SRI Capital invests $1.3 mn in SaaS-based firms YellowDig, Zuppler

Seed-stage investment firm SRI Capital said on Monday it has put in a total of $1.3 million (Rs 8.8 crore) in YellowDig and Zuppler, two US-based companies that operate on a software-as-a-service model and have operations in India.

YellowDig got $1 million and Zuppler the remaining, SRI Capital said in a statement. As part of the investments, SRI Capital founder and managing partner Sashi Reddi will join the board of the two firms.

The latest deals take the total number of startup investments made by SRI to 23, of which 15 are SaaS-based firms. The twin deals follow SRI Capital's investment last week in WorkApps, an enterprise workflow collaboration firm.

"My thesis on SaaS is quite simple. If the product is built in India, is targeting the US market and there is some proof that the product works and meets a market need then I am usually the first institutional capital in that startup," said Reddi.

He said SRI Capital invests around $500,000 typically, but can go up to $1 million. "I help startups with sales and marketing in the US, recruitment, and future fund raising," he added.

YellowDig, run by Six Deg Inc., is a social collaboration-based learning platform for a university classroom. It was founded in 2014 by Shaunak Roy, an IIT Bombay and MIT alumnus, and Ravindra Jaju, also an IIT Bombay alumnus. It has tied up with 30 institutions and counts the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Virginia and Duke University as its clients.

Zuppler offers restaurants their own online food ordering platform, through which they can directly engage with customers under their own brand. Founded in 2008 by Shiva Srinivasan, Zuppler has about 1,600 restaurants using the platform.

SRI Capital is a seed-stage investor focused on software, data, analytics and services. It invests in US- and India-based firms. It invested in health and fitness app HealthifyMe in June 2015 and backed  Hyderabad-based online payment gateway services startup NumberMall in January 2015.

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