2022 - A Year of Cautious Optimism

Eximius Ventures 2022 - A Year of Cautious Optimism

2022 has been a year full of unprecedented events, learnings, yet several wins. This has been one of the hardest years for start-ups not just in India, but worldwide. While this was only our second year in the ecosystem (we launched our first fund in March 2021), it has been instrumental in teaching us what it takes to build a fund for the long run. As we’re gearing up for the coming year, the biggest lesson we carry forward with is that Aggression in portfolio-building triumphs capital deployment for VCs.

Despite all this, 2022 turned out to be a pivotal year for us. We made 12 investments and deployed 2x of 2021. Out of the 8 investments made in 2021, 3 of them raised an up round in one of the most challenging fundraising environments; and one of them crossed $100M in valuation. In addition to this, we debuted our IRL events with multiple community initiatives across Bangalore and Delhi, including our first team offsite at Jim Corbett.?

Overview of the year

While the year started with concerns around rising inflation and choked-up supply chain, the Russia-Ukraine war expedited the arrival of an impending slowdown in the fundraising ecosystem. Start-ups began to see pressures from investors to cut down costs and demonstrate a path to profitability. Despite all the negativity, India emerged as the shining armour - a safe destination for risk capital driven by stronger than expected macro conditions.?

But most importantly, there is massive respect for founders who persevered, built and held on to their team during these times! They truly embodied the quote "When things get tough, tough people get things done!" An impressive amount of resilience from our founders helped us grow stronger this year:

• As opposed to 8 in 2021, we made 12 investments in 2022, taking our whole portfolio to 20!?
• We saw a total inflow of 2,500+ deals and invested in 12 (<1% selection ratio) along with our friends from the ecosystem like General Catalyst, Elevation and more.?
• Even in a dismally bearish market, our portfolio companies managed to raise up rounds - Eka Care raising $15M Series A, Jar raising $25M Series B from Tiger Global, and Oyela raising $2M Seed.??
• While our major focus has been in Gaming, Media & Entertainment, Healthtech, and Fintech, this year we ventured into new white spaces and created our thesis around emerging areas such as Climatech and Web 3.
• We engaged regularly with our portfolio companies to help with team building (placed 6 people in one quarter), next round fundraising preparation, potential customer connections, and more.?
• Our team grew to 10 members, driven by a single mission of helping founders unlock their true potential.?
• After building remotely for 1.5 years, we finally got down on the ground to establish our presence with four Eximius hosted events and 20+ other events across Dubai, Bangalore, Delhi and Mumbai.?

Journey from 2021 - 2022

Despite the market conditions, we stayed true to our commitment to continue supporting strong, conviction-driven founders. By maintaining a stringent selection criteria, we continued investing at a consistent pace of 1 investment/month, even though our deal flow doubled in 2022.?

While deploying capital and the number of investments is an important milestone to anchor upon, last year taught us that the true north star of a VC fund is not the number of cheques written but the growth of our portfolio companies.?

We’re proud to share that most of our portfolio founders continue to hold the fort and make strides in the market. Below are some of the notable achievements:-

• Eka Care - Raised $15M Series A led by Hummingbird, Verlinvest, and 3one4 Capital.
• Jar App - Raised $25M Series B led by Tiger Global, Arkam Ventures. Crossed over 12 million downloads.?
• Oyela - Raised $2M Seed led by a leading Indian VC. Achieved a GMV run rate of 1 Crore within 6 months of launch.?
• Finarkein - Emerged as a category leader within the Account Aggregator ecosystem, generating 7L MRR in an nascent and emerging space within a few months of launching.
• Hood App - Post raising from some of the most notable unicorn founders from India, showcased their ground breaking product to the entire country on Shark Tank India.
• Skydo - Launched their B2B cross-border payments platform post raising a large funding round from notable investors such as Elevation.?

Impact and highlights of our portfolio:

While our portfolio shined, we shined with them:?

We pride ourselves on being a VC with whom you can actually be friends with and work through business problems, personal problems and grow together. We are truly grateful to the founders, who give us the opportunity to work with them in their 0-1 journey.?

Each day we get an inch closer to our vision of serving founders with faster capital, efficient processes and our global network. This is an ongoing process which we plan on improving in 2023 with aid of all the lessons we learned in 2022. But, below are some “Aha” moments founders felt when:-

• We closed our portfolio’s founding team within a month through our HR communities, dedicated in-house recruiter, and helped them build an employer brand.
• They received a summarised HR toolkit which solved their pain points of setting up the hiring process.
• We helped founders get access to relevant global networks for the next stage of growth.?
• We helped our founders find their first set of beta users and helped them conduct various market studies to validate it.
• Founders received timely credits and consulting help through our dealbook of 75+ Deals.
• We worked with them side-by-side to refine their fundraising pitch and connect with them with a series of investors.?

Community is truly what inspires us each day

Tough times bring real people together to work on solving problems or creating opportunities, we are truly grateful for founders, investors and all our friends in supporting us through the events we hosted. And, for the flag bearers of the startup community who brought people with similar interests together. Through everyone’s help we built our presence across 30+ events throughout the year.?

While meeting people has helped exchange ideas and learn, it is the ‘build in public' thought process that has truly enabled us to share our learnings with upcoming entrepreneurs and investors. Our follower base rose by 338% in 2022 and our monthly reach increased to 1M+. We also expressed our ideas and shared our journey across other channels - podcasts, speaker events, leading publications such as Inc42, Economics Times, etc.?

Looking back at 2022

2022 was instrumental for Eximius as we established ourselves and take several key lessons with us to the next year:-?

• Early stage investing is not only about capital but a strong belief in the founders which requires unwavering support and conviction from Day 0. From helping build the core team to supporting them through adversities and helping them raise the next round, the investor needs to stick with the founder through ups and downs.?
• Building a well-rounded portfolio with inter-portfolio synergies is critical to extending scalable help to Portfolio founders and ensuring success of the Fund. While one looks at individual investments, the success of the Fund is always measured in terms of combined success of all the companies.?
• Solidified our view that despite a bull or bear run, it is important to focus on the fundamentals and continue investing at a moderate pace to benefit from opportunities that present themselves. We maintained our pace of 1 investment? per month both in 2021 and 2022.?
• Given the patient nature of the business, being a positive addition to the community is the only instant gratification that can keep people going despite the long 12-hour days.?

Looking forward to 2023

Going into 2023, we’re looking to double down on the investments, continue to support the companies we’ve backed, and be more active in the community. There are several trends that continue to excite us:-

• While Fintech has received one of the largest amounts of investment in the last couple years (we’ve invested in 10 fintech companies ourselves), the sector is far off from maturity. Fintech market size is expected to increase from $500B to over $2T in the next decade and we continue to remain excited about opportunities in lending, insuretech, fintech infrastructure and investment tech.?
• Similarly, Gaming and Healthtech continue to be positioned for strong growth driven by demand from Tier 2 and 3 cities as well as increasing rural smartphone penetration. Positive regulatory support from the Government is catalysing growth in the sector even further.?
• While we continue to remain excited about our core sectors, in 2023 we are looking forward to:

1. Open AI infrastructure / Generative AI?
2. Clean tech / Climate tech
3. Growing export infrastructure in India?

• We believe 2023 will not be a year of exits but rather a good year for investments. We’re looking to make 15 investments in the year, host our annual event, and more.?

Grateful For?

We’re truly grateful for the last year - all the opportunities and the hurdles that came wrapped with them. Most importantly to all the founders who reached out to us and took out time to speak with us. Lastly, we appreciate all our LPs, fellow investors and portfolio founders coming along for this exciting ride with us!

—------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------P.S. - Happy New Year!