Analytics Venture

November 6, 2020

Industry Context

Big Data moved from limited statistical models & reports to mainstream daily business decisions in 2000s. Massive amounts of data can be used to build highly-complex models that allow for extremely granular decisions; e.g. using 1800+ variables to assess credit-worthiness using location of an individual or a business.

One of the key category of variables that define every person and business is its location. This venture became a pioneer in ingesting massive geo-based datasets and building proprietary algorithms that provide excellent predictive power to models used for hyper-local and individual-level decision systems.

Startup Context

The founders from IIT had 10+ yrs of experience in analytics modelling and product development. After raising their seed round, they continued to build their data libraries and product capabilities.

Geo-analytics space has massive opportunities, with hundreds of use-cases, but each use-case requires investment and domain expertise to develop relevant product, ML models and start monetizing them.

With exploding opportunities, but a small team of <10, there was limited bandwidth to focus on sales, clients, delivery, product development and at the same time to plan future rounds of fund-raise.

Ecosystem Support

Ecosystem Ventures became an integral part of the venture, bringing its consulting, business development, technology and fund-raising skills together to help the venture across multiple dimensions.

We helped in defining product roadmap and revenue structure to enable transitioning from a services model to product model

We also setup a business development function, helping grow monthly revenues by 5x in 5 months. This also included brainstorming with founders on various use-cases and prioritizing industries / clients with much faster adoption rates.

Within 5 months, Ecosystem Ventures led a fund-raise at twice the valuation with micro-VCs and angels.

Ecosystem Impact

Ecosystem Ventures has been able to create a significant impact across revenues and fund-raise.

As trusted advisors to the venture, the Founders have deeply appreciated the timely guidance & support we have provided, in a completely honest manner.

“This is an all-rounder team” – one of the best compliments we got from the founder.

EDTech Venture

November 6, 2020

Industry Context

Two megatrends in India converged around 2018. One was growing importance of coding as a fundamental skill. The other was exploding Internet access facilitating remote learning.

This was the perfect time for a new ed-tech venture to be incubated, which pioneered bringing one-on-one online coding classes to every child across the country.

Startup Context

With a single Founder raising $1m+ in seed funding, the venture required significant support across all functions to build product / curriculum / technology on one end, while fuelling an exponential sales growth on the other end.

Speed was super-critical to become a category-leader in this virgin space.

Our Support

We brought the power of our ecosystem to support the venture across multiple dimensions.

Working closely with the Founder, our consulting team conducted market studies, prepared growth plans, templatized MIS reports, built detailed models for financials, unit economics and Series A deck. We worked closely with curriculum, product, ops, sales, HR, finance and technology functions.

We also brought-in multiple partners for tech architecture, CRM systems and marketing tie-ups. The role was similar to an internal SWAT / consulting team for enabling exponential growth.

The overall engagement spanned 18 months.

Our Impact

During this time, the company grew from $100k MRR to $4m MRR, from a team of 20 to 600+.  We played a critical role in closing Series A round and subsequently India’s fastest significant exit to one of world’s largest ed-tech firm giving 45x multiple to first round of investors.

Our contribution to the success can be gauged by this gracious comment by the Founder, “All credit to Abhishek Sanghvi who did more in 7 days of consulting me than I did in 7 months of running the startup”

Healthcare Venture

November 6, 2020

Industry Context

Healthcare continues to be one of the most challenging domains in India.

On one end, we have a growing innovation in technology and business models by new-age startups.

On the other hand, it’s a space fraught with trust-gap, high price-points, limited access and resources.

It’s difficult to strike the right balance between innovation-operations-revenue generation, despite the best of intentions.

Startup Context

Ecosystem Ventures took keen interest in a new-age diagnostic testing venture that developed an innovative process of conducting a wide-range of tests using dry blood and urine samples.

Additionally, they built new testing algorithms that could predict certain medical conditions for babies during birth itself, which has been life-saving for many children.

Startup Challenges

Despite a couple of small rounds of angel investments, their growth stagnated, and the venture didn’t seem to be meeting its true potential.

We loved the founding team, which included a medical doctor-turned-MBA who understood all aspects of the business, and decided to commit our personal capital, strategic capabilities and funding network to support the venture.

Ecosystem Support

Over a 6 month period, our consulting team deep-dived into every aspect of the venture, from product, sales & ops to HR & finance.

We built a new business plan, but this time identified every possible ‘execution gap’ and identified people in our network who could bridge these gaps.

This included bringing a new sales leader and sales team, restructuring ESOP pool to add domain experts and putting management practices for enabling a very tight executing tracking.

We also helped craft a process automation and technology development roadmap that optimized between functionality, opex savings and capex planning.

Ecosystem Impact

Ecosystem Ventures concluded a bridge CCPS round through both domestic and international investors, which included renowned doctors and healthcare leaders. ESV is continuing to support the startup till it reaches the next growth milestone.

In the words of the founder, “ESV’s work cannot be bucketed in any one category. Their support spanned all aspects of our venture, and we truly felt as if we’ve got a much-needed extended family to support us in our journey”.