Udaan Angel Partners chasing consumption theme, to invest up to $65K in startups

Delhi-based early-stage investment firm Udaan Angel Partners, which recently struck its debut deal, is looking at consumption as an investment theme and would look to back both offline and online startups with funding of up to Rs 40 lakh ($65,000), a top executive of the firm told Techcircle.in/VCCircle.

Udaan has just co-invested along with YourNest Angel Fund, in Gurgaon-based digital products startup Simpli5d Technologies.

"We are targeting only consumption-based startups as of now," said Paras Arora, co-founder of Udaan. "We will basically look at two things before investing in a company -- scalability and motivation of the founders," he added.

The early stage investment firm will invest between Rs 20 lakh and Rs 40 lakh ($32,000 and 65,000) each in startups.  The amount can go up according to the requirements of the ventures.

It aims to back up to nine startups over the next 12-18 months

Udaan was founded in September this year by Arora and Zinnia Pasricha. Arora holds an MA from Christelijke Hogeschool Nederland and earlier worked as a director at Delhi-based ANS Realtors Pvt Ltd. In the past, he also worked at Anant Raj Projects Ltd.

Zinnia holds an MBA degree from Rochester Institute of Technology in the US, and previously worked with Johnsonville Sausage as a portfolio management analyst. Earlier, she worked at a family clothing business, TCNS Ltd.

"We are a very new entrant to the venture funding space, and so we will initially co-invest with other VC/seed funds," Arora noted.

According to Zinnia, Udaan will not restrict itself to Indian ventures. "If we come across good startups from outside the country, we are willing to back them as well," she added.

The duo are investing the money from their personal savings and has no immediate plans to raise any institutional funds so far. Arora declined to share the corpus of the fund stocked for these funding.

"We did not want to be individual angel investors rather wanted to have a structure so that it looked more serious and dedicated," Arora said.

(Edited by Joby Puthuparampil Johnson)