Qapita Office Hours with The Chennai Angels

We are delighted to announce our newest initiative “Qapita Office Hours” which gives you an opportunity to have an open, free-wheeling discussion with stakeholders from the startup ecosystem. We kickstarted this initiative with The Chennai Angels and were honored to have Ramaswamy Sankar, CEO and Darshan Kumar, AVP from their team. They talked about their journey at The Chennai Angels and how TCA bolsters the startup ecosystem and helps startups receive the right funding and personal mentoring.

TCA is one of the leading Angel Investment Groups in India. Their angel network consists of elite leaders that have successfully built, run and in many cases exited enterprises across multiple domains and industries. TCA funds scalable startups that have gained market traction and are in the early revenue stage; provided they solve a critical problem for consumers or businesses, using a unique solution.

TCA also actively engages in mentoring portfolio companies, where startups are mentored by top leaders, and it also helps them in subsequent fundings. As of date, TCA has invested over INR 150 Cr across 80+ start-ups.

Some of the key takeaways from the session were:

• Their key areas of investment include Agritech &Sustainability, Electric Vehicles, Deep Science & Technology, Healthtech, Fintech, D2C and Web 3.0.
•  Ticket size is usually between Rs. 50lakhs and 5Cr
•  TCA prefers ventures with early & growing revenues.
•   TCA is open to supporting pre-revenue startups having good differentiation & mvp with introductions to live use cases & potential customers.

TCA hosts 150+ Angels, which is a combination of Individuals, Institutional and corporate members. They have more than 55 active companies in their portfolio. Though the name suggests otherwise, roughly only 20% of the startups are from Chennai and there is no geographical restriction to TCA’s reach.

Tune into this video to know more about how TCA works and get insights on how Angels go ahead with funding startups. Do not miss the QnA section with our vibrant audience and get answers to some of your questions.

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