Celesta Capital to play on front foot on startup investments
Venture capital firm Celesta Capital plans to add another 15-25 entities to its India portfolio over the next 3-5 years, even as startups in India have been caught in a funding winter.
“There is no slowing down or pulling back,” managing partner Arun Kumar told ET.
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Offering CollegeCourseWebsiteIndian School of BusinessISB Digital TransformationVisitIIT DelhiIITD Certificate Programme in Data Science & Machine LearningVisitIndian School of BusinessISB Product ManagementVisitHowever, like other VC firms, Celesta’s approach has been to be more selective. “Fortunately, we did not get caught in the FOMO (fear of missing out) approach. We were quite careful in our investments, and the plan is to continue that,” Kumar said.
India is the most interesting place after Silicon Valley and it is an exciting time for India’s startup ecosystem, he added.
The San Francisco-headquartered venture capital firm has 15 Indian startups in its portfolio of 92 companies.
“I think it (India) is going to be a great competitor (to Silicon Valley). I would say maybe in volume Silicon Valley might be ahead, because they’ve got Stanford and Berkeley and all these concentration of things, but here we have the IITs and the Indian Institute of Science,” Kumar said, speaking to ET on the sidelines of Celesta Capital’s TechSurge Global Deep Tech Summit in the national capital on Wednesday.
Given the challenges Indian startups may face with infrastructure or costs in building emerging technologies like artificial intelligence, Kumar said startup incubators and accelerators have played a positive role. “We’ve had a great relationship with IIT-Madras, IIT-Bombay. And it's a big country with a lot
