"We invest in agriculture, healthcare and education start-ups like e-learning, where we take the business from start to growth," says Rema who comes with over three decades in the manufacturing and services sector.
It was the vacuum in the under-served rural and semi-urban pockets that caught the attention of cost accountant, Rema Subramanian, 54 and Ritu Verma, 44, a scientist from Pennsylvania to team up and become India's first SEBI- registered angel fund founded by women.
It's 18 months since the inception of Ankur Capital and with 45 years of combined experience, the company, with a corpus of Rs 400 million, has funded five start-ups ranging between Rs 5 million and Rs 40 million.
“We invest in real businesses and provide not just capital but also provide significant business building support to create successful companies,” says Rema.
Rural India has a better gender ratio, compared to urban India and we found, women there are early adopters of technology. In the health care investments, for example, over 60% of the patients are women, says Rema.
SkillVeri, another venture funded by Ankur Capital, which is into computer simulators for manufacturing and industrial training, has seen most participation by women folks who are learning to become welders.
“We invest in agriculture, healthcare and education start-ups like e-learning where we take the business from start to growth,” says Rema who has spent over three decades in the manufacturing and services sector. Together, with her partner, Ritu, who comes from a multi-national corporate background, they have been able to evaluate businesses based on growth potential which in turn benefits the rural women folk.
The company's policy is to ensure sustainable viability of the project for three to five years as it is often observed short gestations tend to increase the stress forcing many to give up their ventures within the first six months, she says.
“We do not have any gender bias, there are men as well as women entrepreneurs with ordinary backgrounds. They have no access to large funding companies. We take tap them and nurture them to the next level where they get qualified to access these big venture capitalists in their second round of funding,” says Rema.
“We build the scale and usually, these companies turn the bent in two to three years,” she adds.
Among the successful ventures of Ankur Capital are CropIn Technologies, an application that enables over 100,000 farmers, largely women, to showcase their products and get the best prices. Organisations working with women farmers have deployed mobile-based CropIn Technologies which have been able to attract large end users like McCain Foods and the likes. Apart from this, other successful ventures are SkillVeri, Karma Healthcare, ERC Eyecare and a waste management firm, DailyDump.
We have a couple of investments in the last stages of closing out and look to make 15 investments over the next 12 months, adds Rema.
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