Prasad Vanga is the Founder & Chief Accelerator at Anthill Ventures – the fast growing accelerator with investments in several start-ups including 91Springboard, Custom Furnish, Explara and Thrillophilia. An alumni of the Stanford Business School, Mr. Vanga has over 18 years of experience in building new product offerings, scaling startup companies, and managing large transformation initiatives. He has consulted to some of the top companies in the world including Nike, Symantec, Google and GE. He is an active member of Hyderabad Angels.
BWDisrupt Interacted with Mr. Prasad Vanga to know more about his experience in building up an Accelerator & Investment firm.
Tell us something about the business model Anthill ventures and your journey with the company?
Anthill is a speed scaling platform for early growth stage startups, We Invest and Scale the companies in our portfolio. We provide services like Scale Funding, Market Positioning, Sales Partnering and Tech Refinement for Pre-Series A startups and help them scale rapidly towards Series A within 12 months. My personal journey with Anthill is full of learning’s, we have just started over 15 months now and have built a solid portfolio of 15 startups across India, US and SE Asia
As the CEO and Founder of company what goals do you have in mind and how are they in line with the vision & mission of the firm?
My goals are simple
• Build a $100MM portfolio within 3 years
• Provide atleast a 30% IRR for our investors
• Build a platform that connects the right investors (speed scalers) with growth stage startups
Our vision is to be the Asia’s best speed scaling platform that can be leveraged by both investors and startups. We want to provide funding and speed scaling mentorship
Can you tell us about the sectors which are your top priority right now?
B2B-C Marketplaces & Ecommerce Enablers, Emerging Tech like IOT, AI & Machine Learning across verticals like Travel, Automotive, Health- tech and Fintech
In how many startups have you invested till now and what are your future plans?
We have made 15 investments and plan to do another 3 this year and 12 next year
From how many startups have you exited successfully and what is your preferred exit plan?
We are too young at this point to talk about exits, we are 18 months old and exits should start coming in from 36 months onwards. Through my personal investments I have exited in two companies with an average of 9X returns
Please share with us the range of investment you raise for startups after your accelerator program?
Typically startups come to us during growth stage when they are doing a bridge round or Pre-series A round of $1MM to $3MM. Our accelerator program is not cohort based, we believe in unstructured acceleration and not classroom theory, so startups first go through our speed scale diagnostic to identify areas of improvement and then we target specific business interventions to scale them rapidly.
How many funds have you raised till now and what are you looking forward to?
As we are an operating company and our ticket sizes range from $50k to $100k and we always look for co-investors which are funds & family offices which can do ticket sizes of $100k upwards
You have invested in many Indian startups but what are your plans for overseas opportunities?
Our thesis is to invest in any scalable venture that wants to expand in Asia – it could be based in any part of the world – India will always be 80% of our investments and 20% will be international
What challenges you are facing currently as an investor and accelerator firm?
To identify the right startup which has a scalable idea, an awesome team and a product that has huge barriers to entry is hard to find and that is where our relationships with other accelerators, funds and corporates makes it relevant for us to add value to the gaps that we identify
Where would you like to see Anthill Ventures in the next five years?
I would like to expand our operations from Asia to rest of the world – Our platform should bring the funds that are backed by sector and geographic expertise to scale to startups
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