Angel investor: A life line for rookie entrepreneurs

Angel investor: A life line for rookie entrepreneurs : The Economic Times



Business aspirant Madan Pandit quit his job in 2004 and roamed Bangalore’s cyber cafes to build the prototype of an online search analytics tool, which he later converted into his first venture. When he needed funds for the start-up, he didn’t consider venture capital (VC) firms but approached well-known angel investor Kanwaljit Singh. With an unproven technology and hardly a business model to speak of, he still succeeded in getting the funding. On the other hand, Phaninder Sama, co-founder of Redbus.in, an online bus ticketing site, ran his new business for around three months before making a venture capital pitch.

He and his partners skipped the angel step altogether. They, too, got the money. In fact, the new image acquired by the VC connection helped them hire high-class talent. Two entrepreneurs. Two radically opposite strategies. And both are happy with their respective choices today. So, how does one tell whether a new business should go in for angel investment or venture capital funding? It is indeed a crucial choice for a small company, because if an entrepreneur is not yet ready for venture capital, it is pointless to waste time pitching the business to VCs and more profitable to approach an angel.

Angel investors, often, are successful entrepreneurs themselves, fondly reliving their early struggles and wanting to mentor young minds. Some think of investments in start-ups as a way to give back to society. Others, who left India and made it big in the West, want to shrink the country’s economic growth curve with the stimulus their money would bring to entrepreneurship. Thus, they are driven first by the beauty of new ideas and only then, by return on investment. They can put in as little as a few lakhs of rupees to as much as several crores.

Venture capital funds, on the contrary, are professionally-driven enterprises which pool in resources from their investors and channel them into ideas that are more likely to succeed. They often look for a proven, or at least a well thought-out business model, cash flow, management bandwidth and so on. They also look to invest a sizeable amount of money, say a few million dollars. “By default, you would always want to go in for VC,” Suvir Sujan, a venture capitalist with Nexus India Capital and a former angel investor, said. “VCs can get you further with capital. With an angel, you could get stuck, because there is only so much funding an angel can provide. After all, he is just one individual.

The VC offers the stability of an institution.” However, an angel would be the option when VCs are telling you it is too early to invest in your company, he added. Venture capital funds can be of immense help in building a company to maturity, after the business has cleared the initial hurdle of getting on the track. In an increasingly globalised world, marketing and hiring the best talent can be expensive and large investments are called for in the growth stage. Angel investors don’t have the financial muscle to shepherd their investee companies beyond a point.



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