likelihood of a US top tier VC leading the next round, according to Kanumury.
