Funding for startups India

BANGALORE: Make an 8-minute presentation, answer a few questions, and voila, you're handed a cheque of Rs 25 lakh to Rs 1 crore, with a few hundred people watching and applauding you through the entire event.

At a programme called Shark Tank, four shotlisted companies had to face some tough questions from seven investors - or sharks as the programme called them - to win their funding.

One was Bangalore-based Lumos Design Technology, which has developed solar-powered backpacks that you can use to charge your mobile phone or laptop on the go. The company is now developing solar-powered apparel.

When Lumos co-founder Gandharv Bakshi was asked how he hoped to scale his business and who his target audience was, he said he was in talks with an adventure-gear retailer and some retail chains to sell his products. He said corporate gifting and cycling enthusiasts were among his target customers.

Google India MD and angel investor Rajan Anandan, among the seven investors, wrote a Rs 25-lakh cheque on the spot in return for a 10% stake in Lumos. But Anandan had a condition: Lumos must achieve Rs 60 lakh in revenue by the time they exhaust his money, else his stake in the company should be raised to 15%. Bakshi agreed.

Kolkata-based Tookitaki, a social audience discovery platform, walked away with Rs 1 crore funding for a 22.5% stake in the company from three investors - Anirudh Suri, founding partner of Indian Internet Group, Ravi Gururaj and Ramesh Kumar Shah, co-founders of Harvard Business School Alumni Angels India. Mumbai-based Moojic, a digital jukebox for retail outlets, raised Rs 25 lakh by offloading 12.5% stake to three angel investors including Rajan Anandan.

Vamshi Mokshagundam, CEO of Credii, a cloud-based platform for business software selection and procurement, was selected by 500 Startups, represented by its venture partner Pankaj Jain, into its accelerator programme, which comes with an investment of $50, 000 for a 5% stake.