 "Vivek Bhargava: Attracting investors to local businesses is no child's play")
Raising funds is agony in all start-up structures. It’s certainly no child’s play. Moreover, a company has to work harder to obtain funds when it is a local business. In India, investors are getting more and more realistic as they don’t easily agree to invest in a start-up. Even if some start-ups manage to receive investment in the initial stage, they fail to raise follow-on or Series A or B rounds of funding due to unpromising business and revenue models, and bleak current and future aspects of the company in terms of performance and strategies in the eye of the investors. In India, around 1% of the companies end up raising money from a financial investor. This is largely due to differences with investors over valuations.
At Yuvi Hospitality, we were fortunate to receive angel funding in the initial round as the investor was too eager to invest in other growing sectors apart from his own. But that didn’t mean the road was smooth for us. Like they do with any other start-up looking to raise funds, investors enquired about our core team, experience, business models and future plans (75% of the investors’ attention is focused towards your team and experience when it comes to funding).
We have also reached out to a couple of other investors like Mumbai Angels and Associate Finance as we wanted to make our venture as large as possible with the help of a pan-India expansion strategy. We received positive feedback in terms of our company and upcoming projects. We also received a lot of inbound interest from financial investors with regard to our skilful team, long-term sustainability of upcoming projects, survival during crises, experience in the hospitality industry, our investment strategies and to achieve profitability in less time.
Vivek Bhargava is director and co-founder of Yuvi Hospitality Pvt Ltd. The Gurgaon-based food venture was established in June 2015. The company’s vision is to target the young generation, who is going global, and to fulfil their new taste and preferences with the opening of its genre-defining restaurant concepts in India and abroad. Started with a paid–up capital of Rs 10 crore, the company comprises 40 people and expects a turnover of Rs 15 crore annually.