Last week I had the chance to pitch my firm Malpani Ventures to founders at an event organised by WeWork Labs.

While founder pitching to VC events is common in India, the reverse is not yet prevalent, but equally important. Founders must understand the investor psyche—thesis, operating methodology, and incentives—before offering a piece of their company.

We often encourage potential investee companies to seek feedback on our firm from present & past founders. The most relevant feedback on a VC firm is one that is received from a founder who did not make it large – such a founder has no incentive to speak well about the investor and can often share his/ her honest thoughts.

I am sharing some slides and summary notes from my pitch below. If you would like to see the full video pitch, please refer here:

Overview:

Malpani Ventures is a single-family office – We manage private investments for Dr Aniruddha Malpani and his family. Personally, I joined the firm about 5 years back and we are increasingly taking bolder and bigger bets.

We come in fairly at the pre-seed and seed stage – typically we like to be the first external cheque in a company beyond friends and family. Our cheque size ranges from Rs 1 to 5 cr with significant money reserved for follow-ons.

We have been investing for quite some time now and have seen several cycles across our invested startups.

We recently saw our first IPO as well with IKS Healthcare. We stayed invested for more than 15+ years in this company and have seen first-hand the benefits of compounding over long periods of time.

Investment Thesis & Themes:

Our investment thesis is very straightforward: We invest in all things B2B.

We want to back founders who are looking to dominate specific niches or categories.

Why should you partner with us?

One of the most persistent questions that VCs ask founders is What is your right to win?

So it is only fair that we address why you should work with us!

While patient capital and long-term focus are clichés used by most firms – in reality, most VC/ PE funds are constrained by their fund life. The harsh truth here is that Funds cannot have more than a  5 to 7-year view of your business. This means that they will encourage you to make decisions that may be wise in the short term but long-term detrimental to your business.

Given that we have a single LP with a long-term mindset, we can actually walk the talk on providing capital. Our term sheets do not have an exit period clause! We believe in staying permanently invested as long we are aligned on the outcome potential and the founder’s vision for the business. This is especially relevant in the early stage, where we believe in giving founders a very long rope to finding PMF! We don’t care about showing valuation mark-ups on paper to appease our investors but rather focus on setting the right fundamentals in a company.

Unlike some other family offices, we form our convictions and prefer to lead our investments in most cases.  Additionally, our investments are not spray and pray – We make limited bets every year and our focus is on going deep with a few companies.

We reserve significant reserves for companies in subsequent rounds.

Finally, we value transparency and ethics in all our dealings and believe in offering the same to our founders. Our term sheet and standard shareholder agreement are available on our website.

How do we add value?

 Our honest answer is that we believe investors can not add a lot of value to investee companies. 

We believe that the best founders will find a way regardless – We believe in being facilitators in this journey.

Concluding thoughts

In summary, at Malpani Ventures we offer patient, long-term, and flexible capital. We do not have to return money within a fixed time frame allowing us the liberty to stay invested.

We respect the time it takes for founders to build their business in the RIGHT way.

I am keen to work with long-term mission led founders who want to build a business for life and want an early investor who comes in with a permanent ownership mindset!

If you are an early Indian founder, please write to me on Linkedin, X, or email.

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I look forward to hearing from you!