‘Ridiculous seed-stage valuations have gone’

livemint.com:

₹250 crore and invested in about 20 startups including cold chain logistics firm Tan90 and fintech startups DigiSparsh and Credit Fair. Over the next couple of years, it hopes to make 20 more investments through the first fund. Co-founded by Ankit Kedia, who was previously the promoter and director at plastic packaging solutions Manjushree Technopack Ltd, Capital A invests in early-stage companies with cheque sizes running from $50,000 to $500,000, primarily in the fintech and climate-tech segments.

In an interaction with VCCircle, Kedia talks about the transition from an entrepreneur to an investor, Capital A’s thesis and its plans. Edited excerpts: I started Capital A with a singular mission of investing in meaningful businesses. While the word ‘meaningful’ has been used very loosely by many people, in my case it was different, because we came from a hardcore operating background.

We’ve run businesses, established factories and worked with private equity businesses. I felt that there was a possibility to combine the mentality of profitable businesses, as well as the nature of early-stage businesses, where you have to give time for them to germinate into something bigger and better. I’ve been an angel investor since 2018.

When (what I did) started to work, and work in the favour of the company and the founder, I felt this was an ability that I should leverage a lot more. It wasn’t very hard because all of it was proprietary capital that we carved out from the family corpus, so we don’t have any external investors in the fund. Fund II, which we are launching very soon, will have external limited partners.

We are talking to a few anchors to back us. We started deploying the first fund from 2021. We will continue to deploy