Student-focused venture capital fund gradCapital to host its first Demo Day

gradCapital, the youngest Indian student supported by CIIE.CO, will hold its demonstration day on November 27, 2021.

IIM-A and BITS Pilani graduates Abhishek Sethi and Prateek Behera launched gradCapital, a $ 1 million fund, to support and invest in startups founded by students earlier this year, and are of return with a demonstration day. He has invested $ 25,000 in 8 startups to date, 6 of which will take the stage on November 27.

The demo day takes place after a strong 8-week acceleration program, during which startups met with startup investors, operators, founders and CXOs.

Some of the investors included Ankur Warikoo, Sanjeev Bikhchandani (InfoEdge), Kailash Nadh (CTO, Zerodha), Mikhil Innani (co-founder, Pharmeasy) among others. The demo day will cover Indian and American investors, attracting interest from national and international investor communities. More than 100 investors have already expressed their interest in the procedure. For all interested members, you can check out this RSVP link (https://bit.ly/gradcapital).

The demonstration day will be moderated by three panelists, Anand Datta (Nexus Venture Partners), Farooq Adam (co-founder, Fynd) and Swati Murarka (Inventus Capital India). Each pitch will be followed by questions from the panelists, followed by the intentions of the other investors.

Co-Founder Prateek Behera said, “We have exceptional students who are creating really interesting products in our cohort. Surprisingly, 33% of startups have founders who have dropped out of school. We didn’t even make it to university. Even before gC was made official, we had Aadit building Zepto (KiranaKart) in grade 12 last year in our experimental cohort. Now he has raised $ 60 million! Our belief in students has grown stronger every day, and therefore, this demonstration day is to enhance and transfer this belief to the outside world “

Here is a brief overview of the companies participating in the Demo Day:

Beet: Beet launched a beta application launched in a village, racking up over 12,000 downloads, engaging 70% of the village’s population. The app allows people to form groups, communicate through short text and video, and use other tools to enable commerce. The team is led by two brothers who sold their previous business to an Indian unicorn.

AirBound: Supported by Peter Thiel’s 1517 fund, Airbound is building a drone that can take off without an expensive launch pad and operates at high speed. As a result, they save more than 10 times the cost of building infrastructure. Naman & Faraaz are dropouts who have self-taught in aeronautics, electronics and fluid mechanics. AirBound’s vision is to enable SMEs to use drones for hyper-local delivery.

Listening number: Listnr aims to become the Canva for audio. It allows users to create, edit, distribute and monetize their audio in one place. The company has generated over $ 300,000 in revenue from over 9,000 users in the past six months. Ananay is a York University dropout.

Electric Valerio: With over 10 orders completed and over 100 pre-orders, Valerio Electric competes to provide affordable charging points for all parking lots. The included IoT module provides feedback on battery status, power consumption, and more. The founders are recent graduates of BITS Pilani, having built their first VE together at university.

YoZu: Yozu is building an AI companion for students to help students become better learners, with both founders hailing from IIT Bombay. They empower students to respond to their curiosity – which is otherwise killed off in traditional education systems. Over 500 students are part of their beta family.

Mature: Ripen is a must-have adult app for Gen Z. It takes a community-driven approach to achieving goals together by enabling product, cohort and content discovery. The solo founder of SRCC is on his way to a second company after successfully launching the first. It is currently in beta testing with over 200 users.

Posted on: Friday November 19, 2021 11:46 am IST