Ritu Verma, co-founder of Ankur Capital, explains the fund's mandate and investment thesis across India's emerging mass markets.
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Verma: India is a sandbox for developing globally exported, world-class agritech
“Agriculture is a global play, and I always think that India, and this has been played out in other industries, is the, is a really great sandbox where, you know, we have really good tech talent, That not much money develops world-class products, and that's app…”
Insight
Verma: Purely domestic healthtech solutions will not scale into billion-dollar global companies
“Companies that are going to go on to become billion dollar companies will have to navigate some of those quirks, and just a pure India solution You know, may not work as well in another country. So your technology, your product has to kind of take into account…”
Insight
Verma: Physical-world tech adoption scales slower but creates far stronger defensive moats
“There is an intersection of these technologies with the physical world, which obviously slows things down, you know, versus something going viral in a year or two. Ah, but on the other hand, these are modes, right? So as you get those right, ah, dislodging you…”
Assertion Partly supported
Verma: India's agricultural inputs market is a 70,000 crore rupee industry
“One is in imports and agri inputs and how that kind of goes in. It's again a 50,000 crore or 70,000 crore kind of industry.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Verma: Cropin retained its earliest enterprise customers and expanded their contract sizes
“Their first customers are still customers. As a matter of fact, not at the same size, but at much larger sizes.”
Disclosure
Verma: Ankur Capital has expanded its check sizes up to $5 million
“We used to do about a million dollar checks. We can now go up to five million dollars.”