Hyderabad Angels, which had either invested in or committed around Rs. 15 crore to a dozen start-ups last fiscal, plans to grow its portfolio by adding 12 more companies in the current financial year.
“While we are sector agnostic, Artificial Intelligence, Augmented Reality and Virtual Reality, Machine Learning/Data/Analytics, IoT, fintech, edutech, healthtech, logitech, enterprise SaaS are a few sectors that will continue to attract investments from us in the current start-up market scenario,” Investment Director P.S. Sreekanth announced on Monday.
Of the dozen companies in which Rs. 15 crore was invested in 2015-16, two were follow-on rounds and the remaining new additions. Some of them were yet to go public with the fund raising news, he said. The Hyderabad Angel’s current portfolio covers a range of industry verticals. The GIBSS, NowFloats, Betaout, Explara, Indian Money, Thrillophilia, Spareshub and Evibe form part of the portfolio, a release from the angel investor network said.
On the exit front, the HA exited Edutor with a 3.5x return last year. “We hope to continue this momentum in the coming year as we have built a strong pipeline of companies at various stages of investment,” Vice Chairman Daggubati Suresh Babu said.
Chairman Pradeep Mittal said the HA receives an average of 250-300 business plans every month from India, the U.S., Dubai/UAE and other countries seeking to raise capital, he said.
The network has close to 100 investors, including from the U.S., Japan and Singapore - with around 75 per cent of them being active (at least one or more investment). “We expect to be at least 150 investors by end of this year,” he said.
