Entrepreneurs startups India

India saw the first wave of entrepreneur angels when the likes of Makemytrip's Deep Kalra and Naukri.com founder Sanjeev Bikhchandani took their companies public. However, this time around most of the angel investing is being done by existing entrepreneurs who are in the thick of running their own businesses. Whether it's Sachin and Binny Bansal of Flipkart, Snapdeal's founders Kunal Bahl and Rohit Bansal, Mu Sigma's Dhiraj Rajaram or InMobi's Naveen Tewari, they are all keenly investing in new ideas — a sign of the overall startup ecosystem maturing in the country along the lines of Silicon Valley.

Angel investing is typically done at a very early stage of a company's life, and startups say they gain significantly from these entrepreneur angels. "Who better to know the high potential and market opportunities than existing entrepreneurs? This is great for the ecosystem. It also highlights the fact that this new breed of young entrepreneurs is truly putting its money where its mouth is. I find this very exciting for the future of value creation in the Indian market, " says one-time entrepreneur Avnish Bajaj, MD at VC fund Matrix Partners India. Bajaj, along with his Harvard Business School classmate Suvir Sujan, founded India's largest online auction site Baazee, which was later acquired by eBay in 2004.

IIT-graduate Bhavish Aggarwal, co-founder of OlaCabs, a technology backed taxi service startup, says he met Snapdeal's Bahl at an entrepreneurship event in Mumbai when Ola was still bootstrapped. A few meetings later, Bahl along with his co-founder Bansal, and Zishaan Hayath, founder of online test prep portal Toppr.com, seed-funded him. "We're all facing the same challenges and it was great to exchange notes with them, " says Aggarwal. Since then, Ola has raised two rounds of institutional funding from marquee VCs like Tiger Global and Matrix Partners but having mentors like Bahl and Hayath was crucial in the initial phase, says Aggarwal.