Alfa Ventures, a proprietary fund launched by angel investor Dhianu Das to make seed investments in startups, has disclosed its first deal.
The fund has invested in CivilCops, a chatbot operated by Delhi-based Tavroi Research Pvt. Ltd, it said in a statement, without revealing the amount.
Das started Alfa Ventures earlier this year. The fund has a corpus of Rs 100 crore. It aims to make 25-30 bets, with an average ticket size of Rs 1 crore, Das had told VCCircle in February. As an individual investor, Das counts GoMechanic, ClearDekho and Cleansecar among his portfolio.
“CivilCops comes across as a very promising venture as it provides a very unique solution for government authorities to improve governance and public service delivery by putting the citizens’ needs at the centre of decision-making,” said Das.
CivilCops is a so-called civic-tech product that enables users to contact Delhi government agencies to report any issue and check about public services. It is incubated under IT industry body Nasscom’s 10,000 Startups programme in Gurugram and was part of the 2017 cohort of the StartupBootCamp Smart City Accelerator Dubai.
CivilCops was started in April 2017 by Delhi University graduates Ashish Sharma and Vaibhav Gogia. The company says it has been working with government agencies in India and Dubai. It is also planning to test waters in Europe.
“Public services account for a large proportion of government’s budget but the increased spending has often not been matched by improvements in outcomes,” the two founders said in the statement. “We aimed to change this situation by building a product to help the authorities with a technology architecture to improve efficiency and at the same time, engage the residents in the decision making process.”