Making Fundraising Easy For Founders Some of the notable startups in LetsVenture's portfolio are Trell, Classplus, Testbook, SUGAR Cosmetics, Khatabook, Airmeet, Yulu, Agnikul, Melorra to name a few
By S Shanthi
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Co-founder and CEO of LetsVenture, Shanti Mohan's journey as an investor stems from her founder-operator background at an embedded systems company she had founded in early 2000 called Ionic Microsystems. After exiting the venture, she worked at HP in India and US in product roles. LetsVenture was founded in 2013 with the simple vision of making startup fundraising easy for founders and investors.
Over the last 7+ years as part of Mohan's day job of building LetsVenture, she had the opportunity to interact with thousands of founders and investors across the globe. This grounds-up learning formed the foundation of her understanding of the various sectors, investment thesis, founder-investor dynamic, market dynamics, and more. "I have seen first-hand the massive transformation of India's startup ecosystem right from the early days of the startup boom in 2013 when internet adoption was gaining steam to the present day when startups are going public," Mohan tells us.
She believes that being a founder helps her when she has to evaluate founders and decide to invest. As an investor, her belief is to double index on founders. "Ideas change, businesses pivot, markets expand or contract based on macro conditions we may not have control over. What remains constant in this change is the founder's belief in what he or she is building, as well as his or her persistence and resilience to build something meaningful," said Mohan.
At the stage at which the LetsVenture invests, which is very early, sometimes for business metrics to be validated, understanding why the problem is big enough and why this is the right team that can win becomes important. Outside of this, the company uses a thesis as a framework to evaluate founders and the domains it wants to invest in. Some of the notable startups in LetsVenture's portfolio are Trell, Classplus, Testbook, SUGAR Cosmetics, Khatabook, Airmeet, Yulu, Agnikul, Melorra to name a few.
While Mohan's investments in the last 3-4 years were ad-hoc, in 2021 she has returned to actively investing. "My thesis is BIG BILLION BHARAT - bet on Big structural changes India is seeing today, bet on founders who want to build billion-dollar companies focused on solving and building for India. Fundamentally I believe that this decade will belong to the Indian founder, with CXO's of large startups founding companies. This decade, founders will build faster, bigger and more globally competitive businesses from India," she said.
