Welcome to our ‘Fund in Focus’ series where we profile our member funds, underscore their investment philosophy, and highlight some of their interesting work. Today we speak to Anant Vidur Puri, Partner,
to learn more about high potential opportunities in the Indian consumer internet marketplaces.
Fund In Focus : Know how Roadmap-driven investing approach makes it Bessemer VP’s biggest differentiator
Anant Vidur Puri, Partner, Bessemer Venture Partners
1. As a global fund, Bessemer VP launched its first India focused fund last year. Elaborate the strategy behind having a dedicated fund for a region. How has the new capital been deployed so far?
Bessemer Venture Partners believes that innovation and entrepreneurship are not limited to a city or country. With this ideology, our platform of partners and portfolio companies spans across the globe, enabling us to back diverse and dynamic founders and CEOs. In 2021, we announced the first India-dedicated fund of $220 million. While the global funds continue to back our investments in India, the new fund introduced is another pool raised to back early-stage companies, investing in seed and Series A rounds. The dedicated fund exemplifies our confidence in the massive growth opportunities within India and allows us to support more entrepreneurs in their journeys.
2. Moving on from the initial focus on consumer internet companies, today the fund is more geared to back tech/ SaaS start-ups and enterprises. What is the approach of Bessemer VP to identify successful investments in this category?
Bessemer’s consumer internet roadmap in India has been evolving over time. In 2011, the firm started investing in consumer internet with listing marketplaces like Bharat matrimony and later move on to investing in full-stack, vertical, transactional marketplaces like BigBasket, Swiggy, UrbanCompany. We are now looking at marketplaces targeting newer consumer segments including SaaS enabled marketplaces with software embedded into the ecosystem, which may turn out to be more B2B. Marketplaces thrive when both sides (demand and supply) of the world are fragmented. In India, a lot of the supply side is disorganised across different categories. So, the more fragmented the supply, the better the marketplace can be. Once a marketplace business is built, it is very hard to replicate. These businesses usually end up being monopolies, duopoly or oligopolies and thus the value generation is much higher. We have built out four key roadmaps in India - Consumer Internet and Marketplaces, SaaS, Fintech and Health-Tech and continue to build more!
3. Share some interesting work by a few of your new portfolio companies in terms of market problems they are trying to solve, competitive advantage and impact generated so far.
Plobal Apps
With the rise of omni-channel-commerce, having a dedicated mobile app has become necessary. While the teams at Plobal Labs were building applications for global e-commerce players since 2016, they realised that custom development was something that only a handful of retailers or brands could afford.
Today, Plobal builds the native mobile apps for Shopify storefronts and enables these apps to go live in 24-hours or less. Brands do not have to invest upfront in technology and only pay when the app yields transactions.
The results speak for themselves: app check-out conversion rates are approximately 2-4x higher on Plobal mobile apps versus the same store’s mobile web, whereas the open-rates on push notifications are about 2-5x higher compared to SMS or email campaigns sent by the same store.
In addition, the app seamlessly ports over all existing integrations on the store and allows a range of additional functionalities like LiveStreaming, Deep Linking amongst many others.
Today, Plobal counts some of the most recognizable Shopify brands such as Steve Madden, Goose Creek, Matt & Nat, Koovs, and Rare Rabbit as customers. Plobal is one of the many examples we are seeing in India’s entrepreneurial ecosystem where strong leadership and product innovation are having a global impact.
Zopper
In the last couple of years, companies across different sectors have leaned into insurance as a service.
Zopper is a leading Insur-Tech platform that connects insurance carriers with online and offline ecosystem partners to sell curated insurance products for consumers by integrating into their daily activities and experiences.
With more people looking for protection across assurance and insurance, we are excited to see the Zopper team continue to strengthen its infrastructure rails and build an enduring company.
At the core, Zopper also aims to build trust within the ecosystem by enabling insurance distribution through working with over 60 partners in lifestyle, digital, and financial ecosystems. Some of the most recognisable distribution partners Zopper works with include HDFC Bank, IIFL, Croma, Xiaomi, Amazon, Ola, Cars24, and Titan Eye Plus among others.
Zenskar
As global SaaS spend continues to increase, pricing is evolving from vanilla subscriptions to granular, consumption-based pricing. Oftentimes, product launches and pricing changes get delayed because of limitations with billing tools. Additionally, these SaaS companies have to devote significant engineering resources to automate their billing processes.
Zenskar offers a flexible billing platform that enables SaaS companies to handle complexities in pricing that include usage-based pricing, subscriptions, nuanced discounts, credits, custom currencies, prepaid, post-paid, ramp deals, etc. They not only overcome billing related limitations, but also further automates accounting, streamlines receivables management workflows and provides robust analytics.
Zenskar, further integrates with the entire stack of a company, including CRM, CPQ and ERP. Through the interface, onboarding can be done by non-technical users, and only takes a few days instead of the months required by legacy billing tools.
We were impressed with their founders’ deep understanding of customer pain points, and DNA of first principles innovation to provide a radically unique and flexible billing software. Looking forward to partnering with them on the journey to fundamentally disrupt the quote-to-cash tooling for SaaS companies across the globe.
Lentra
This Pune-based fintech has demonstrated superior metrics on revenue retention and grown 20-fold since a $12 million Series A round in 2019. It is an online platform designed to change the status quo offering banks zero-risk and instant lending solutions
Lentra is empowering banks to embrace fully digital processes. Lentra Lending Cloud offers ready-to-use third-party API connectors to various data sources that banks want to join. Lentra has been at the forefront of digital lending transformation since inception. It has more than 50 clients in India and will be using the recent funding for product and platform enhancement to expand overseas in Asia and the USA.
Pepper Content
As a content marketplace that connects global brands such as Google, Meta, Amazon and Adobe with over 100,000 creators, Pepper Content helps enterprises identify and work with vetted professionals for their content marketing needs.
Businesses use Pepper’s platform to provide briefs for their content. Pepper’s AI model then allocates the brief to the most relevant/appropriate creators in its creator base taking into account factors such as past performance, timelines, cost/word etc. Creators also get access to a platform where they can manage their briefs, view their earnings, as well as complete content requests.
Once creators create/upload content onto Pepper’s platform it is then graded and curated by a set of editors (a sub-set of creators) post which the customer sees it on their dashboard. The customer can provide feedback/request rework or accept the content. For businesses, this provides a seamless way to scale quality content without too much manual intervention.
For creators, this provides higher earnings (as compared to agencies), more flexibility of work, as well as an ability to scale a sustainable source of income. In addition, Pepper runs PepperType.ai – a GPT3 based automatic text content creation tool integrated with the PepperContent marketplace to provide a full stack automated platform which would allow marketplace customers to use PepperType to populate their briefs and short form content faster while also allowing PepperType customers to use the marketplace for their long form content.
Rupifi
B2B Commerce has seen a wave of digitisation during the past few years with credit becoming an integral part of the B2B Payments ecosystem. Rupifi started with the B2B BNPL Product focusing on the Digital B2B Marketplaces in mid 2020 and has seen significant growth.
Despite the subdued economic activity, Rupifi has managed to record 50 per cent MoM growth in disbursals during the past 12 months, covering over 50,000 SMEs. The firm is working with some marquee Marketplaces such as Flipkart Wholesale, Retailio and Fynd among others.
The team states that their priority has been to create scalable growth without compromising on portfolio quality, which is why, despite the pandemic-induced uncertainty and disruption, Rupifi’s portfolio continues to be healthy with very low NPA levels.
Medisage
Founded in 2019 by Bhagwat Dhingra, Abhishek Ghosh and Anurag Dhingra, MediSage is a knowledge platform that connects the healthcare ecosystem which includes doctors, nurses, and patient cases to pharmaceutical and diagnostics companies.
The platform enables doctors and other healthcare practitioners from over 146 countries to discuss and share medical information through virtual communities including those created by a group of over 1500 global subject matter experts, medical associations, drug and device companies and medical universities. We are excited to partner with the team as they plan to strengthen its product and expand its team.
Cashify
Cashify operates an eponymous platform — both online and physical stores and kiosks — for users to sell and buy used smartphones, tablets, laptops and other gadgets.
Additionally, Cashify also works with all top smartphone makers including Apple, Samsung, Xiaomi and Samsung to power their refurbishing programs. The startup repairs and refurbishes those devices, giving them new lives without which they may have likely ended up in the garbage bin.
The startup is tapping into India’s large market, where over 100 million smartphones ship each year and tens of millions of used smartphones get resold.
They also have operations outside of India, including in markets including the UAE, Turkey and Bangladesh. In the international regions, the firm licenses its enterprise business. The firm’s enterprise business includes offerings such as a diagnostic tool to evaluate a smartphone’s functional and physical aspects.
4. What excites you about the 'India Opportunity'? Which sectors will play significant growth drivers for the digital economy in future?
As one of India’s earliest venture capital firms in the business, we have experienced several economic cycles and the evolution of the country’s private-capital landscape. Over the last one and a half decade of our India presence, Bessemer has partnered with over 65 startups across a wide range of companies, stages and sectors in India. We have taken seven companies public and have several unicorns in the portfolio including Urban Company, Big Basket, PharmEasy, and the Good Glamm Group. We follow what we call the ‘roadmap-driven’ approach to investing, which means that we are stage-agnostic. We can come in at the seed, series A, series B, series C across the range as long as the company fits our roadmap. We have built out four key roadmaps in India - Consumer Internet and Marketplaces, SaaS, Fintech and Healthtech and continue to build more
5. Amidst funding winter there is record dry powder with a high potential for investing into Indian startup ecosystem. What is your take on this phenomenon and how is BVP approaching it?
At Bessemer, we invest in roadmaps and our investment strategy does not change with market cycles. We continue to invest at our usual pace finding. This year, the company has closed investments across stages in Cashify, Rupifi, Medisage, Pepper Content, Plobal Labs, Zenskar, Zopper, and Lentra.