The Pitch, a multi-city startup pitching programme run by VCCircle, saw as many as 40 curated ventures make elevator pitch to a set of a dozen-and-a-half venture capital investors in its first chapter held at Hyderabad recently.
The programme, now in its second year, seeks to facilitate curated startup discovery for VC investors while allowing the entrepreneurs to connect more meaningfully with some of India’s most active early-stage investors.
The inaugural chapter of the programme this year, after the resounding success of the three-city edition in 2023, received as many as 400 registrations of which just one-in-ten were handpicked to make their pitches to VCs at IIT Hyderabad. There were around 17 VCs, making it a investors-to-startup ratio of nearly 1:2.
Kae Capital, IAN, Inflexor, Ivycap Ventures, Blume Ventures, V3 Ventures (Verlinvest), 2070 Health, SucSEED Ventures, Inflection Point Ventures, Pavestone Capital, Rukam Capital, Navam Capital, Dallas Venture Capital and Bharat Innovation Fund were some of the investors that joined for the pitching sessions.
Notably, nearly half (45%) of the startups captured investors' interest for further potential engagement.
The Hyderabad chapter saw 40 startups straddling all key subsectors to participate. This include new age tech such as SaaS, IoT and AI (38% of startups); healthtech and healthcare (15%); fintech (10%); agritech and foodtech (8%); mobility (8%); followed by energy; fashion, lifestyle & e-commerce; manufacturing/construction and others.
Broadly, 83% of the startups pitching to the investors were bootstrapped with the rest already having an angel or seed investor on the cap table.
Flyhi Finance, Jaagruk Bharat, OneBoard, Alphashots.AI, TIEA, Scichip and KLVIN.AI were the funded startups looking at fresh capital infusion from new investors.
Other startups that made their pitch to VCs include Foto Owl AI, THub, Shuddhilok, Kapex, SEMAI, Sportzlete, THOTFUL, Reczee, Dawn Lee, Worko, AiLusion, Pathpavers, Ohieo, Jagruti Rehabilitation Center, Element Mobility, Vipas.AI, EVOASTRA VENTURES, LNT7, CerviAI, TruckParts, myTailor.in, Romi Voyager, ANTRO, Brazmexx, MAKDFS, Shramik Dhuniya, Synergia Pac, YUVAM, Pronounce Solar, B-Arm, Aetheris, Arth: By Capovex and NIMka.
A quarter of the total or around 10 were revenue-earning startups while the rest were pre-revenue stage ventures.
In terms of business model, a quarter each were B2B and B2C ventures while around half are targeting both set of customers.
Notably, over a quarter of the startups that pitched were from the western region of the country: Mumbai/Pune/Aurangabad/Raigad/Goa (comprising 23%) and Ahmedabad/Gujarat adding another 5%.
Among other key startups hubs, Bengaluru (18%); Delhi NCR (18%); Hyderabad (15%) and Chennai/Coimbatore (10%) comprised bulk of the ventures that were part of the pitching cohort.
The programme now moves to its next destination Kolkata where the pitching sessions will be hosted at IIM Kolkata on December 7. On January 24, 2025, the programme will take place at IIT Chennai.