Exclusive Interview With Morpheus Venture Partners On Their Model, Startups & Their Upcoming Fund!
(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...
Just yesterday we blogged about the second batch of Morpheus Venture Partners companies and there were some queries on their model So we decided to have an exclusive interview with Sameer and Nandini of Morpheus Ventures and asked them some interesting questions. Read on to know all there is to know about Morpheus Venture Partners – India’s self proclaimed YCombinator model.
Q) What is the ideology of Morpheus Venture Partners? Is it a Incubator? Mentoring Firm? Seedfund?
A) MVP’s vision is to facilitate a startup revolution in India, by way of building strong businesses out of early stage companies. To have a closely knit startup community that learns from each other and helps each other grow and in turn grow the economy of the country. India is due to seeing a startup revolution and now is the genesis. 6-8 years from now, we will see a series of today’s startups make it big in the world economy either via M&A or IPOs
Morpheus Venture Partners (MVP) is a Business Advisory Firm focusing on startups. MVP does not invest currently. However, we do have some investing partners who we can connect the companies with, for seed/angel investing options. We plan to close a fund of about 5Millioin $ by the second quarter of 2009, so that we can directly invest in the companies.
Q) What does Morpheus search for in eligible startups?
A) This decision involves various factors: people in the team are the most important aspect, stage of the venture, working relationship between MVP team and the founding team, quantum of value that the MVP team could add to the venture and make an significant impact, etc.
But the three main factors are:
- A rockstar team, with the right set of skills, a great vision and a lot of passion.
- A large market opportunity which is growing at a rapid pace.
- Most importantly, a lot of comfort level and trust between the MVP team and the founders.
Q) Given that you have now around 7 startups in your portfolio in the second batch what is your view of the startup scene in India? Do you think its over funded? Under funded? Which segments look promising?
A) We are very bullish about the startup scene in India. We are seeing a breed of entrepreneurs who are fresh, smart, with strong education backgrounds, with experience of working with good startups and strong aggressive companies. These young entrepreneurs have a very balanced head and ‘I refuse to fail’ attitude. There is still plenty of opportunity for investment and in early stage investments, things are just getting started.
Some of the areas that are promising are SaaS (Software as a Service), mobile, gaming, financial services, education, recruitment, permission marketing, health and clean tech.
Q) Which are the VC Partners that Morpheus works with? You suggested that Morpheus would be launching a fund – How big would this fund be? What would be the deal size for funding? By when do you expect to raise this fund?
As most MVP companies will be looking to raise 0.5-1 million USD, the main focus of our partnerships is on the various Seed Funds, Angel investors.
We plan to close a fund of about 5 Million USD by the second quarter of 2009. Typical deal size will be 15 – 25K USD
Hope you enjoyed this interview. Do mail us at info@watblog.com if you want us to interview someone!
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to our RSS Feed OR Email Alerts!
Leave a Comment and Follow the replies through Post Comment Feed