LetsVenture, OurCrowd open up India-Israel corridor for investors in startups

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LetsVenture, a Bengaluru startup building a platform to curate and showcase startups for potential investors, has struck a partnership with Israel’s OurCrowd, an equity crowdfunding specialist, to open up opportunities in the startup ecosystems they each operate in.

As part of this partnership, OurCrowd will offer curated deals to Indian investor syndicates managed by LetsVenture as well as showcase Indian startups on OurCrowd’s platform, giving selected Indian startups access to accredited investors globally and to business development opportunities, the two said in a press release on Tuesday.
 
OurCrowd and LetsVenture will also be collaborating on an India Fund to invest in Israeli, Indian and global startups. The investment into this fund would primarily be from family funds and high-net-worth individuals in India and OurCrowd’s global network of accredited investors, according to the press release.
 
“Our vision is to make angel investing easy with a focus on portfolio management,” Shanti Mohan, co-founder and CEO of LetsVenture, said in the release. Mohan started her marketplace some four years ago and counts VC firm Accel and Infosys co-founder Nandan Nilekani among her investors. To date, LetsVenture has helped 105 startups raise about $42 million.

Teaming up with OurCrowd, which has helped startups raise about $450 million so far, is a way to offer investors on LetsVenture’s platform access curated startups in multiple geographies, including Israel. And the startups profiled on LetsVenture get access to family offices overseas looking for India opportunities. Next year, LetsVenture also expects to help OurCrowd's portfolio companies sell their products and services in India.

“India is a critical growth market for our business with a huge number of exciting startup investment opportunities in a range of sectors,” Jon Medved, CEO of OurCrowd CEO, said in the release.

LetsVenture also recently announced it will now facilitate pre-series A and series A/B deals, focusing on bringing family offices and corporates on a private, curated and interpersonal platform. It will help family offices co-invest with VCs and funds leading series A/B deals while also sourcing and managing deals directly for family offices and corporates.

To do this, LetsVenture has named Farooq Oomerbhoy, a respected investor in early-stage ventures in India, as a partner (Consultant). "Family offices and corporates have lacked guided access to the venture asset class in the Indian ecosystem. Unlike the West where there has been a process of evolution for these category of investors, India is still at a nascent stage,” Oomerbhoy said in a LetsVenture press release last week.

He aims to make LetsVenture the go-to platform for all venture investments for this category of investors, handholding them through the entire process. Oomerbhoy is co-founder of Orios Venture Partners, India's largest domestically raised VC fund with a corpus of $50 million. He was a founding representative of the Indian Angel Network’s Mumbai Chapter.