Unitus Seed Fund

Unitus Seed Fund is an investment fund which provides seed funding to social enterprise in India. Based in Bangalore and Seattle, Washington and established in 2012, the program invests in Indian startups that have the potential for large-scale impact on poverty and significantly help those living under $2 a day. It invests in companies which gives significant benefits to the base of the economic pyramid (BOP) population, by providing products and services such as early childhood education, preventive health care, affordable necessities and income-generating opportunities. USF provides a maximum initial investment size of $100,000 and invests in a wide range of business sectors including livelihoods, education, agriculture, healthcare, ecosystem, innovative technologies, mobile, rural distribution etc.

History

Unitus Seed Fund is part of the Unitus family and was initially incubated by Unitus Labs starting in late 2011. USF announced its first investments in India in February 2012 in three ventures: Milaap Social Ventures, Bodhicrew Services and Hippocampus Learning Centres. In April 2012, USF announced an investment in Villgro Innovation Marketing .

In July 2012, USF announced that it was graduating from the Unitus Labs incubation program and forming a new investment management company to scale-up investing. The new investment management company is being run by three partners: Dave Richards, Will Poole: and Srikrishna Ramamoorthy.

In September 2012, a new investment management company, Unitus Seed Partners LLC (USP) was set up with offices in Seattle and Bangalore to manage USF going forward.

In January 2013, Unitus Seed Fund (USF) secured over $8 million in investment commitments for its seed-stage venture capital fund focused on accelerating “BoP startups”. Since then USF has invested in skills training company iSTAR, a facility management company Jack on Block and Caravan Craft. 2013 also saw the addition of some corporate heavyweights like Ravi Venkatesan (Chairman of Microsoft India) and Atul Bindal Managing (Director Asia of Khosla Ventures and former President of Airtel Mobile) to its Investment Advisory Committee. In Dec 2013 Unitus Seed Fund India (USFI), a new India-based seed-stage investment fund, received approval from India’s securities regulator, the Securities and Exchange Board of India (SEBI), to start investment activities. In Feb 2014 Unitus Seed Fund was named India’s most active seed stage impact investor. It is also this year that USF marked its foray into the healthcare sector with investments in healthcare marketplace Medypal and eye screening startup Welcare.

U.S. investors include Mike Murray (co-founder of microfinance pioneer Unitus Labs ), Jeff Clark, Vinod Khosla (founder, Khosla Ventures and Khosla Impact), 500 Startups, and Bob Gay (formerly of Huntsman-Gay and Bain Capital). A year after its launch it had raised $8 million.

In September 2014, Unitus Seed Fund announced its new India fund's growth to USD $20 million with new foundation investors and Individual investors. New foundations include Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, Deshpande Foundation, Lemelson Foundation, Sorenson Impact Foundation, and Wadhwani Foundation

In November 2014, Unitus Seed Fund announced its presence in 7 additional India metros, Chennai, Mumbai, Lucknow, Jaipur, Delhi, Hyderabad, and Bhubaneswar to expand its entrepreneur outreach.

November 2014, Unitus Seed Fund announced prominent new investors in their fund] including Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

Criterion for investment

Unitus Seed Fund’s general criteria for investment are :

• Seed-stage investment needs
• Strong, experienced management team
• Business developed beyond the concept stage
• Clearly differentiated value proposition
• Strategies to build effective distribution and marketing programs
• Potential for improving the lives of at least 100,000 low-income families

Investment portfolio

Teams who are innovating to bring economic self-empowerment to millions of people living at the base of the economic pyramid:

Blowhorn a Bangalore-based online marketplace for last mile logistics. Blowhorn offers a tech platform connecting owners of mini-trucks to consumers who want to move goods quickly and effortlessly around town.

AddressHealth: a chain of ‘one stop shop’ child health clinics, offer affordable preventive and primary health services to children through an integrated approach. Each clinic is a medical home for children living in a defined geography, providing services for pediatric illnesses, common dental procedures and dental hygiene promotion, vision checks, children’s eyewear, and vaccinations.

Caravan Craft: Connects the artistic traditions of the country to customers who need products for everyday, contemporary living. The company envisages training 350,000 artisans across India and engaged in diverse crafts from leather goods to metalworking to weaving and embroidery over a period of ten years.

Cue Learn: Cue Learn is disrupting the status quo by providing after-school learning programs for Math and English with a unique distribution model: tapping the incremental efforts of women and senior citizens with basic academic backgrounds, and backing them with by custom-designed learning materials, both paper-based and technology-driven.

Curiositi: Curiositi is focused on delivering innovative and impactful educational solutions to schools across the price spectrum. Curiositi’s program can be tailored to all budgets, yet delivers high quality activities covering 80 topics across all branches of science.

Commerzpoint: Provides a single stop healthcare marketplace addressing the need to find and select healthcare service providers based on quality, infrastructure and cost. Over the next five years, Commerzpoint is seeking to build a global healthcare marketplace which matches up to 4 lakhs (400,000) patients with quality healthcare providers at better prices than if they shop on their own.

GoCoop: Provides online social marketplace platform for cooperative and community-based producers to list and sell their products enabling wider access to markets and helping co-ops and their members to realize higher prices. In 5 years, GoCoop aims to facilitate online trade/sales for 20,000 cooperatives. With an average of 100 members in each cooperative this would translate into at least 20 lakhs (2 million) families being served.

Hippocampus Learning Centre: HLC believes that one of the sure shot ways out of poverty is education. Over the next 3–5 years, HLC hopes to reach out to more than 3,000 villages, employing 12,000 teachers and reaching out more than 300,000 children annually.

iStar: partners with colleges to better equip college graduates with critical success skillsets required for business and commerce graduates to immediately be employable in their specialty upon graduation. In the next five years, iSTAR expects to train over 140,000 students across India, a vast majority of these from low income families.

Jack On Block: Creates new stable jobs and enhanced income for BoP workers and their families by providing technical as well as soft skills training and hiring as full-time employees of the company. In the next 4 years Jack On Block aims to provide employment to over 2,000 low-income workers and directly impacting around 10,000 family members through skill development, financial stability, education and other basic necessities.

Jiffstore: an m-commerce platforms to affordably enable small shop owners to build trusted relationships and to increase sales with their customers. Using an iOS or Android app, consumers can browse store items, make orders, and optionally have them delivered. The shop owner uses an Android app to interact with customers, manage inventory and other functions.

mGaadi: service enables consumers to order scheduled or on-demand autos using their mobile phone – either through an app or a voice call – or the mgaadi.com website. mGaadi network auto driver locations are tracked via GPS and cell tower triangulation in order to match the right auto with a nearby commuter.

Milaap: crowd-sources microloan funds from individuals all over the world through its website, milaap.org. Milaap hopes to provide access to basic amenities, education, livelihood support for at least 20,000 families in the next couple of years.

Smile Merchants: a brand of Free3 Healthcare Pvt. Ltd., is a chain of dental clinics targeting tier-2 and 3 cities, towns and villages in India. It makes quality dental services accessible – convenient locations and price-wise – to the base of the economic pyramid populations in India.

Villgro: created a unique, low-cost rural distribution model which reaches villages through local, knowledgeable sales agents called VLEs (Village Level Entrepreneurs.) Within 5 years, VIM plans to reach to over a million rural households in 15,000 Indian villages improving their income by at least 20%-30%.

Welcare: sets up an affordable eye screening service inside existing diabetes centers, general hospitals, and other health centers. Over the next 5 years, Welcare is targeting to provide screening to 5 lakhs (500,000) high-risk patients in multiple cities across India which is expected to identify up to 1 lakh (100,000) patients

Recent Updates

Unitus Seed Fund and Sylvant Launch “StartEdu” Startup Competition [1]

See also

• Social enterprise lending

References

• http://www.impactiq.org/seeding-startups-at-the-base-of-indias-pyramid/
• http://investing.businessweek.com/research/stocks/private/snapshot.asp?privcapId=162968789
• http://www.vccircle.com/news/general/2012/02/06/unitus-seed-fund-backs-bodhicrew-hippocampus-milaap
• http://www.thinkchangeindia.org/2012/02/26/unitus-seed-fund-launches-makes-three-investments/
• http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2013-01-04/news/36148931_1_vinod-khosla-ranjan-pai-mohandas-pai

External links

• Unitus Seed Fund, Official website