After college Prateek got a job at a big bank. He enjoyed the job but often felt like a small cog in the machine. Witnessing the early Indian startup wave closely, he decided to leave his job in 2014 and startup. He launched a B2B marketing platform that after 4 years got acquired by an Indonesian firm. He moved to Indonesia and fell in love with its culture. The country’s budding startup ecosystem and sense of community led him to start Kitabeli, a social commerce app. Social commerce takes advantage of people’s behavior of sharing purchases and offers in their friend circles. This significantly reduces the logistics cost and the CAC as compared to traditional e-commerce. Join us to learn how Prateek built and grew Kitabeli to facilitate commerce in Indonesia. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

Link to detailed article: https://ajuniorvc.com/nazara-gaming-ipo-esports-mpl-dream11/ Last week Nazara Technologies became the first gaming company ever to be taken public. This INR 583 Cr IPO was oversubscribed 176 times by investors. Even before a 21-year-old Nitish Mittersain could find his foothold with his fledgling startup, he found himself in a $660K debt after the dot-com crash. Nazara.com v1.0 was kept aside, and Nitish resorted to selling bulk SMS packs to stay afloat. But the wheels of his fortune were turning, and by 2005, Nazara had landed a $1.5 MM seed investment and Sachin Tendulkar as its brand ambassador. The journey ahead could only be in one direction - upwards. But there several more twist and turn that Nitesh had to content with. What did Nazara do to eventually spring back again? Was it just COVID, or did the demographics have a role to play? Will it be able to compete with the new-age fantasy gaming industry and come out on top?

Sumit grew up in a town full of small business owners. His family’s nudge towards STEM education was considered the unconventional path. While working as an equity analyst, Sumit discovered a unique problem in the fintech space - Indians have very high physical asset ownership, yet asset-backed lending makes only a minority of total borrowing. In 2015, he started Rupeek to fulfill this unprecedented demand. He believes Understanding customers is an ongoing process and one should keep running experiments to learn. Today, Rupeek serves over 1 lakh happy users across 25+ cities. Join us to learn how Sumit got to know his customers and built Rupeek. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

Episode on youtube: https://youtu.be/aWkBTwiLQWc Last month, Infra.Market raised $100M to gain unicorn status, only 20 months after getting its first-ever institutional round. Become one of the fastest Indian unicorns. Join us for a behind the scenes peek at the A Junior VC piece Can India’s Fastest Unicorn Win the Infra.Market? More info on: ajuniorvc.com

Growing up, Reeju had never thought of starting his own venture. It was after receiving an admit from ISB when he started thinking about what he really wants to do in life. Considering the huge expense of Bschool, in addition to the opportunity cost at hand. He made the decision of not doing an MBA and starting up instead. He met his co-founder Akash through a mutual friend. The two often used to bounce around business ideas with each other. Before starting up, they evaluated many different ideas and narrowed down on the problem they both had faced personally, Cash on delivery payments for online businesses. Today, Cashfree is used by over 50000 businesses with transactions worth $12 billion processed annually. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

The AJVC team gets  together to discuss BharatPe and how they raised $100M to reach within a touching distance of becoming a unicorn, within an incredible 3 years of founding. Join us for a behind the scenes  peek at the A Junior VC piece Will BharatPe Become Bharat’s Lending Tap? More info on: ajuniorvc.com

Pranay studied at IIT Delhi where he got to be a part of a true community in the form of his hostel. Post his MBA from IIMA, he got a job as a Stock Broker. As work used to get over by 4, he started helping his college startup accelerator after his working hours. This continued for a year after which he came full time as the CEO. After working at the accelerator for 4 years he met his co-founder Varun and decided to start 91 Springboard, a small fund to help startups. To make the fund economics work, they realized the need for a local community of startups. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

The AJVC team gets together to discuss Mobile Premier League(MPL) and it's rise to rocketship growth in the fantasy gaming segment. Join us for a behind the scenes peek at the A Junior VC piece Is Mobile Premier League the Real Deal?

After graduation, Dhimant worked for a large tech company as a software engineer for 5 years. Intrigued by the business aspects of a company he decided to join a B-School. At ISB he met folks with diverse backgrounds including entrepreneurs that transformed his initial perspective of getting a high-paying job at a corporate. Dhimant highlights the importance of intertwining Business with Impact so both continue to grow simultaneously. Today Better India has a reach of over 90 million people in a month. Join us to learn how Dhimant built and grew Better India to empower citizens and catalyse change. More info on: ajuniorvc.com/podcast

The AJVC team gets together to discuss the evolution of SaaS in India - how we get here and where we are going. Join us for a behind the scenes peek at the A Junior VC piece Is India SaaS Ready to Soar? More info on: ajuniorvc.com