The Social Investor

Nagaraja Prakasam left his software job to fund enterprises that have a definitive impact on society

- Anshul Dhamija

By 2013, Umesh Sachdev, CEO and co-founder of Chennai-based Uniphore Software Systems, had been turned down by close to 20 venture capital (VC) investors. Incubated at IIT-Madras in 2008, Uniphore was creating tools that would allow software applications to understand and respond to human speech. Sachdev admits that, five years later, the story of Uniphore “was not sellable”. The startup was doing “bits and pieces of many things”, he says, as it had started to digress from voice recognition and created “non-core” verticals such as mobile apps. More so, Uniphore had modelled its voice recognition business as a service rather than a product.

Enter software engineer-turned- angel investor Nagaraja Prakasam, who was introduced to Sachdev by an acquaintance in late-2013. What Uniphore was building instantly caught Prakasam’s imagination. As Prakasam, 45, says, “Only 250 million speak English in India, which means 1 billion are left out of the digital revolution. That’s the problem he [Sachdev] is solving.”

In early 2014, Prakasam (known to just about everyone as Naga) led an undisclosed angel round of funding in Uniphore. The investment was routed through the Indian Angel Network (IAN)—a network of angel investors, which Prakasam became a part of in 2010. While Uniphore was a much older startup than those IAN typically invests in, Prakasam believed that an angel investment could come at any stage before a startup raised VC funding. As with other IAN lead investors (who contribute 20 percent of the overall investment), he also got himself a board seat in Uniphore.