HYDERABAD: To provide a platform for budding entrepreneurs to pitch in their ideas to venture capitalists and investing firms, a city-based venture capital and private equity firm held a one-day programme, ‘The Marketplace 3.0’, here on Friday.
The event, organised by Anthill Ventures, brought together Indian and South-East Asian investors, startups and accelerators to help online marketplaces and enablers raise a million dollars. The focus of the event was to get 25 startups pitch for raising angel and pre-series round of investments from 50 leading venture capital firms and angel investors.
Prasad Vanga, founder and speed scaler of Anthill Ventures, said, “We are excited to launch Marketplace 3.0 in India. It is an interactive platform for startups to raise a capital of up to USD 1 million with the participation from some leading investors in India. We have strategically short-listed 25 startups from 300 plus applications, and have also curated the investor community to ensure that we send private invites to only 50 investors in the country.”
Anthill also partnered with Malaysian Global Innovation, Asia’s largest accelerator; Creativity Centre (MaGIC) and Fundnel, a Singapore-based leading equity-based crowd-funding platform, to give startups a global platform for fundraising and accelerating. Through the partnership MaGIC will select startups for their acceleration programme and Fundnel will qualify startups that can raise funds from South-East Asian investor communities.
“We will be hand-picking a couple of startups from T-Hub for our accelerator programme and would provide them training for four months. This partnership will allow all startups to raise more funds, expand their businesses and reach out to a wider client base. We would be providing Indian startups an opportunity to expand in Malaysia. Anthill will give assistance to our startups,” Jonathan Lee, MaGIC’s executive director of entrepreneurship development said.
“Anthill will act as our proxy in India’s market and provide a steady pipeline of deal flow to our fundraising platform, and vice versa. This reiterates our mission of bridging funds from the crowd to local and regional SMEs. Ultimately, we hope to work together to build a holistic ecosystem that will sustain and grow the startup community in Asia,” Kelvin Lee, co-founder of Fundnel, said.