What’s Getting Funded – India Edition Q3 2015

Since I get nearly 60% of my visitors to the blog and nearly 80% of email requests for connections to funding sources from India, I thought I’d do a quick round up of what’s getting funded in India, so people can determine which areas they would have an easier time to get funded, and which areas they are likely to struggle.

There are 13 sources of funding data for me from India – 1. Venture Intelligence, 2. VCCircle, 3. YourStory news, 4. TechInAsia, 5. Economic Times Tech, 6. IAN newsletters, 7. Mumbai Angels newsletter, 8. LetsVenture, 5 of the accelerators (9. Microsoft, 10. GSF, 11. 91 SpringBoard, 12. Tlabs, 13. Startup Village and 14. CIIE Ahmedabad), 15. TIE, and 4 other angel networks and sources – Hyderabad, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata. Besides this I also track the top 25 Venture firms announced deals.

If you triage that data you get roughly about 273 deals done this year from accelerator to seed and from VC to later stage deals. I suspect another 10-20% have gone unreported.

The deals have totaled about $4.1 Billion so far ( 9 months)  compared to $5.1 Billion in 2014. While we cant predict for sure, I think we can safely say that we should go past the funding amounts for last year.

Of these deals, over 28% have been accelerator stage, 21% have been seed and the rest have been later stage. Some companies have gone through 2 deals in this year alone.

The not so surprising part – Over 50% of the companies have been funded without going through an accelerator – which makes sense if you consider the domains getting funded.

Over 62% of the companies are in eCommerce. The rest are in SaaS, Content (media), Ad supported businesses and Enterprise software businesses.

B2B has made up less than 22% of the funded deals. They have been more in the later stage deals and the accelerator stage, but VC’s have largely been slow to adopt B2B this year.

The top 3 areas within B2C eCommerce are – services (delivery – food, groceries, etc.), goods (furniture, etc.) and travel / transport (cabs, buses, etc.)

In B2B, SaaS is the first category, followed by some Ad tech, but  IoT, Cloud infrastructure, drones, Robotics, are largely being ignored.

So if you are looking to raise funding now, you are better informed.