'Main focus is on sustainability'

Ventur East, one of the oldest venture capital firms in India, is nearing the full deployment of its sixth fund, which had a corpus of nearly $100 million.

- Malvika Maloo

The firm invests $3-8 million in early-stage companies, mainly across seed, pre-Series A, Series A and pre-Series B stages. Its portfolio includes fintech startups Kissht and Acko, healthcare firm Portea, and customer-engagement platform MoEngage.

While the VC firm continues to make investments, it is also looking to strike exits. In the last couple of years, it has scored exits from Zaggle, IndusOS, iNurture, and Comprehensive Prosthetics & Orthotics (CPO), among others.

In an interaction, Sanjeev Yamsani, Partner at VenturEast, talks about the firm's thesis, evolution, and focus for the next year. Edited excerpts:

Could you walk us through VenturEast's investment thesis?

We are an early-stage fund and our focus areas have largely been bucketed into three areas. The first one is what we called middle India: building sustainable consumer businesses around Indian consumers.

The second one is SaaS and enterprise technology, where we've invested in a bunch of product startups that focus on technology and the technology built in India that can be scaled globally.