What is driving India’s D2C growth?

For Kanwaljit Singh, Managing Partner at Fireside Ventures, the most attractive aspect of being an investor is seeing how brands are getting built faster and with little capital.

Thursday September 09, 2021 , 3 min Read

Good Morning,

Kanwaljit Singh, Managing Partner and Co-founder of Fireside Ventures, has been a part of the consumer brand space for the past 30 years.

In a conversation with YourStory Founder and CEO Shradha Sharma, he says that the pandemic and increased digitisation have turbocharged the DTC and ecommerce spaces.

"I started my career with Unilever and saw significant trends coming together in the last five to seven years, which led me to believe that this was something real and long term," he says.

In 2019, Fireside Ventures, a seed and early-stage focused micro VC fund, targeted to build 25 iconic consumer brands over the next 15 years, and take its companies to Rs 1,000 crore in revenue, including turning them into unicorns.

Today, many of its portfolio companies — Bombay Shaving Company, boAt, DesignCafe, FableStreet, Mamaearth, SlurrpFarm, and Vahdam Teas — are gaining popularity.

For Kanwaljit, the most attractive aspect of being an investor is seeing how brands are getting built faster and with little capital.

Editor’s Pick: 100x Entrepreneur Podcast

Vani Kola, Managing Director at Kalaari Capital, believes that it is important to feel connected with the founder while investing by meeting them as well as allowing the founder to get to know the VC firm.

She also says that she gives more importance to the potential of the founder than the team’s background or pedigree, and values business insights over a business plan. Read more.

Vani Kola of Kalaari Capital — *Vani Kola,* *Managing Director at Kalaari Capital [Image Credit: Kalaari Capital]*

Startup Spotlight

B2B marketing using AI

To help customers make better campaign decisions and to improve their return on marketing investments, Srikrishna Swaminathan, Praveen Das, and Aravind Murthy founded Factors.AI.

The Bengaluru and US-based startup stitches the customer journey across ad platforms, website, MAP (marketing automation platform), and CRM (customer relationship management) at a contact and account level. Read more.

News & Updates

The purchase window for Ola S1, electric two-wheelers by Ola Electric, is now open for those with a reservation. According to a blog post, the two variants – the Ola S1 and the Ola S1 Pro — are available for purchase, with delivery expected in October.

Oravel Stays Pvt Ltd, that operates hospitality firm Oyo, has approved an increase in the authorised share capital of the company from Rs 1.17 crore to Rs 901 crore. The development comes ahead of the proposed initial public offering (IPO) by OYO.

EV startup Ultraviolette Automotive plans to set up a manufacturing facility in Bengaluru. Spread over an area of 70,000 square feet in Electronics City in Bengaluru, it aims to manufacture 15,000 electric motorcycles in the first year.

US-based Notion has acquired Indian cloud startup Automate.io. Automate.io will continue to operate independently post-acquisition to enable customers to take up new signups.