 "Kalaari Capital launches Kstart, a seed fund cum accelerator")
"We felt there's a pretty big opportunity to create a brand new type of seed program that really offers people some broader choice than today. one of the big ones is around capital, so here it is structured around a convertible equity instrument as opposed to straight up equity," said Bala Srinivasa, partner at Kalaari Capital..
"Because it's pretty hard at the early stages for anyone to value a young seed company and we've gotten great feedback from people in terms of how they value this as young entrepreneurs because they can then build on top of that."
Apart from investing in early stage companies, Kalaari has also put in place a network of large technology companies such as IBM and Google which could work along with the start-ups. It also counts business heavyweights such as Ratan Tata, Padmasree Warrior, Zia Mody and Rajan Anandan among mentors for the start-ups that are part of its portfolio.
"We have also focused on building an ecosystem with partners like Google and IBM. We can give our seed companies tremendous acceleration in their growth curve, by helping them leverage technologies and capabilities that they wouldn't find normally. And it's kind of hard to put together the kind of partners," said Srinivasa.
Kalaari plans to host quarterly batches for selecting start-ups for its Kstart programme, selecting five start-ups in each round. A few spots have already been filled according to Srinivasa, while the firm will begin accepting applications from early-stage start-ups from today. By the end of the year, Kalaari hopes to have 20 companies incubated out of its new property 'Respace' which is located in the Whitefield locality of Bengaluru.
